Page 203 of Wrong Number Right Doctor

He closes the agreement and sets it neatly aside. “But nothing has changed,” he continues. “We are not ending the arrangement.”

That’s how he says it. Not like a threat. Not like a negotiation. Like weather. Like the next hour has already been planned and I’m wasting both our time by still standing here.

I don’t answer. I can’t.

Because I know, all at once and with perfect, sick clarity, that I am trapped.

Chapter Twenty-Four

DALTON

By the end of the week, I’ve worked eighty-one hours.

I know the number because I checked.

Not because I’m proud of it. Not because it means anything useful. Just because I wanted proof there was a reason I felt this wrung out, this raw, this incapable of standing in my own kitchen without thinking about her.

Three overnight trauma shifts. Two emergency abdominal surgeries. One thoracotomy at two in the morning on a man who came in with half his chest full of blood and just enough pulse to make everyone in the room meaner than usual. Consults stacked on consults.

Coffee that tastes like hot regret. The emergency room swallowing hour after hour and asking for more.

I keep saying yes. Yes to extra time. Yes to another case. Yes to staying. Yes to the kind of work that usually clears my head because it leaves no room for anything but the body in front of me and the next right decision.

It isn’t working. Maggie is there anyway.

In the scrub sink. In the elevator. In the ten seconds between one patient leaving recovery and the next chart landing in my hand. In the quiet after I close, when I strip my gloves off and there’s just enough stillness for memory to come back.

Maggie on my couch in my sweater. Maggie in my car, furious and bright and impossible. Maggie in that room at Alester’s party, looking at me like I had hit her when I told her I hoped the child was his.

That look follows me everywhere.

By Friday night I’m standing in my apartment with my tie hanging loose around my neck, staring at an email from a hospital in another city that I never answered.

The offer is good. Better department. Better pay.

But what I’m really looking at is not the salary, not the title. It’s the miles.

I tell myself leaving would be the kind thing. The sane thing. I tell myself Maggie’s life is already complicated enough without me turning it into something even uglier. I tell myself I’m old enough to know when wanting something is the same as threatening it.

I close the email. Then I open it again.

Then I close it for good because I’m not deciding tonight, and because even thinking about leaving feels less like a plan and more like panic with professional packaging.

My phone rings.

Acharya.

I answer immediately. “What happened?”

“Nothing acute,” he says. “Before you ask.”

I lean one hand against the counter. “That’s a good start. Did you just call to check up on me?”

“You stopped responding to my messages,” he tells me.

I sigh. “I’m off the case.”

There’s a pause, and that tells me he has an inkling of what transpired between us. Then his tone shifts. “I thought you should know before this moves any further,” he says.