15. Kristen
KRISTEN
I'm ready twenty minutes early, which is ridiculous. I'm standing in my living room in jeans and a jacket, bag packed, and I've already checked my hair twice and changed my top once, and now I'm pacing between the kitchen and the front window like I'm waiting for a prom date.
I stop myself. There is no reason to be nervous.
This is not a date. I am not going on a date with Logan Maxwell.
I am going somewhere private with him to prepare for the hearing.
A focused, professional work session in a quiet location where we can concentrate without the hospital watching our every move.
We'll just be alone. Together. For the whole day.
I start pacing again.
I catch my reflection in the hallway mirror, and I laugh at myself. Get it together, Kristen. You're in your thirties, not a teenager. You've performed surgery on people. You can spend a day in a room with a man without losing your mind.
Probably.
My phone buzzes.
Logan
Outside.
I grab my bag, lock the door, and walk out.
His car smells like leather and coffee and something clean and subtle that I've started associating with him.
"Where are we going?" I ask as he pulls onto the highway heading out of the city.
"My second place."
"Your second place?"
"Where I go when I need to not be at the hospital."
"Logan Maxwell voluntarily leaves the hospital?" I look at him. "I thought they bolted you to the floor."
"Funny."
"I'm serious. I half expected to find out you sleep in your office."
"I do sometimes. There's even a cot."
"That's the saddest thing I've ever heard."
"It's efficient."
"It's sad."
He glances at me sideways, and there's a pull at the corner of his mouth that he's trying to hide. I look out the window so he doesn't see that I noticed.
We drive for about forty-five minutes. The city thins out, and the buildings give way to trees.
The air coming through the cracked window is cooler than it should be in summer.
The knot between my shoulders loosens with every mile we put between us and the hospital, between us and Miguel, or the hearing and every set of eyes that's been watching me for weeks.
He turns onto a private road that winds up through the trees. The gravel crunches under the tires, and the branches hang low enough to brush the roof of the car. Then the trees open up, and a house appears at the top of a clearing.
From the outside, it looks like something out of a magazine.
A mountain cabin, but not the rustic kind.
Wooden panels stained dark, a sloped roof with exposed beams, a wraparound porch with two chairs facing the valley below.
The whole thing is surrounded by trees, and the only sounds are birds and the wind.
"This is your escape?" I say, still looking at it through the windshield.
"Everyone needs one."
"We're clearly in different tax brackets."
"It was my grandfather's cabin. He left it to me."
We get out. He unlocks the front door, and when I step inside, it's even better.
The living room is open and warm with hardwood floors, a stone fireplace on one wall, and a bookshelf that takes up the entire opposite wall, packed full.
Well-read paperbacks sit next to medical texts and a few novels I recognize.
There's a worn leather couch facing the fireplace, a dining table by the window, and a small, clean kitchen.
The whole cabin smells like cedar and pine; something old and lived-in, like it's been standing here breathing quietly for decades.
But the best part is the back wall. It's almost entirely glass, floor-to-ceiling panels with a sliding door that opens onto the balcony. I walk toward it and just stop.
The view is breathtaking. Mountains covered in thick green forest stretch out in every direction, and at the far end, tucked between two ridges, there's a lake.
The perfectly still water is dark blue. The whole thing looks like someone painted it and hung it outside his window.
I've seen beautiful places before, but this is something else.
This is the kind of view that steals the words right out of you.
"Logan." I turn to look at him. "This is incredible."
He's standing behind me with his hands in his pockets, watching me look at his view, and there's something on his face that I can't quite read. Like he's pleased that I see what he sees.
I turn back to the window. I already love this place. It's not mine, it has nothing to do with me, but standing here looking at those mountains and that lake, I feel something I haven't felt in a long time: peace. If I lived here, I'd never leave.
"I could stay here forever," I say, mostly to myself.
"Most people would say that." He pauses. "Then they'd get bored after two days because there's no cell service."
"But that's not a flaw. It's the entire point."
He looks at me. I look at him. For a moment, neither of us says anything. The quiet in this house feels different from the quiet at the hospital. It's softer and safer.
But we're not here to relax. Not entirely.
We sit at the dining table and we work. He brought files, notes.
I brought everything I have on Miguel. Financial records from our shared accounts, dates, details, text messages I screenshotted before I left, the ones where he threatened me, where he reminded me what I owed him, where he told me I'd be nothing without his help. I've kept all of it. Every word.
We lay it out between us, and for the first time, I'm not just surviving this. I'm strategizing.
We go through the complaint point by point. For every allegation, Logan plays devil's advocate. He pushes back hard.
"The residency allegation," he says. "They'll say Miguel Cruz pulled strings to get you into St. Andrew's. What's your answer?"
"That I was qualified. My med school record was excellent. The gap was the issue, not my ability."
"But he did make calls."
"He did. I didn't ask him to. I was applying on my own and getting rejected, and he went behind my back and made it happen. I didn't find out until after he told me."
"Can you prove that?"
"I have the rejection emails from other programs—all timestamped before St. Andrew's accepted me. That shows I was trying to get in on my own merit."
He nods, then writes something down. "Good. What about the inappropriate relationship allegation? Between you and me."
"There is no relationship."
He looks up from his notes and holds my gaze. "Right. There isn't. But they'll point to the fact that I drove you home, that I was involved in the Miguel confrontation, that I've been personally engaged in your situation beyond what's expected of a department head."
"So how do we explain that?"
"By telling the truth. That a visitor was physically aggressive toward a resident in my department, and I responded as any attending would. Everything after that was professional support during a crisis."
"And the driving me home part?"
"A colleague ensuring another colleague's safety after a traumatic event. It's not romantic. It's basic human decency."
I counter his points, and he counters mine.
I catch a gap in his argument about the patient endangerment allegation, and he raises an eyebrow and concedes the point.
Barely. I find a flaw in my own timeline, and he helps me restructure it.
We go back and forth for hours, and it's exhilarating in a way I wasn't expecting.
Two minds so used to competing against each other finally aimed at the same target.
Around five, he pushes back from the table, takes off his glasses, and rubs his eyes. "That's enough for today, or we're both going to combust."
I laugh because he's right. My brain is fried. I lean back in my chair and look at him across the spread of papers and coffee cups. Something about the moment is so familiar it aches: the two of us at a table surrounded by work, refusing to quit before the other one did.
"This feels familiar," I say.
"It does. Except we're on the same side this time. Who would've thought?"
"Weird, isn't it?"
"Deeply uncomfortable." He crosses his arms. "I keep wanting to argue with you."
I laugh. "You did argue with me. For three hours."
"That was strategic pressure testing. Not quite the same."
"That was arguing, Logan."
He almost smiles. I almost smile back. And for a second, we're just sitting there, wrung out and looking at each other across a table full of evidence. It feels good. It feels like us.
He cooks dinner—which surprises me and doesn't—because Logan Maxwell doesn't do anything halfway. He moves around the kitchen like he's done this a thousand times, opening cabinets without looking, finding spices by feel.
"You can cook," I say from the counter where I'm sitting with my wine.
"Don't sound so shocked."
"I am shocked. I figured growing up as a Maxwell meant you had someone cooking for you your whole life."
"We did. My mother hired a private chef when I was seven. My parents didn't really have time to cook."
"So how did you learn?"
"My grandfather." He pulls a pan out and sets it on the stove. "He taught me when I was fifteen. He said a man who can't cook for himself is a man who can't take care of himself. Didn't matter that we had a chef at home. Up here, you cooked or you didn't eat."
"I like your grandfather."
"You would have. He would have liked you too. He had a thing for stubborn people."
"I'm not stubborn."
He gives me a look over his shoulder. Just a look. One eyebrow slightly raised, glasses slipping down his nose, and I have to look away because the combination of him cooking and giving me that look is doing something to my brain.
He rolls his sleeves up to his elbows. I watch his forearms as he works, and I take a very long sip of wine. This cabin is full of beautiful views, isn't it?