43

Jesse ran his tongue over his new molar and stared at Clara’s text for about five minutes.

I’ll share my location with you. Come find us after work!

I don’t get excited about things the way you do , he’d told her. Yet here he sat with an accelerated heart rate and no appetite for his long-awaited dinner.

Every time his screen started to go dark, he tapped it.

Margo appeared in the doorway, looking like a grandmotherly Tinkerbell in her bleached pixie cut. He’d noticed since his return that she alternated between light blue and dark blue scrubs and always wore the same shoes. It was weirdly disappointing.

“Did you talk to the skull fracture’s wife?” she asked.

“Yeah, just now. Sent her home to get some sleep.”

“I’m glad. She seemed like a nice woman.”

The conversation seemed over to Jesse, but she didn’t go away. He looked up from his phone again, eyebrows lifted in question.

“Why aren’t you eating?” she asked.

“Not hungry.”

“I heard your stomach growling in the OR,” she said flatly.

“I’ll eat in a minute.”

She looked skeptical. “You’ve been weird ever since you came back. You’ve lost weight, too.”

“No, I haven’t.”

“That woman really did a number on you, didn’t she?”

He looked up again, startled. “Dr. Wilder? No, not at all.”

“Clara. I knew, as soon as she said you were going to operate on a collie.”

“Border collie,” he corrected automatically. “You knew what?”

“That she’d done a number on you,” she said enigmatically.

“No one did any numbers on me and I haven’t lost weight.”

“What are you looking at on your phone?” she asked.

“An article.”

“About what?”

“Torticollis,” he said coolly.

“You haven’t been scrolling.”

“You have to tap to turn the page.”

She squinted at him for a moment, and then gave up. “Fine. But this isn’t sustainable.”

“It often resolves in six months with treatment.”

“Says who?”

“ New England Journal of Medicine. ”

She rolled her eyes. “I’m not talking about torticollis. I’m talking about love.”

“This is a workplace,” he reminded her somewhat self-righteously.

She pushed away from the door jamb where she’d been leaning. “Send me that article, would you? I want to read about torticollis, too.”

“Sure thing,” he muttered, returning to his contemplation of Clara’s text message.

Almost as though he had willed it, a new message appeared below her last one.

Stand me up. I dare you.

He was tempted to let the woman hunt him down like a dog. But he knew the wiser course would be to have a sociable drink with her and Liesl and Eve. That way he could prove to himself that he was indifferent to her presence and verify that it was mutual, and then it would be a lot easier to focus on other things, like enjoying his oddly quiet new condo.

“Well, your CT scan looks great, Jesse. No indication of swelling or bleeding. Kind of cool to see the new dental implant on there, too. Your orthodontist did a fantastic job.”

“Thanks, Harry.”

“Have you been having any headaches? Nausea?”

“No, nothing like that.”

“Well, then it’s my professional opinion that you’re in the clear. Must not have been a bad concussion.”

“Felt pretty bad at the time.”

His doctor laughed. “How’d it happen? You said you fell in a creek? What were you doing, fishing?”

“Fighting over a woman.”

“Sure, we’ll go with that. Well, anything else I should know about? You look thin. How’s the appetite?”

“Good, I’ve just been running.”

“Knees holding up?”

“Yeah, so far.”

“What about mentally? Any depression? Burnout? Anxiety?”

“No,” he said automatically.

“How do you deal with the stress of the job?”

“Weightlifting and meditation,” Jesse said. It was a lie, but it was a lie that he had told for years, and everyone seemed to love it.

“Great,” Harry said, sounding thrilled. “Hey, you want to play tennis this weekend? Bring a date. We’ll play some doubles.”

Clara would be in town. Savagely, he repressed the parallel universe scenario that popped up. “I’m not seeing anyone right now.”

“Oh. Well, I promised the wife I’d play tennis tomorrow. But call me sometime. We can shoot hoops, like the old days.”

“Sure.”

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