Chapter 26
Wade
An ACL reconstruction with a meniscus tear that had appeared straightforward on the imaging and turned out to be messier once they were in there: the kind of case that adds ninety minutes while you’re already three hours deep, your lower back locked into the precise and unforgiving stance of arthroscopic work.
The patient would heal. Everything had gone right.
But I'd spent five and a half hours in a position the human body was not designed to maintain for so long, and I was tired.
I drove home without noticing most of the drive.
For the past five days, our house had been filled with people. With family. It had held chai and pierogies and borrowed extra blankets and three different conversations happening simultaneously in the great room and a shoe pile so large it had migrated two feet from the door.
I’d enjoyed it at first, especially after Lucky had publicly claimed us. But I’d had to work for most of their vacation, and too soon, I’d wanted our quiet home back. Our little family.
I came through the front door and left my bag somewhere near the entry and didn’t bother with the lights, smiling down at the shoe pile by the door, which was back to what it should be. The house was quiet and calm, back to its right size. Three people. Three sets of shoes by the door.
The layout was familiar by now, the shape of the great room in the dark, the hall, the glass door to the deck. I moved through it all like a body running on the last dregs of a battery, registering my own footsteps with distant awareness.
Outside, the cold hit me. The hot tub had the cover on, and I could hear the motor of the heat pump humming steadily away, steam curling up around the edges.
I unlatched the cover and folded it back against the wall, found the jet controls through touch, turned them on.
The water churned to life, the underwater lights casting everything in pale blue.
I peeled off my scrub top and left it on the deck.
Toed out of my shoes. Pushed off my pants.
Stood there in my boxer briefs in the January cold for a moment, not even caring if some tourist in the house next door could see me.
The mountain was dark, the skiers were all home, and I needed a goddamn hot tub.
I sank in with a groan, and the heat hit my lower back like a physical force. I let my head fall back against the edge of the tub and closed my eyes.
I had no sense of how long I was out there before I heard the door.
Bode came around the side and stopped at the edge of the deck, taking in the discarded scrubs, the running jets, me up to my chin in the water.
“Wade.”
“Hey.”
He studied my face for a moment.
“You okay?” he said.
“No.” I didn’t know why I’d said no. I always said yes, no matter what the real answer was.
He went inside without a word. I heard his low tone through the glass.
A minute later, Lucky appeared in the doorway, sweatpants and the oversized shirt that had migrated from my side of the closet in December and never come back, her hair loose.
She took one glance at me and her expression settled into focus and presence.
Bode was right behind her. They both stripped down at the edge of the deck, Lucky to her underwear, Bode to his boxers, and they both got in.
Lucky tucked under my arm. Bode settled on the other side, shoulder solid against mine. The water found a new level around all three of us. Neither of them said anything, and I didn’t either. They didn’t ask. They were just there if I needed them, and for some reason, that made it okay to talk.
I told them about the surgery first. The ACL, the meniscus tear that hadn’t shown up clean on the MRI, the frustration of adding time to an already long case.
Bode asked a technical question about graft choice that surprised me, and I found myself explaining it, getting more detailed than I expected, the tension in my shoulders shifting, processing rather than pain.
Lucky asked whether the patient was a skier, and I said yes, seventeen years old, and she made a small sound that said she understood the weight of that without me having to say it.
The surgery ran out as a topic, and I kept going anyway.
“I didn’t tell you guys the truth about what happened at my residency in Lincoln.” I looked at the mountain. “Didn’t tell anyone.”
Lucky shrugged. “You said it was bad. And we’re sorry for whatever happened to you, but I know you don’t like to talk about things. And you don’t need to say more unless you want to.”
“Would you want to hear the story if I wanted to share?”
“Of course, Wade,” Bode said. “You listen to all of our stories. Why wouldn’t we listen to yours?”
So I told them.
I told them about Gerald Lewis. How it started: the mentorship, the rigor, the way working under him made me feel like I was becoming a better surgeon, even when it was brutal. And it was brutal most of the time.
“He sounds like a nightmare,” Lucky said.
“He was also genuinely the best diagnostic mind I’ve worked with. That’s the part that made it confusing. Like, you can’t dismiss someone who’s teaching you something real.”
“Sure you can,” Bode said. “If he’s an asshole.”
“In retrospect, sure.” I exhaled. “At the time, it seemed more complicated. Plus, he was really fucking hot.”
“Hot in like an objective way?” Bode asked. “Or more.”
“At some point, the mentorship shifted. He started calling it a friendship,” I said. “Which, fine. Some attendings are like that. Informal. And I — I wanted to believe that was what it was, because the alternative was that I’d let it go too far.”
“How far was too far at that point?” Lucky asked, her words quiet and precise.
“Is sucking him off in the locker room on a regular basis too far?”
Lucky gasped. “From someone who was supposed to be a mentor?”
“He had a way of talking about my future. Our future, almost. Like it was a thing we were building together. Like he was my boyfriend.”
“But he wasn’t?”
“There was a night—” I stopped. “Toward the end of my second year. We’d had dinner. Gone back to his place. Had sex. And I thought we were going to cuddle, to sleep, but he kicked me out. Said his wife would be home at any minute. How the fuck did I not know he was married?”
Bode went still beside me. “Jesus.”
“I confronted him. He claimed I knew all along. That I seduced him, lured him away from his loving marriage. Then he had the fucking gall to offer me a permanent position. To suggest that we could still hook up, if we limited it to the hospital.”
“So I left. Packed my apartment in a weekend. Blackmailed him for a good reference and applied to every open position I could find. And it just so happened that Lucky was going to Elkhead, and Elkhead General was in desperate need of someone with my skills.”
“You did the right thing,” Lucky said.
“The right call was leaving.” I sank deeper into the water. “What I couldn’t shake was — I never told anyone the real version. Not because it destroyed me, but because I didn’t trust anyone to hold it without needing me to be fine about it afterward. Without needing the reassurance version.”
“The reassurance version?” Lucky said.
“People always want to know that I’m okay, that I’m the usual Wade. If I let people know I’m broken inside, then I’m managing their feelings about my thing, which is—” I laughed, a little. “Which is on-brand for me.”
“Little bit,” Lucky said, and there was so much warmth in it.
Bode was quiet for a moment. “He picked you.”
“Yeah.”
“Not randomly.” His jaw was doing the thing. “He noticed you and he saw someone who makes it easy for people. Who doesn’t keep score. Who is loving and genuine and open—” He stopped, started again. “That’s what an abuser like your attending looks for.”
“That’s what I keep coming back to,” I said. “Not what he did, that he was so deliberate about it.”
“Does he still work there?” Lucky asked.
“As far as I know.”
A pause. “That’s infuriating,” she said, and the precision of it, naming it, not packaging it with anything else, hit me somewhere I hadn’t expected.
“Yeah,” I said. “It is.”
Lucky’s thumb had gone still on the back of my hand.
I hadn’t meant to say all of it. I’d meant to give the outline, the version that explained Lincoln without requiring anything from them, and instead I’d given them the whole thing: the shape of Gerald’s deliberateness, the months of construction, the night I saw it for what it was.
I felt the sensation of emptying out, a little shaky, aware of my own body in a new way.
“Thank you,” Lucky said.
“Yeah,” I said.
Bode hadn’t moved. His hand was still on my knee under the water, steady and unmoving, and his eyes were on the mountain. After a moment he said, “You packed up and left in a weekend.”
“Yeah.”
“You didn’t tell anyone the real version.”
“No.”
“It’s okay to not be okay sometimes, Wade. We’re here for you. We’ll pick up the slack. You’ve certainly done that much for me, time and time again.”
Lucky smiled. “And for me. You’re my best friend.”
My throat tightened.
“Nine years,” she said. “I kept putting it in this box. Friendship. The label made it easier not to examine what was there.” Her tone was steady but her eyes were doing something I hadn’t seen from her before, something past her usual precision.
“I love you, Wade. I have for a long time so much that it scared me.”
I couldn’t speak for a moment. I pulled her in and held her, her wet hair against my cheek, the heat of the water around us.
“I love you, too, sweetheart,” I said into her hair. “I kept thinking friendship was the whole thing. That wanting more was too much. Then Bode arrived, the shape clarified. I didn’t need just one of you. I needed him too. Love him just as much.”
She laughed, a rough sound. “We both needed him, too. I don’t see how it ever would have worked without him.”