54 - DETONATION
Lacey
In my office six hours later, I was trying to plan what I was going to say to my father in three days.
This seemed the most stressful note on an otherwise incredibly good day, or day after.
I smiled to myself—whatever release that amazing experience allowed, I felt like it just made the background problem worse.
I squirmed. But those promising words. From now on—
Then I got the text from Allison.
I have a serious issue to discuss with you. Come to my office ASAP.
I read it twice. Allison didn't text like that. Allison scheduled things a week out, never anything that needed clearing. In six years, she had never once sent me a sentence with no warmth in it.
I set the phone down. My first thought, immediate and total, was Derek.
Fuck. Last night. The father of a patient. I'd gone to his house and read his daughter to sleep and woken in the dark and come downstairs and we had— and that was the kind of thing that ended careers. Not illegal, but unethical. Close enough that a board could make it whatever it wanted to.
But it was last night. It was hours ago. How would she—
I walked to her office the way I'd walk to a code, fast and level, the professional me that handles things already stepping forward to take the wheel. By the time I knocked, I had my face arranged.
"Come in."
She was at her desk. She didn't smile. She had an expression I had never once earned from her.
"Close the door," she said. "Sit down."
I closed it. I sat. She didn't say anything right away.
She squared a folder on her desk that didn't need squaring, lined its edge up with the edge of the blotter, and I watched her decide how to begin, and the waiting was worse than anything she could have said.
Allison was never careful with her words. She was careful with me now.
"I have to tell you," she said, "that I'm very disappointed in you, Lacey." A pause. "I never imagined I'd have a conversation like this with you, of all my doctors. You would have been the last."
She knows about Derek. The thought arrived already certain. Somehow, she knows.
"Allison." I kept my voice clean, level, the doctor's voice, the one that holds when nothing else does. "I don't know what you're talking about."
"You're lucky," she said, "that the only people who need to know about this are me and the chairman of the board, Derek Harrington."
Derek told her. It was the only shape it could take. Why would he tell her? Why would he do that to me—and under it the smaller, colder question, how else would she know, and I had no answer, and my face stayed level while everything behind it went white.
"I still don't understand," I said. "I don't know what you mean."
"No." She nodded slowly, like I'd confirmed something sad.
"No, I suppose you wouldn't have known." She reached for the laptop on the corner of her desk and turned it toward me.
"You're also lucky the security officer who reviews the footage recognized you, or we might be calling the police.
You couldn't have known there was a camera over the peace garden. "
I looked at the screen.
Me. On my back in the peace garden, under Ricardo, the dark spill of hair that was mine, and there was no mistaking any part of it.
And Ricardo smiling right at the camera.