Chapter 20
Isabelle
I glanced up at the clock, then back at my case logs.
I couldn’t focus.
Austin had left early this morning; I hadn’t even noticed since the pillow wall sort of insulated me from the noise. Selena
had been tired and took the day to relax and nap before the first event tomorrow—the Mehndi.
So, I planned to log some cases, but as the afternoon sun streamed past the white curtains and along the pearly white tabletop
where I was trying to log those cases into my spreadsheet, I was restless.
I stood. Maybe I needed a change of scenery. Picking up my laptop and my purse, I thought maybe I’d try the garden.
Just as I began to turn the knob to the hotel room, the door swung open. I took a startled breath and a couple steps back,
and Austin stood in the doorway. The deep-yellow afternoon sunshine flooded out to the hallway from behind me.
Casual in a pair of dark-gray joggers and a white Henley T-shirt that made ripples along his muscular chest and arms, he made my heart jump. “Oh. Hi.”
“Hey.” He brushed past me, but I caught the lines around his eyes, the heaviness beneath them. He was tired. “Did you get
some work done?”
My feet felt the need to move, so I turned my toes against the floor. “Yeah, it was super productive.”
I lied. I didn’t know why, but I felt like I had to make sure he knew I was busy and not wondering if he was having a nice
time in London. Or when he’d be back. Because I wasn’t his actual girlfriend, and he said he’d be back before tomorrow’s party
and that’s all I really needed to know.
He nodded, walking back out into the living area. He looked over my shoulder to the table I was just working at. “Well, I’ll
leave you to it. I was going to grab something to eat.”
Something told me not to let him walk away, propelling me to stop him. “Wait.”
The tiny—truthful—part of me that sort of missed him while he was gone. I felt like, after that cooking class, we’d have had
fun together today exploring Paris. With Selena so exhausted between events, she’d been napping a lot, and I wanted to make
sure she got her rest.
“What about that place you mentioned a few days ago?” I added after a drawn out pause.
“The brewery?”
“Yeah.” A nervous shiver ran along my muscles.
Maybe he wanted to be alone; he seemed a little glum.
But not even the unfathomable chance that I’d hear a polite declination stopped me.
“Want to go? I’ve worked enough for the day.
Selena’s wedding team is outrageously well-equipped to do their jobs. ”
And Austin was basically doing the only other job assigned to me—dealing with Malcolm.
The corners of his mouth screwed dimples into the sculpted slope of his jaw. His face brightened. “Yeah, sure.”
“Great.” I put my laptop down on the console table and spun around on my toes to walk back into the bedroom. “I’ll get changed.”
“You look great like that,” he called into the room as I shut the door. “I mean . . .” His voice lowered from the other side
of the door. “It’s casual. You don’t need to dress up.”
“Two minutes,” I answered from my side of the door.
At the northeast tip of the city, in the nineteenth arrondissement, at the head of the large public pool that felt like a
lake, were myriad outdoor activities. Tourists and locals alike sunbathed along either side of the pool, ziplines crossed
the span, and tons of activities bubbled with life along its banks—a beach in the middle of the city.
On the wooden patio that hung over the top of the grand swimming area at its entry point, our seats gave us a view of the
entire sun-soaked summer evening.
Austin’s chuckle pulled me from my thoughts as I watched—with trepidation—as a few people dove into the water.
Across the square wooden table, Austin took a sip of his beer. “Imagining the injury?”
“It’s hard not to after a few rotations on trauma.
It can make one a little risk averse.” I’d seen enough injuries that involved the cervical spine to know I was never going to dive into water unless it was unreasonably deep.
“But traumas are pretty rewarding when they go well, seeing how quickly you can take someone from the brink and bring them back to something pretty close to normal.”
I glanced back at him, and my eyes got caught on his. The flecks of darker and lighter shades of blue shifting in the sun
like a calm tide. They were alive in the evening light. There was a playfulness about him that made it hard to look away.
“Is that why you went into surgery?” he asked. The wind wisped through the locks of his deep brown hair that fell forward
before he brushed them back.
I smiled. It was what I liked to call an application question.
My answer was usually some poetic version of the truth. Surgery was demanding, one of the most difficult things you could
set your plans on.
“It’s tough,” I answered. “But when you’re in it—when you’re operating—you’re solving a constantly changing puzzle. You have
a map and a lifetime of knowledge ready to go for all the intricacies, but that first cut . . .” I glanced over to the water,
then back at Austin. “It’s like a shot of pure adrenaline followed by hours of a challenge.”
A half smile made a valley along his jaw.
He probably knew that exact feeling, I imagined that’s what it felt like to play a hard game. Win or lose, it was a challenge.
“Sounds like a good reason.”
“Well . . . it’s not the only reason.” I teetered between giving him the application answer—which was true—and the whole truth. “I would have never found it if it weren’t for my parents. They’re both surgeons, too. Who knows what I would have chased if they weren’t.”
His eyebrows lifted and fell slowly. “Big shoes to fill?”
“I guess,” I began. “I know I’m talented, but sometimes it feels like I’ll always be in my dad’s shadow. I’m always fighting
against the assumption that I’ve gotten the opportunities I have just because of who my dad is. I want to make a legacy of
my own one day, one nobody can argue with. And I also want male surgeons to get used to the idea of me, and women in surgery
in general.”
Women in surgery got a particularly insidious line of assumptions made about them. That eventually surgery would be too tough,
and we’d bow out for something friendlier to having a family. The assumption that we wouldn’t keep up at this grueling clip
in residency pushed me to put myself on countless papers, get prestigious awards, and now I was at the precipice of the most
difficult fellowship offered in my subspecialty.
“Beating the boys out of spite?” He put his glass down and leaned in, crossing his arms on the table, an intrigued spark lit
in his eye.
“No,” I insisted. But maybe I was, a little. The days I was too exhausted to study or review cases, I would remind myself
of that annoying trope. The one that assumed a woman’s career aspirations just evaporated after she fell in love and had a
family. Like suddenly she’d be lobotomized and want to ride off into the sunset with some guy, leaving everything she’d built behind. That thought pissed me off enough to keep going. “I’m just not letting anyone stand in the way.”
Austin nodded. “Your parents must be proud, following in their footsteps.”
“My dad didn’t seem to even register it. It was the expectation. But my mom . . .”
“She was upset?” he asked disbelievingly.
“No.” I laughed humorlessly to myself. My voice dropped in hollow disappointment. “She looked so proud. Like she was getting
another chance, vicariously through me.”
Confusion lined his brow when my dejected tone didn’t match the words.
“My dad is a world-renowned orthopedic surgeon,” I explained. Sometimes, I felt like I had to achieve the career my mom didn’t
have because of me. Raising me meant her life was on hold all those years and it wasn’t like you could just pick up opportunities
after you declined them originally. The world didn’t wait. “He operated on former President Alders after he had that fall.
When someone says Dr. Mercado, it’s him they picture.”
It had been all over the news and my dad was in a few press conferences outside the hospital. I remembered watching as a little
girl and thinking about how that would be me one day.
“And your mom?”
“Top of her class. She outshined my dad in every measure,” I said, running my finger up my glass, drawing lines in the condensation.
I felt like I needed to highlight my mom’s achievements because they were there, but nobody saw them. “But she’s just a general
surgeon now.”
“And that’s a bad thing?” His voice went up an octave, perplexed.
“No, of course not,” I conceded, taking a sip from my beer. “It’s just different. But sometimes she looks at me and tells
me I have so much potential, and I feel like . . .”
My mom never really verbalized any regret about not pursuing a fellowship because she had me. But I could hear it in the way
she pushed me to this fellowship. Whether she consciously knew that she was doing it or not didn’t matter. For as long as
I could remember, I had always had this feeling that stopping short of the top was a trap I couldn’t fall into. So, I didn’t.
“You don’t want to let her down?” Austin finished for me. “I know that feeling.”
In that moment, another interesting similarity gleamed between us. Big dreams and a cheering section that maybe we felt like
we owed something to.
“I know she wants me to be happy,” I insisted. “But anything short of the best is . . . I dunno, I just don’t want to feel
like I wasted my potential.”
Austin didn’t say anything, rather he nodded in a quiet understanding.
After days of blurriness, focus finally came together in my mind.
I think that was why seeing Blake spun me out the way it did. He made me question my drive, if putting my career first was
really the right move. The temporary heartache had cracked my resolve and made me wonder how I could have avoided it—what
I could have changed to make a relationship with him work.