4. Kristen
KRISTEN
Logan Maxwell is doing something to me, and I can't figure out his aim.
Every morning during rounds, he finds me.
It doesn't matter where I stand or who I'm behind; his eyes sweep the group and land on me like I'm the only person in the room who owes him something.
He asks me first. Always first. And not the easy questions.
The other residents get straightforward presentations, standard differentials, and textbook material you could answer in your sleep.
I get the weird ones. The edge cases. The ones that require you to think three steps ahead and defend every single answer while he stands there watching you with those gray-green eyes behind his glasses, giving you absolutely nothing to work with.
It's been a week of this. A full week of Logan Maxwell treating me like his personal pop quiz while everyone else gets to blend into the wall.
Today, he stops at a bedside and doesn't even look at the chart before he speaks.
"Portland. Delayed splenic rupture. Walk me through management."
A few of the other residents glance at me. I've become the show now, the one they watch to see if she breaks or delivers. I hate it, and I'm used to it at the same time.
I keep my voice steady. "Depends on the grade and hemodynamic status.
If the patient is stable, then non-operative management with serial abdominal exams, repeat imaging at forty-eight to seventy-two hours to rule out pseudoaneurysm or expanding hematoma.
Bed rest, type and screen on hold, and a low threshold for angioembolization if there's any change. "
He doesn't react at all. Just keeps looking at me, and I can see him turning something over behind that neutral expression, deciding whether to let me off or push harder.
He pushes harder.
"Good. Now tell me what you'd do differently if the CT was inconclusive and the patient was hypotensive."
The other residents shift slightly. Brennan, who's standing next to me, exhales like he's grateful the spotlight isn't on him. It permeates the air—this collective relief that it's me and not them.
"If the CT is inconclusive and the patient is hypotensive, I'm not waiting for better imaging.
I'm doing a FAST exam at the bedside. If there's free fluid in Morrison's pouch, that's my answer.
The patient goes to the OR for an exploratory laparotomy.
You don't sit on a declining patient because the scan wasn't clear enough. "
Logan adjusts his glasses, nods once, barely, and moves on to the next bed like I just told him the weather forecast instead of answering a question that would've tripped up half the residents in this program.
I'm left standing there with my pulse running too fast because I still can't tell if this man is trying to build me up or break me down.
Both feel exactly the same from where I'm standing.
After rounds, I find Priya in the residents' lounge. She's already got her bag and her jacket, which means she's thinking the same thing I am.
"Food truck?" she says.
"Please."
We grab lunch from the truck parked outside the hospital, the one with the good tacos that always has a line, and sit on a bench across the street because I need air, and she can tell without me saying it.
"So." She bites into her taco like this is a casual conversation and not an interrogation. "What's the deal with you and Dr. Maxwell?"
"There's no deal. He just keeps singling me out."
"Yeah, I noticed. He asked you four questions today. He asked Brennan one." She holds up a finger. "One. And Brennan almost cried."
"So he's hard on everyone."
"He's hard on everyone. He's brutal to you." She looks at me sideways. "You make him mad or something?"
I think about med school. About four years of making him mad every single day. About arguments in lecture halls and study sessions that turned into shouting matches, and a flashcard I threw at his head that he caught without looking.
"No," I say. "I barely even talk to him."
Priya studies me for a second, chewing slowly, like she's deciding whether to believe me. Then she shrugs. "Well, either he hates you, or he sees potential in you. No in-between with that guy."
"It's definitely the first one."
She laughs, and I almost laugh too. Sitting here with Priya, eating tacos on a bench in the sun, complaining about attendings like it's the biggest problem in the world, it's easy to forget what happens during rounds.
Out here, with her, I'm just another resident on her break, and I want to stay in that feeling a little longer before I have to go back inside and face whatever Logan Maxwell is turning me into.
"You know what I heard?" Priya leans in like she's about to share classified intelligence. "Jameson asked one of the nurses if Maxwell had ever smiled. Like, ever. In his entire life."
"What did the nurse say?"
"She said she saw him almost smile once. During a really clean anastomosis. But she couldn't confirm because he was wearing a mask."
I press my lips together hard because I'm not going to laugh at that. I'm not.
"You're smiling," Priya says, pointing at me with her taco.
"I'm not."
"You are. You're human after all."
I roll my eyes and she grins, and for the next fifteen minutes, I bask in the feeling of being a normal person with a normal job and a normal friend who doesn't know the half of it.
I lost most of my friends when I had to give up my life, and making new ones still feels like a skill I forgot I needed.
But Priya makes it easy. She doesn't look at me like a puzzle.
She just talks to me like I'm a person who's here now, and that's enough.
Back on the floor, I round on my patients.
Mrs. Dart in 408 is recovering well from her cholecystectomy, alert and in good spirits, asking when she can eat solid food again.
I check her drain output, review her labs, and tell her that if everything looks good by tomorrow morning, she's probably going home.
She thanks me three times. I tell her once is enough. She thanks me a fourth time anyway.
I'm updating her chart at the nurses' station when a voice calls out from my elbow.
“Dr. Portland?" It's Ramirez, one of the floor nurses, and she's got a look on her face I can't quite read. It's not urgent or medical. More like she's trying to figure out how to phrase something diplomatically.
"It's Mr. Hale. He won't do his exercises. He told the physical therapist that she was, and I'm quoting, 'wasting his time and hers.' Rodriguez is about five minutes from putting in a formal complaint."
"I'll go."
Walter Hale is sitting in his chair with his arms crossed like a man who has decided the world can come to him because he is done going to it.
"Mr. Hale. I hear you're giving everyone a hard time."
"I'm giving everyone an honest time. There's a difference."
"Your honest time made Rodriguez lose his hair."
"Rodriguez talks to me like I'm five. I'm seventy-three. I've earned the right to be difficult."
I pull up a chair and sit next to him, because Walter doesn't respond to authority. He responds to people who sit down and look him in the eye. "You have. You've also earned the right to walk out of here on your own two feet instead of in a wheelchair. So what's it going to be?"
He's quiet for a moment, then says softly, "You remind me of my daughter, you know that? She doesn't take my crap either."
He says this every time. I stopped correcting him three visits ago.
"Smart woman," I say, the same way I always do.
"Stubborn woman."
He does all his exercises, slowly, with the occasional grumble and a running commentary about how the hospital floor is too cold and the grip on the walker is "designed for someone with baby hands".
And when we're done and I've checked his range of motion and noted the improvement in his chart, he settles back in his chair and looks at me with an expression that's softer than he'd ever admit to.
"Same time tomorrow, Portland. Don't send Rodriguez."
"Rodriguez is a trained professional. He's your physical therapist, Walter."
"Rodriguez annoys me." He waves me off. "Go. Save some lives or whatever it is you do when you're not babysitting me."
I leave his room and I'm smiling, and it takes me a second to notice because smiling isn't something I do on autopilot anymore.
It's something I have to remember, like a foreign language I used to speak.
But Walter makes it easy. He's stubborn and rude and impatient, and he reminds me of my dad in ways that ache.
The rest of the shift is uneventful until we get a trauma case at around four.
Car accident, single vehicle, driver extracted by fire rescue.
Logan's leading, and the bay fills with controlled motion, monitors beeping, nurses hanging lines, the radiology tech wheeling the portable machine into position.
I'm assisting, my hands gloved and my gown on, and for a few minutes, there's nothing but the work and the body in front of us and the rhythm of a team doing what it's trained to do.
The imaging comes up on the screen. Logan glances at it, then at me.
"Portland. Read it."
I step closer to the monitor and go through it fast. "Left-sided rib fractures, four through seven. Left-sided pneumothorax, small but present. No obvious mediastinal shift. There's a hemothorax tracking along the posterior costophrenic angle on the left."
"Rib fractures," he says, eyes on the patient, not on me. "What about the displacement on the fourth?"
"Lateral."
"You sure?"
I look at the scan again, then pull up the coronal. The fracture line is clean, and the fragment is displaced laterally. Not anterior, not posterior. Lateral. I've read it twice now, and I'm certain.
"Yes."
"You sure?" he asks again, louder this time, and now there's an edge to it, a push.
Every set of eyes in the bay shifts toward me—the nurse holding the suction, the intern at the foot of the bed, and the respiratory tech.
All of them waiting to see what happens when the department head questions the same resident he's been grilling for a week.
"I'm sure." My voice comes out louder than I intended and steadier than I expected. "I've read it twice. The displacement is lateral, not anterior, and if you pull up the coronal view, you can see it clearly. I'm not guessing." I look right at him. "If you don't believe me, pull it up yourself."
Apart from the monitors and the soft hiss of the oxygen line, the bay goes so quiet I can hear my own breathing.
I immediately want to take back every word.
Swallow them. Apologize. Regardless of our history, he's the chief of trauma surgery, and I'm a third-year resident who just challenged him in front of his entire team.
I don't do this anymore. I don't fight back.
I don't raise my voice. I don't stand my ground in a room full of people who outrank me, because I learned the hard way what happens when you push against someone who has power over you.
My hands are trembling at my sides, and I'm already composing the apology in my head, already bracing for the correction, the cold dismissal, the public dressing down that tells everyone in this room exactly where I rank.
But he looks at me, holds my gaze, and nods.
"Good. Trust your reads." He turns back to the patient. "Someone get me a chest tube tray."
The bay moves on. I stand there, and my hands are shaking, but it's not fear.
It's something I haven't felt in so long that I barely recognize it.
Because for about five seconds, I wasn't the woman who kept her head down and her voice low and her opinions folded up small enough to fit in a pocket.
I was the woman who knew she was right and said it out loud in a room full of people.
And Logan Maxwell looked at me like that was exactly what he'd been waiting for.
I get back to work. We stabilize the patient. The chest tube goes in clean, the hemothorax drains, and the lung re-expands on the follow-up film.
The team clears out in shifts. I stay behind to finish documenting, writing until my hands stop trembling, and pressing the pen harder than I need to because the pressure helps.
I don't know what Maxwell is doing. I don't know why he pushes me harder than anyone else, why he singles me out every morning and asks me questions nobody else gets asked. I don't know why he did what he did earlier.
But I know that I walked out of that trauma bay today feeling more awake than I've felt in months. And it felt good. It felt dangerously, terrifyingly good.
Which is why I'm scared. The last time a man's attention made me feel like this, like I mattered, like I was worth seeing, I trusted it. And it cost me everything.
So I finish my notes, put the pen down, strip off my gloves, and drop them in the bin. Yet even as I walk out of the hospital, even as my heart pounds with the old fear, I can still feel it—that fire in my chest when I stood my ground.
I know why he did that. The woman I buried a long time ago, the one who argued and fought and never backed down from anyone, is still in there. I spent years burying her because being her wasn't safe.
And Logan Maxwell is trying to dig her up.