Chapter One
"IT'S TIME, DR. COLLINGTON."
Emily was already clutching a wad of tissues when she said this, her dark eyes red-rimmed above the stack of discharge papers she held against her chest like a shield.
She was twenty-six, sharp-featured, and in possession of the kind of face that broadcast every thought she had ever had with the subtlety of a billboard.
On paper, Kazeyuki would have described his assistant as stubbornly expressive.
Off the record, it was the most politically correct term he could think of as euphemism for frequent and thoughtless insubordination.
He set his pen down.
"Of her discharge," he drawled. "Not her funeral."
"But I'm going to miss her."
A pause.
Emily looked at him reproachfully as she handed him the discharge papers. "You're supposed to say you'll miss her too."
"Err, no. I'm not supposed to say that." He uncapped his pen and signed the discharge papers with the same brisk efficiency he brought to everything, because that was all this was.
Katherine McKenna had been in his care for four weeks, one week longer than standard post-aneurysm recovery because Kazeyuki had wanted to be certain, and now she was leaving.
He was always certain. It was the one quality he valued above all others in his profession, and it was the reason his patient was walking out of this hospital today instead of being wheeled out in a bag, and none of that required missing anyone.
He handed the papers back to his assistant, but Emily remained standing in front of his desk.
"Is there something else?"
"You should say goodbye to her." Her chin was up. Her ponytail was aggressive. Emily had a way of channeling her entire emotional state into the tightness of her ponytail, and today's was pulled back with the kind of tension that suggested she had opinions and was fully prepared to deploy them.
"I actually shouldn't—"
"Dr. Collington!"
Kazeyuki still had no plans of changing his mind—
"Don't be mean!"
But that word, though.
It sat in the room for a moment after Emily left, and it sat in his chest for longer than that, and five minutes later, he was walking down the hallway toward Katherine's room because apparently a single word from a twenty-six-year-old with a ponytail and no concept of professional boundaries was enough to override twenty-one years of discipline.
The nurses at the station smiled as he passed. Every one of them wider than necessary, and every one of them aimed at him like they knew where he was going and why, and Kazeyuki returned each one with a polite nod that invited nothing further.
He could hear voices coming from Katherine's room before he reached it.
"Congratulations!"
"Finally!"
"Thank you." Katherine's voice, bright and genuine. "Thank you so much."
Kazeyuki's stride slowed, and he let himself listen for a moment. She sounded pleased. Genuinely, uncomplicatedly pleased, the way people sounded when they were happy about the thing that was actually happening and not performing happiness to cover something else.
Emily had been hinting, in not so many words, about how Katherine had developed inappropriate feelings for him.
But if that were the case, would she have sounded this way about leaving?
A girl with a crush on her doctor would not be celebrating her own discharge.
She would be dreading it. She would be finding reasons to stay.
Unless Emily was simply wrong, which was the more likely explanation, and which would mean that Kazeyuki could say goodbye, wish his patient well, and walk back to his office with the clean conscience of a man who had done his job and nothing more.
He entered the room, and the room was packed.
Balloons crowded the ceiling, their ribbons trailing down like streamers, and every surface that wasn't occupied by medical equipment was occupied by people.
Nurses he recognized, a few he didn't, orderlies from the floor below, the elderly volunteer who ran the gift shop on the ground level.
All of them smiling. All of them looking at Katherine, who was sitting up in bed with her red hair loose around her shoulders and her green eyes bright and her whole face doing that thing it did where it made everyone around her want to give her things.
But the most interesting thing about what he was seeing now?
“Konstantin. Eve. I didn’t realize you knew Katherine.”
“Her case was of interest,” Konstantin answered mildly.
Ah.
That made sense since Konstantin was a neurosurgeon as well.
"We'll see you around, Kitty." Eve kissed the Katherine’s cheek before taking her leave with her husband.
The room began to empty after that. One by one, in pairs, the visitors said their goodbyes and filed out, and Kazeyuki didn't understand why everyone seemed to be leaving at the same time, as though some signal had been given that he hadn't received.
But he shrugged this off. The room had been crowded.
People had places to be. There was nothing coordinated about it.
The door closed behind the last visitor.
And it was just the two of them.
Katherine turned to him, and the way she smiled up at him.
..started making Kazeyuki feel like he had missed something.
The smile was all for him, unguarded and lingering in a way that carried a quality he couldn't quite diagnose, as if she'd been saving it for this moment, for this room, for when everyone else was gone.
No. Don't make a big deal out of this. Just say goodbye—
"Dr. Collington?"
"Yes, Ms. McKenna?"
"It's my last day today."
Her hopeful tone was reassuring, and he smiled slightly. "As a matter of fact, I heard everyone's well wishes all the way down the hall."
"Oh, that's not what they're congratulating me about."
Her smile widened, and the effect of it reminded Kazeyuki of a defibrillator pulse, the way it jolted through his chest and forced something to beat that he had not realized had gone still.
He drew a breath, and then another, because there was no clinical term for what her smile was doing to him, and the absence of a diagnosis was, for a man like Kazeyuki, its own kind of alarm.
All natural, he told himself. She had almost died, and he had saved her life.
"They're congratulating me because they know I'm still happy—"
It was natural for a bond to emerge.
"—you're not dating, and they knew I was going to tell you that today."