The Doctor’s Simple Life (Love Heals All Wounds #3)

27. Reece

CHAPTER 27

REECE

I didn’t have that much stuff to begin with, so packing doesn’t take me too long. Mikey gets us a cab, and we travel back to my house in silence. He tells me he’ll see me tomorrow with that big old grin of his, and I halfheartedly echo him. I tell him I’m looking forward to it. I can’t decide if I’m lying.

As I pack my four suitcases, cramming clothes in without any order or logic, all I can think about is Sienna. All I can see in my mind’s eye is the face she made as she stormed off. The tears in her eyes.

Did she really believe all of that? That I haven’t changed at all? That I didn’t care about her at all while I was here?

Because I did. With all my heart, I did.

Somehow, I don’t think sending her a message would go down well. So I don’t.

Instead, I turn up my music to drown out my thoughts and sit on my suitcase to try and zip it up. I swear I didn’t buy that much new stuff, and all of this came in these bags. How can it not fit?

In the end, I have to abandon a bunch of socks, but everything else fits. I’m calling it a win.

That night, I sleep restlessly, waking up every hour to snatches of dreams of Sienna, of home, of Mikey laughing. Of the tennis ball that sent me here in the first place. It probably means something, but I’ve never understood the point of analyzing your dreams.

It never tells you anything you want to hear.

In the morning, I throw my cases into my car, lock up the house, and post the keys back through the postbox like I was instructed to when I moved in. No going back now.

Best to just make a quick and quiet exit, I decide. After all, I have nobody to say goodbye to. No doubt Sienna went running off to Peggy, so there’s no way she’ll want to say goodbye to me. Not after I hurt her granddaughter.

I drive all the way back to Miami, listening to the radio and mulling things over in my head. I still can’t believe Sienna said all those things to me. Sure, Mikey was unkind, but for her to flip out like that…

Maybe she had just been waiting for me to make a misstep the whole time. Maybe it was a game to her too, a test to see if I would be the perfect guy she wanted me to be. Well, sucks to be her, because I’ll never be perfect. I just spent three and a half weeks of my life trying to be everything she wanted me to be, and it wasn’t enough.

Time to become the old me again. Time to have some fun and leave that mess behind me.

The Welcome to Miami! sign greets me like an old friend as I pass it on the highway, and I breathe out, the knot in my chest relaxing a little. Back to the familiar. Back to my apartment and my friends, my job and the glamor. I’ve been missing it. Small-town life just can’t compare to the city.

I pull up into the parking garage under my apartment complex and stand staring at the keypad for a second. There’s no way I’ve forgotten the unlock code this fast. It’s only been three weeks.

Soon this will all be a bad dream.

To my relief, the door swings open on my first attempt, and I sigh as I cross the threshold of my apartment. It’s just the way I left it, and just the way I like it. Clean and modern. Fast Wi-Fi. All the kitchen appliances I could ever want and not use.

Thinking about cooking gives me a twinge as I think about Peggy.

This is everything I wanted, to come home to everything I love. But I just hadn’t been expecting to miss anything about Silverbell at all.

“Stop being so dumb,” I chide myself as I pull my suitcases through to my bedroom. Unpacking is going to be a later problem. I’m too tired to bother with that now. Besides, I have to be up at the crack of dawn tomorrow.

Mikey texted me earlier with my shifts for tomorrow, and like the prankster he is, he set me on the earliest shift.

So I abandon my suitcases, order food, and head straight for bed, where I sit and watch TV over my takeout noodles until I start dozing off. It’s so good to watch TV again, real TV. It helps with the not wanting to think about anything else.

When I get to work the next day, I’m greeted by my friends, the colleagues I’ve known for years. They’re all delighted to have me back. Immediately, I get thrown in to the deep end with client consultations, signing charts, and babysitting interns, and by the time my first break rolls around, I’m totally exhausted.

I’m taking a time out in the break room when Mikey slides up to me. “Howdy, Reece.”

“Hello, Michael,” I say because I know it winds him up.

The words hit their target perfectly, and his face twists into a frown. “How’s being back in the real world?”

“Great.” I shrug. “It’s weird doing real work again.”

“The vacation’s over now, buddy.” He slaps me playfully on the shoulder, then says, “Me and the boys are heading out for lunch later. Come with us.”

It’s not really a question. I don’t really want to go, but it’ll look bad if I refuse. It’s still too soon after getting back to avoid the “Reece went soft in the small town” jokes, which I really don’t want to be on the other end of. So I force myself to smile and say, “Sounds great. Where?”

I show up at the restaurant exactly on time, and I’m met by all the guys from the work tennis club staring at me. We all know exactly what this is going to be. An interrogation.

“So,” says Joe as I sit. “How was it? Was it awful? Did you hate it?”

“How were the women?” chips in Nathan.

More questions follow in quick succession. How were the people? What did I eat? Where did I go? What was the hospital like? Was everyone stupid? Were they bad doctors? Were they horrible people?

I give them the most honest answers that I can, not wanting to slander the people of Silverbell but also not wanting to sound like I had too much of a good time. I know what these people are like. I don’t want to get mocked mercilessly for the next few years for being the doctor who actually enjoyed the small town.

I’m supposed to be hip and cool. I’m supposed to be a smooth guy from the city.

Defending the people of Silverbell doesn’t really fit into that vision.

They’re all expecting me to tell them it was the worst, that it sucked as much as they think it would. I think for any of them, it would have. I tell them about the hospital, at my shock over paper charts and old people, and I don’t tell them how it started to fill a hollow space in me that I hadn’t even been aware of.

I tell them about the hopeless internet and the pagers and the hip replacements, and they all laugh and tell me how brave I was to endure it all. How awful it must have been for me to face all of that alone.

And the more I speak, the more guilt gnaws into my stomach.

I don’t think this is who I am after all. It isn’t who I should be.

I had a glimpse of something different out there, and now… I don’t know if I can be who I was before.

Every day after that becomes a tedium. At first, it’s exciting to be dealing with high-quality patients and their high-quality problems again. I like it when they have money, and I like it when we build something amazing together. I help a young man get the jawline of his dreams and give a mastectomy patient a bust indistinguishable from the one she lost.

And I do a lot of Botox. A lot of nips and tucks. A lot of the same old, tedious shit.

The exciting patients are few and far between, and though I get good money for everything else and I don’t have to care for any really old people, I don’t feel like I’m helping anyone. It’s only the occasional few that I feel like I’m actually doing anything real with.

The entire time I was in Silverbell, I was remembering why I loved being a doctor.

Now, as I sit here all day, every day, in my office, looking out at the bustling streets of Miami, the shining high-rises and the honking cars, I’m starting to doubt myself.

Sure, it feels good that people are so happy with my work. I’m good at what I do. The regret rate isn’t that high.

I just don’t know who I am anymore. It makes everything start to blur.

I’m just coming out of the surgical theater one day when I find Mikey waiting for me. Silverbell was almost two months ago, and it’s starting to feel like a distant fantasy of something far, far away. I’ve just done a routine breast implant surgery — nothing that rigorous or hard, but it’s nice to know that I helped at least one person become closer to the person she’s always been in her head.

It’s about the only satisfaction I get these days.

It’s been a long day and I’m tired, so the last thing I want is for Mikey to say, “Hey, can we chat?”

“Sure,” I say. It’s not like I can say no. “What’s up?”

He leads me off into a back room, and my heart jumps into my mouth. There’s no way he’s firing me. Is there?

I can’t have come back to my job only to be so bad at it that I’m going to be let go immediately. Right?

He smiles as we sit. “I’m so glad to have you back.”

“Thank you,” I say. “I was worried I was getting fired for a second there.”

Mikey laughs long and hard. “Oh no, I’m not going to fire one of my best people. I’m not stupid.”

“Never thought you were.”

He chuckles again, then claps his hands on his knees to signal that he means business. “No, I’ve actually come to talk about a promotion.”

“A promotion?” I stammer.

“Yeah. Obviously, think it through. I’ll give you some time. It would be a whole lot of extra responsibility, and I don’t want you to take on more than you feel like you can handle. But it would make you a very senior member of staff. It wouldn’t have that much effect on your pay grade, but your status would improve, and you’d be able to pick whatever you wanted for your workload. Have a look over this, think about it, and get back to me. Okay?”

“Okay,” I say, my head too empty to think of anything but agreeing.

He hands me a packet of information and then smiles. “You’re a great doctor, Reece. We want you here. Consider this an honor. Accept this, and you’ve got a job until you die.”

With that, he leaves the room, leaving the packet in my hands.

I glance through it, a numbness growing inside me. It’s many, many pages long, full of legal speak and tiresome nonsense. And as I look at it, I begin to wonder why I would bother. I like not having to do enough work. Getting by easy is one of the only things that makes this place tolerable.

I’m realizing that I love what I do, but I have no passion for it.

I’ve seen what passion looks like. I miss it.

And this promotion would rock, if I wanted it. But the idea of being here until I die, with men like Mikey…

Does this really mean anything to me anymore? Did I have everything I ever wanted when I was in Silverbell?

Was I too stupid to hold on while I had the chance?