Chapter Three
SATURDAY MORNING, MOLLY is at a practice SAT session, and Grey left at eight for a round at Canyon Springs with a client. Or that’s what he told me.
I have the house to myself and three hours of silence, so I use them the way I’d work up a complicated patient, systematically, with full documentation, and without letting the diagnosis scare me before I’ve finished the labs.
I start with the phone records.
We share a T-Mobile plan, the family plan that’s been running since Caleb got his first phone at thirteen.
The account is in Grey’s name, but I set up the online portal years ago when I needed to sort out Molly’s data usage, and the login still works.
I pull six months of call and text logs for Grey’s number and export them to a spreadsheet because spreadsheets don’t lie and memory does.
Sharon’s number is in my contacts because she’s been my supervising physician for twelve years.
I’ve called her on weekends about patient reactions, medication questions, and DEA audits.
I know her number the way I know the dosage for metoprolol.
Three digits into searching the spreadsheet and my hands slow down, because the results are already loading, and there are a lot of them.
Sixteen months.
The calls start sixteen months ago, early December of the year before last, and they’ve been steady since.
They aren’t daily, and they don’t carry the urgency of something new.
Two or three calls a week, usually between seven and nine in the evening, when I’m charting at home or watching something with Molly or already in bed reading.
The texts are harder to parse because the log shows only timestamps and character counts, not content, but the frequency is clear.
Some weeks they exchanged thirty or forty messages.
Some days they texted twelve times between seven a.m. and noon, which is the window when I’m seeing patients and Sharon is supposed to be seeing hers.
The longest call is fifty-two minutes.
I look at the date. November Fifteenth. My hands go still on the keyboard.
November Fifteenth is Molly’s birthday. The dinner at Rosario’s on South Alamo, the one Molly had been asking about since September because her friend Natalie went there for her quincea?era and said the enchiladas suizas were life-changing.
I made the reservation two weeks early. I remember the table by the window, the candle in a red glass holder, Molly’s face when the server brought the basket of warm tortilla chips.
She was happy. She was seventeen, happy, and sitting in a restaurant she’d waited four months to try, and Grey ordered a second margarita and then his phone vibrated on the table.
He picked it up and said, “I have to take this, it’s a device issue,” and pushed back his chair and walked outside.
I watched him through the window. He paced the sidewalk with his phone pressed to his ear, and I told Molly the enchiladas were excellent, and Molly said they were.
We ate, talked about college essays, and whether she should apply to Trinity early decision.
The conversation was good, and Grey was outside.
He was gone for fifty-two minutes. He came back when Molly was finishing her tres leches cake.
She made a joke about it. “Tell them to reboot it like a normal person.” Then she got quiet, and I changed the subject to college applications because I didn’t want her seventeenth birthday to end with her feeling like her dad had somewhere more important to be.
I sat across from my daughter and performed a normal evening while my husband stood in a parking lot talking to Sharon Fossi for almost an hour.
I remember thinking he looked tired when he came back.
I remember thinking the device issue must have been serious and being grateful he apologized to Molly and ordered her a second dessert to make up for it.
He wasn’t tired. There was no device issue. The second dessert was guilt, and I didn’t know it.
I close the spreadsheet tab. The number stays.
Fifty-two minutes. November fifteenth. Molly’s birthday dinner, and he sat in the parking lot of Rosario’s talking to the woman who signs my prescriptive authority agreement while I ate the cake and pretended his absence was professional instead of personal.
I open the credit card portal. We have a shared Amex, the one we use for restaurants and travel, because years ago an accountant told us to consolidate points and nobody ever revisited it. I pull six months of statements and search for charges near the Eilan district.
October. The Ostra restaurant, inside the Eilan Hotel.
Friday. $146.20. Two entrees, a bottle of wine, and a dessert, charged at eight-sixteen p.m. on a Friday when I was home with Molly and Grey told me he had a client dinner in the Medical Center.
The Eilan is not in the Medical Center. The Eilan is on Fredericksburg Road, which is where I saw his car yesterday with Sharon’s scarf on the dashboard.
There’s a second charge I almost miss. An Uber, $22.
40, same evening, ten-fifty p.m., from an address near the Eilan to our house.
He took a car home because he’d been drinking and didn’t want to drive.
Responsible about the alcohol. Irresponsible about everything else, but responsible about the alcohol.
I check the mileage next. Grey’s Acura has the AcuraLink app, and I have access because we set it up together when he bought the car two years ago.
The odometer logs show Friday mileage that doesn’t reconcile with his stated routes.
His office on Huebner to the Medical Center to home is roughly thirty-five miles.
His actual Friday mileage on three of the matched dates runs above fifty.
The difference is the Eilan, and the difference is consistent.
I create a password-protected file on my laptop and name the folder Household Budget because if Grey opens my desktop he’ll see a name that isn’t interesting.
Inside, I put the call logs, the credit card screenshots, the mileage records, and the calendar comparison from last night.
Dates, amounts, durations, distances. Organized with the precision of a patient chart, because that’s the only system I trust, and right now, trust is a limited resource.
I eat lunch. I put in a load of laundry.
I call Caleb in Austin and listen to him talk about his economics professor and whether he should switch to a business minor.
I say the right things and ask the right questions and he doesn’t hear anything different in my voice because I’ve been compartmentalizing since clinicals, and the skill transfers.
ON MONDAY, I CALL CRUZ Occupational Health.
The referral that sat for three weeks has been bothering me professionally even before it started bothering me for other reasons, and I want to close the loop with the physician who was waiting on the other end of it.
A front-desk coordinator puts me through, and the voice that answers is direct, unhurried, and slightly irritated in a way that sounds like it predates my phone call.
“Dr. Cruz.”
“This is Joan Campbell at Ridgeline Internal Medicine. I’m calling about the Herrera referral. Your office sent records requests twice and we didn’t respond, and I want to apologize for that and make sure Mr. Herrera got his clearance.”
“He did. Three weeks late. His employer docked him two days for the missed shifts.”
“That shouldn’t have happened. The referral went to my supervising physician’s queue while she was unavailable, and I didn’t see it until it came back as a complaint.”
“That’s not the first time we’ve had a routing problem with your office.”
I don’t defend Sharon. A week ago I would have. I would have explained that she’s a busy physician with a large panel and that referral delays happen in every practice. Today I let the statement sit where he put it.
“I can give you my direct fax and my cell,” I say. “If your patients need primary care clearance and they’re on my panel, route them to me and skip the attending queue. I’ll handle the turnaround.”
“Appreciate it.” A pause, and then his voice loosens, shifts from complaint to conversation. “You’ve been at Ridgeline a while.”
“Twelve years.”
“I’ve had your name on referral paperwork for most of them. You run a clean chart.”
“Thank you.”
“If you ever get curious about occupational medicine, I’ve been looking for an NP since mine relocated to Houston in October. Niche field, different pace, but the clinical work is solid. Hard position to fill because workers’-comp doesn’t attract everybody.”
He says it casually, an observation between colleagues, not a pitch. He’s a physician mentioning an open slot he doesn’t expect anyone to fill.
“I’ll keep that in mind,” I say. “Send me the Herrera follow-up notes when you get a chance.”
“Will do.”
I hang up. The call sits in my head, clean and purposeful, no loose ends. The contrast with everything else is sharp enough to notice, and I let myself notice it before I go back to work.
After clinic, I pull up the file I built on Saturday and look at it one more time.
The dates, the charges, the call logs, and the mileage.
Sixteen months of calls, texts, and Friday afternoons.
Sharon has been sleeping with my husband for sixteen months, and during every one of those months she has signed the prescriptive authority agreement that allows me to practice.
Every prescription I’ve written, every medication I’ve adjusted, and every controlled substance I’ve dispensed for my six hundred patients runs through a document with her signature on it.
She’s been holding my career and my husband at the same time, and I handed her both.
I save the file. I back it up to a flash drive and drop it in the zipper pocket of my work bag, next to my stethoscope and my hospital badge.
Then I eat the granola bar I forgot about at lunch, because tomorrow I still have patients who need me, and my authority to treat them depends on a woman who’s been lying to me for over a year.