Chapter 16
SIXTEEN
ALLY
“Do you want to stop at your apartment before we head to my place?” Drew asks as we drive out of the hospital parking lot.
“No, I should be good. Provided you don’t mind sharing some soap and toothpaste.” My apartment’s in the opposite direction from his condo, and I can survive for one night without a change of clothes.
He smiles. “I might even have an unopened toothbrush.”
He slows as we approach the bike racks. “Did you leave your bike here?”
“Yeah, but I can come back for it tomorrow. It might not fit—”
“It’ll fit,” Drew says confidently, pulling over and hitting the button to pop the trunk. I unlock my bike from the rack while he folds down the backseat, and he lifts the bike easily into the trunk.
“Thanks,” I tell him as we climb back into the car. “One less thing for me to worry about tomorrow.”
“Sure,” he says. “Did Sophie call about your bloodwork?”
“Yeah, it was all fine.”
Drew nods. “Good.”
Silence falls, and I feel the need to fill it. “So, Lucy told me you’re basically the youngest person to get a neurosurgery job, ever.”
“That’s ridiculous,” he says, but there’s a faint blush creeping over his cheeks. For some reason, any sort of praise seems to embarrass this man.
“Lucy was lying to me, huh?”
He rolls his eyes. “Okay. I was pretty young.”
“She also said Toronto and Montreal tried to recruit you.”
His blush deepens, and he gives a half shrug.
“And they’re probably still trying to recruit you,” I say. “Especially now that you’re connected to the Tates.”
Another half shrug, which gives me my answer. Drew Malone is a hot commodity in the neurosurgical world.
“So it got me thinking about the meeting with Heather and Dr. McGregor,” I continue. “Dr. McGregor seemed weirdly happy that we were dating, at I didn’t understand it at the time.”
“Maybe he’d just been worried about my love life?”
“Um, no,” I say bluntly. “I doubt you have a problem there. A lot of women go for tall, dark, and cynical.”
A smile tugs at his lips. “You think so?”
“Sure,” I reply. “There’s no accounting for taste.”
Drew chuckles. “Right.”
“But back to that meeting,” I say. “When you told Dr. McGregor you needed to meet about a personal issue, he probably thought you were going to leave Somerset.”
“Nah,” he says. “He knows I’m not looking to leave.”
“Really?” I ask. “Even if another city offered you a better deal? More money for research, or a guarantee that you’d never have to go to meetings?”
“It sounds tempting, but probably not. I grew up here.”
That’s interesting. I grew up in Somerset too, but it doesn’t mean I wouldn’t consider opportunities elsewhere. “Is your family still here?”
“My sister and her family, yeah,” he says, glancing over at me.
“You’re pretty close to them, huh?”
“Close enough, sure. But you’re right that when someone requests an urgent meeting, it’s rarely to give good news. Bernie was probably expecting to hear something a lot worse than what we told him.”
He’s deliberately changing the subject, but I’ll play along. “Like what?”
“Oh, that I was sick and needed a leave of absence. Or being sued, or facing criminal charges—”
“Criminal charges?” I interrupt.
He shrugs. “It happens. Last year, one of the internists was charged with trafficking fentanyl. The police showed up to the hospital to arrest him.”
“Wow.” I guess it’s not actually that surprising. Doctors are human like anyone else.
“It’s unlikely to happen to me, though,” he quips. “Criminal charges, I mean. In case you were worried about spending the night at my condo.”
“Good to know.” He turns into the parking lot of his building. “You know, you could walk to work from here.”
“I often intend to,” he replies. “I just never manage to leave in time to do it.”
He parks in the underground garage, and we take the elevator up to his unit. He’s on the eighth floor, facing Lake Ontario, and the view is spectacular. In fact, the entire condo is spectacular, with huge windows and high ceilings.
And it’s immaculately clean. It feels like it could be a showroom for an upscale Scandinavian furniture store.
“I have a lady who cleans on Fridays,” Drew explains. It’s as though he read my mind, and he doesn’t want me to think he’s a neat freak.
“She does good work,” I remark, as my eyes sweep the room. There’s an abstract print hanging over the sofa that vaguely resembles a red elephant. I’m not a fan of abstract art in general, but there’s something striking about this elephant.
“Come on in,” Drew says, and I set down my backpack and slip off my shoes.
“What would you like for dinner?” he asks. “I thought we could order in.”
“Sounds great. I like pretty much everything.”
“Roti Palace?”
I nod. “I’ll have palak paneer and garlic naan. Thanks.”
“Got it.” He taps at his phone screen. “Do you want anything for dessert?”
“No, I’m good. Thanks.”
“You sure?” he asks. “I don’t have much here for dessert.”
“No secret stash of candy in your cupboard, huh?” I tease, but I already know the answer. Drew seems almost unnaturally disciplined; definitely not the type to keep a secret candy stash in his cupboard.
“No, but we could order some.”
“It’s okay,” I tell him. “I have an emergency stash in my backpack.”
He grins as he finishes ordering and slips his phone back into his pocket. “Should be about forty minutes. Do you want anything to drink? I have Perrier or still water. Or milk, or herbal tea.”
“Perrier, please.”
He hands me a Perrier from the fridge. “Why don’t I show you the spare room?”
“Sure.” I pick up my backpack and follow him down the hall to what’s clearly his home office.
There’s a sleek wooden desk under the window, and a bookcase along the adjacent wall.
Unlike my dad’s home office, there are no framed university degrees on display.
Instead, another abstract print hangs over the bookcase; this one reminds me of the ocean, all vibrant blues and greens.
“The couch pulls out,” Drew explains, gesturing to a gray pinstriped sofa. “I’ve never slept on it, but I’ve been told it’s pretty comfortable. Unless—”
“I’m sure it’ll be great,” I interrupt, before he can offer to take the couch and give me his bed.
He nods and stacks the cushions beside the couch, then pulls it out into a bed. “I’ll grab some sheets.”
He disappears for a second, and I take the opportunity to look at his bookshelf. He’s got a mix of titles: a few medical texts, but mostly paperback novels. There’s Michael Connelly’s Lincoln Lawyer series, a couple Reacher novels, and a book of Salinger’s short stories.
“Feel free to borrow anything that looks interesting.”
I turn and see that Drew’s returned with an armful of sheets and a pillow. Fortunately, he doesn’t look like he minds me looking at his books.
He starts to make up the bed, and I jump to help. “I can do that,” I offer, grabbing the other side of a blue plaid fitted sheet. It feels oddly domestic to be doing this together.
“The bathroom’s across the hall,” he says when we’ve made the bed. “I have an ensuite off my bedroom, so you’ll have this one to yourself. I put a new toothbrush in the drawer.”
“Thanks.”
“No problem. Let me know if you need anything else.”
I nod, and wish I’d taken him up on his offer to stop at my apartment so I could get pajamas.
I could sleep in my underwear, but if I have to use the bathroom in the night, I’ll have to cross the hall to do it.
And there’s a chance—an infinitesimal, but not zero chance—that Drew will be up, and he’ll see me crossing the hall in my underwear.
So unless I want to risk that, I’ll either need to sleep in my clothes or put them back on before any middle of the night bathroom trips. Unless . . .
“Do you think I could borrow a t-shirt to sleep in?” I ask.
There’s a beat of silence before he answers. “Sure. Yeah. Of course,” he finally says. “I’ll grab one.”
He disappears for a moment, then returns with a dark green t-shirt. “This okay?”
“Great.” I say, taking it from him. It has the comfortable softness of something that’s been washed a hundred times.
I set the t-shirt on top of the pillow, then follow him back to the living room. Drew grabs himself a Perrier too, and we sit on opposite ends of the sofa. There’s a new tension in his posture, and I don’t understand it. I wonder if he had other plans for tonight, or if he has work to do.
“I’ll be fine, if you’ve got other stuff to do,” I tell him. “I might even borrow one of your books.”
Once again, it takes him a minute to answer. “No, no. I don’t—do you want to watch TV?”
“Sure.”
He grabs a remote from an end table and flicks the TV on. “You can pick a show,” he says, handing me the remote.
“What kind of stuff do you like?”
“I don’t watch much TV,” he says. “We can watch whatever you want.”
“I started watching Grace General on my phone this afternoon,” I suggest.
“That’s fine.”
“I made it to episode four,” I say as I flick through the Netflix menu. “But we could start at the beginning if you want.”
“Nah, pick up where you left off,” he says easily. “I’m sure I’ll figure it out.”
So I hit play on episode four, which opens with a couple of residents doing CPR on a patient in the ER.
“I don’t think they should have tried to defibrillate there,” Drew remarks. “That heart rhythm wouldn’t respond to a shock.”
“I guess that’s why it didn’t work,” I reply, as the on-screen team restarts chest compressions.
Drew lets me know whenever he finds something unbelievable, which happens roughly every two minutes. By the time our food arrives, the tension between us has disappeared, and I’m left wondering if I imagined it.
My phone rings as we’re finishing dinner, and my landlord’s name flashes across the screen.
“It’s my landlord,” I tell Drew apologetically, as I swipe to answer it. “Hi, Robbie.”
“Hey, Ally,” Robbie says. “I got your text, I can swing by now to take a look at things.”
“Okay. I’m not home right now—”