11. Ashley
11
ASHLEY
T he doctor's lounge was mostly empty this time of day with lunch nearing. Everyone was finishing their morning rounds or already out to lunch off campus. When I heard Farah tell Michael she'd be going over her patient files and prepping to send her recordings off for transcripts, I knew it was my chance to sneak in and snoop around a bit. I sat across from her at the round white table and folded open my laptop, sneaking glances at her.
She was so serious all the time, except when she was poking fun at my age in relation to my position. Jack really undersold me when he lined up the position, telling them I was a first-year resident when I had more experience in my left pinky than these two had put together. And the age discrepancy wasn't the only mocking point. When I showed my worth during Jack's lectures or while doing procedures, Farah acted jealous, not professional at all.
"So, how is patient review going?" I asked as I feigned typing on my computer. If anyone walked behind me, they'd see an open document with a jumble of characters that even translation software wouldn't be able to compile into something that made sense.
Dr. Blake glanced at me over the top of her laptop, and I noticed her irritated expression through her furrowed brow. But her tone was calm and even when she spoke. "Things are going fine." The short answer wasn't inviting. I could tell she wasn't interested in conversation, but I was here to get to the bottom of things and I wanted to pry a bit.
I "typed" a bit more while I tried to decide how to break the icy wall between us. I thought about the things I knew about her. She joined Jack's team two years ago and had been with him ever since, so she had one of the best teachers this entire city had to offer. I wasn’t biased about that either. Most people believed that. According to Jack, Farah had graduated Summa Cum Laude from Emory, which was no small feat. It made my Magna Cum Laude degree seem superficial, but I wasn't threatened by her.
I also knew she had parents who put pressure on her to be the best. Michael told me that. Apparently, her younger sister had a congenital brain defect that delayed her development. I put two and two together to decide her parental pressure stemmed from social pressure for her to be above average to offset the shame her parents felt about the younger sister's issues. It was a shame and one that could push Farah to be vindictive or punitive toward other people perceived as "better" than her in an attempt to not look bad in front of her parents.
"I heard another patient died.” I kept my eyes on her face, hoping for a reaction, but I saw no change in her expression, not even a minute crinkle of her forehead.
"Yeah, I know." Her eyes flicked back and forth across her computer screen in concentration, but I pushed.
"I heard you were there. Was it scary? Sad?" Farah acted like a robot without any emotional display. It wasn’t natural.
"Patients die all the time, Dr. Sutton." She looked up at me. "If you can't get past that emotionally, this is the wrong practice for you." Then her eyes dipped back to the computer screen and I sighed. I was getting nowhere. That speech had been given to us on repeat throughout medical school and residency. I knew it by heart. Patients would die. We had to go on.
"But I just thought it would be a little more difficult for you since you consulted on the first one and you were there in the room when the second happened.” I saw her throat squeeze as she swallowed and felt satisfied that I had at least drawn somewhat of a reaction. "And both times, it was cardiac infarction. Doesn’t that seem too much of a coincidence?"
Farah licked her lips and blinked a few times then looked up at me. "I told you. Patients die all the time. I moved on because I have to. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to get my work done so I can eat my lunch." She stared at me for a second, and I took the hint.
"Sorry," I said, then I closed my laptop and picked it up.
The cafeteria called my name, and with the nausea I'd been suffering the past few days, I didn't dare skip lunch. I dropped my laptop off in Jack's office hoping to catch him and ask him to join me for lunch, but he wasn't there. Then I picked up my sack lunch from my locker and headed downstairs.
I kept my mind busy most of the time so I didn't have to think about the fact that I was nauseous every day now. A niggling worry that I might be pregnant kept slithering into my thoughts each time I let them rest. It wasn't a tormenting thing. I always wanted to be a mother and at thirty, my clock was ticking. I had no real steady relationship, and after thirty-five it became riskier. However, the idea of having Jack's baby did make me nervous. What would people say? What would my father say?
"Hey, Ash!" I heard Sam's voice, and my eyes scanned the sea of faces in the cafeteria. He sat at my normal table with his lunch spread in front of him. When he offered to help me figure out how these patients died and how it was related to Jack, I didn't realize it would also mean he would follow me around like a puppy.
"Uh, hi, Sam," I mumbled, again scanning the room. The only white coat I saw in the entire cafeteria was in line for food, and the silvering hair gave him away. Jack was here. That was why he wasn't in his office. It made me a little more at ease as I slunk to the table and sat down. Jack would get his food and I would wave him over, and that would be that.
"Not eating with hubs today?" he asked before having a big bite of his sub. Mayo oozed from the corner of his mouth and he wiped it away. "Part of your sinister plan to keep me at arm's length?" He smirked, and I felt my shoulders tighten. The incessant badgering wasn't funny anymore, but I couldn't be rude. I needed Sam's help snooping around this hospital and identifying whether foul play was involved. Yes, the hospital board was doing its own review, as were investigators for the plaintiff in Jack's malpractice suit, but there was no police involvement yet, and I believed Jack when he said something fishy had happened.
"Sam, I don't have emotional energy for this today." I unzipped the lunch pouch I brought and pulled out the pudding cup first. Even that reminded me that there might very well be something else Jack would need to know going on—inside me. My gag reflex had been touchy, so much so that I had to eat softer foods to compensate.
"You're not fooling me, Ashley. You forget that I know you." He pointed the end of his foot-long sub at me and my mouth watered. I wanted to eat a giant foot-long sub, but pudding it was if I wanted to avoid vomiting.
"You forgot, you left me. That changes people. Did you think of any ways to test our theory that one of Jack's team might have been involved in the patient’s death? You know there was another one." Tearing the foil lid off the pudding container, I felt my stomach roil. It was to the point that I felt like I needed to take a test and have a doctor prescribe anti-nausea medicine for me. If not, I'd definitely throw up in front of Jack and he'd start to suspect something.
If that happened, we'd be forced to confront the fact that there was a very real relationship between us. One I wasn't sure he wanted, and I wasn't ready for the rejection if my gut was right. I'd have to tell my father, which would mean so much drama, and I knew how Jack felt about that. It would ruin his relationship with Dad. I hated the idea of that. And above all, it would put more stress on Jack's shoulders when he was already under so much pressure.
Sam shrugged a shoulder and set his sandwich down on its wax wrapper as he wiped his mouth again. "I haven't. Did you stop to think that this is a hospital where people come because they’re sick and they need help and that maybe the deaths just happened?"
He had a point, one I thought of when Jack first asked me to help him snoop around his team—a job I was failing at when it came to Dr. Blake because she was just too closed and unwilling to talk about things. Maybe it was my personal attraction toward Jack, but I believed him at the time, and our sneaking around for hot sex only made me even more biased because now that I'd seen how it was affecting him, I wanted to fix it.
I hated watching him suffer and be miserable. It was one of the reasons I had become a doctor to begin with. I wanted to end suffering in any way possible. Julie told me it was my sickness, that I had to fix people in order to be happy, like not being able to fix my dad's broken heart due to my mother leaving him created a trauma response. I didn't care. It didn’t make me a bad person to be drawn to broken or hurting people. It made me empathetic. But in this case it might have made me blind to the truth.
"I have thought of that, and while that might be the case, we can't rule out foul play, at least until the autopsy report comes in. I wonder why that's taking so long." I pulled my spoon out of the lunch bag and plunged it into my pudding for a bite and from the corner of my eye, I saw Jack with his tray of food, scowling. He was looking right at me, so I raised my arm and waved him over.
"I heard when it's cases like this, they take their good ole time." Sam gestured with his sandwich as he spoke again and continued, "They have a lot of criminal cases that come first, and with only a handful of MEs, they probably don't have time to get to it." He looked up. "Oh, hey, Dr. Stewart."
Jack's towering form cast a shadow over me that felt ominous. "Sit down, babe," I told him, and it felt nice to be my true self around him even in front of Sam. My ex had no clue how real this relationship was, even if there wasn't a piece of paper saying we were hitched. Even if Jack wouldn’t admit that we had a real relationship that wasn't just sex, I knew it. He just refused to say it out loud yet.
My previous cursory glance around the cafeteria already informed me that other than Sam, there were no staff around to rat us out, only patients' family members. So I reached over and took Jack's hand as he sat, even though he looked grumpy again. Then I leaned over and softly kissed him on the cheek.
"How was your morning?" I asked him, but he stiffened instead of responding intimately to me.
"Fine," he grumbled, and my chest felt heavy.
"I, uh… I'll go." Sam, sensing the awkwardness, stood and collected his sandwich and soda.
"No need to rush away on my account," Jack growled, and I sensed something was wrong with him. Maybe he had gotten bad news from his lawyer or something outside of work had upset him.
"It's fine. I have to check on some patients." Sam gave me a tense look while Jack focused on taking the lid off his dish of soup. "Ashley, I'll keep my eye out and let you know if I hear or see anything."
Jack turned to me with a deepening scowl as Sam walked away. When he asked, "What was that about?" I felt compelled to tell him.
I pulled my hand from his and hoped no one was watching who would report back to someone who mattered. I didn't want Jack getting in trouble for any of this, and it went beyond a fake relationship that was actually a real relationship in disguise. He had hired me under a heap of lies and pretenses, and that definitely wouldn’t be good for his career.
"Cambridge is a big place, Jack. Sam offered to help me sniff around. He's being a friend." The pudding cup sitting on the table in front of me didn’t look appetizing at all anymore. But Jack's soup smelled good. I leaned toward him. "Give me a bite?" I asked, and he seemed to be more tense now than when I saw him across the cafeteria staring at me.
"Maybe Sam will buy you a cup of soup," he grumbled, and I shied away from him. He was upset that I had asked Sam to help? But why?
His phone rang, and he reached into his pocket and pulled it out. One look at the number made his face screw up in frustration and he stood. "I gotta take this. Eat the soup." Then he walked off to answer his call, and I was left speechless.
I would never understand this man. He was on again, off again and irritable most of the time. It hurt my heart. I wanted to scoop him up and make anything and everything that was bothering him go away. My stomach churned, and I decided I needed to eat, so I sat there slurping Jack's soup, wishing I could have said or done something to make him feel better. One thing was obvious. if Sam was going to help and not hurt, I had to chat with him when Jack wasn't around. It annoyed Jack, but Sam could help. I knew it.