Chapter 4 #2
She looked tired. Despite this, Anna still thought she looked beautiful.
Her hair was pulled back into a low chignon as usual, and she wore no jewelry other than a lovely jade pendant on a delicate golden chain around her neck.
Despite the dark circles under her blue eyes and a slightly hectic pink in her cheeks, her statuesque beauty shone through.
Anna knew she was trouble, volatile trouble, and yet… God, what a beautiful, compelling woman she was.
Victoria didn’t even have to say anything today to let her opinion be loudly known. She simply cleared her throat to get Anna’s attention, looked her up and down with that icy, laser-like blue gaze, and quirked up one perfect golden eyebrow.
“So glad you like it,” Anna said, grinning in a way that seemed to make Victoria’s eye twitch. “Please, make yourself a cup of tea, and help yourself to the bakery box.”
The words bakery box appeared to catch Victoria’s attention, and she headed over to Anna’s desk first. Anna pretended to not be watching as Victoria picked up a napkin and peered into the box, her hand hovering over each irresistible option.
Would she actually take one? And if she did, would she eat any of it?
Anna held her breath as she closed her office door and moved to pick up a plate for each of them.
The napkin fell on one of the caramel pretzel croissants, and the pastry was instantly snatched up, with one of the quiches swiftly following.
Anna handed over one of the plates and Victoria dropped her bounty onto it, setting the whole thing down on the couch before moving to prepare her cup of tea.
Anna noticed that when making the tea, she moved precisely, almost ritualistically. An interesting tidbit she filed away.
She already had a lot of interesting tidbits about Victoria collected.
Anna sat down in her chair with a caramel croissant of her own and waited for Victoria to settle down.
She wanted to try a different approach today, and was nervous about how it would go.
In her experience, if a patient left their sessions early three appointments running, they did not come back.
But Victoria’s career quite literally hinged on her acknowledging she needed help and getting it. How would today go?
Victoria sat down with her tea, stirring in the monkfruit sweetener and looking Anna over again.
“On second glance, the ensemble isn’t so bad,” she remarked, with something that almost looked like approval in her gaze.
“Could use boots, though.” She extended one foot out and pulled up the trouser leg to display her black-leather clad ankle.
“Ah, but you love my ballet flats so much,” Anna replied cheerily, wiggling her feet. “How could I deprive you?”
“How thoughtful of you.” Victoria took a sip of her tea, keeping her eyes on Anna.
Tension fairly radiated off of her, a distrustful wariness that made Anna’s soft heart ache for her.
She wondered what Victoria’s life had been like, that her walls were so very high, so much of the time?
No wonder she didn’t seem to sleep. She must be living on high alert.
Anna knew better than to try to encourage Victoria to eat with words. Instead, she picked up her croissant and took a hearty bite of it, trusting it to work the same annoying magic it had the other day.
And indeed, Victoria did briefly close her eyes and even appeared to shudder… but then, she picked up the croissant. Her bite contained considerably less gusto, but a bite she did take, and a faint smile actually crossed her lips. “This is really rather nice.”
“I like them a lot myself. I was happy to see they made them today.” Anna smiled back, but otherwise restrained herself from any further quips. She didn’t want to break the spell, especially after Victoria went back for another nibble, and then a third.
Anna had finished her croissant and was licking her fingers when Victoria put down the second half of hers and bent down to pull a packet of wet wipes out of her bag.
Daintily, she cleaned her hands and dropped the soiled wipe into a nearby trash can.
Then she folded those strong, graceful hands together into her lap and directed a steady, silent stare at Anna.
Anna smiled sunnily and sipped at her apple chai latte.
Eventually, Victoria spoke up. “I genuinely detest when you do this.”
“Oh, but it’s part of what makes our time spent together so fun.” Anna could not help but play the dangerous game of provoking Victoria, at least a little, before she settled into something more gentle. At the first sign of anger, of course she would back off.
To her surprise, instead of the expected anger, there was a glint of something that might have been interest in those steely blue eyes. “You are not a very conventional sort of therapist, Dr. Monroe.”
“I’d love to know what you think makes for a conventional therapist,” Anna replied. “Have you seen so very many?”
Unbelievably, this seemed to fluster Victoria. “Well.”
“Are you basing this opinion on a TV therapist?” Anna wondered if the woman even had a TV. She had no idea what Victoria did like to do, but somehow she felt very strongly that watching TV was not something on her hobbies list.
“Of course not.” Victoria huffed. She actually huffed. Anna had never been so entertained, and by such a complicated, difficult patient to boot.
Still, she did have a job to do, here. Shaking her head, Anna tried to refocus. This was not a game. A career was at stake. A life, possibly. A touch of shame burned a tiny hole in her heart. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to tease.”
“Oh, I…” Victoria looked surprised at the admission, and seemed to need a moment to reset herself. Anna felt bad for getting the two of them so off course. She decided to fix the issue.
“Dr. Ellis,” she began, and something even in just those two words must have alerted Victoria to her serious intent.
The surgeon stiffened on her perch at the edge of the couch cushion, a beautiful bird poised for flight.
“We’ve gotten off on a pair of particularly bad feet, I think. I know you don’t want to be here.”
“I don’t need to be here,” Victoria corrected.
Anna let that hang in the air for a moment, then decided not to directly argue the point. See, I can be taught! “The fact remains, we are both here. I know you feel I have overstepped, frequently—and I apologize. But I would like to talk to you only about one thing.”
Victoria didn’t relax one iota. “And that would be?”
“The Jennings surgery.” Anna held up a hand as Victoria, impossibly, tensed further. “I won’t ask you about your feelings, your past, what happened later, or anything but that specific surgery itself. All I want is for you to take me through those hours that you were in the OR with David Jennings.”
The icy blue gaze remained steady, but a slight hectic pink hue tinted Victoria’s cheeks, and one of the hands in her lap twitched. She pinned it down with her other hand. “I wrote a complete incident report on the entire procedure. Dr. Proctor did as well. We were very thorough. We had to be.”
“Of course. I’m sure you were.” Anna kept her voice light. She really wanted to get through their whole hour today. If they could manage it once, odds were good that it could happen again. “I just think it could be useful to hear it as if you were, I don’t know. Teaching me.”
Victoria shifted slightly, sitting the tiniest bit further back on the sofa cushion. She picked up her tea and held it, not sipping from it, just cradling the mug in her hands. “Shall I cover Dr. Proctor’s portion of the procedure as well?”
“Everything that happened once you were in the room,” Anna said. “Start to finish.”
Taking a deep breath, Victoria sat up very, very straight and began. “To preface, after discussion with Mr. Jennings regarding his heart health, we elected to do a CABG surgery…”
“Cabbage?” Anna asked, unsure she’d heard correctly.
“C-A-B-G,” Victoria spelled out. “A coronary artery bypass graft. We harvest healthy blood vessels from other parts of the body to replace the function of blocked coronary arteries. The surgery takes place in two stages; one, the healthy vessels are harvested. Two, these vessels are transplanted into the chest.”
“And you elected to divide these stages between yourself and Dr. Proctor.” Anna wanted to be clear.
“Yes. Typically one surgeon performs both stages. However, I…” Victoria hesitated, and something dark flashed behind her eyes, so briefly that Anna wasn’t sure she’d seen anything at all.
“I wanted to be very fresh and focused for the actual grafting, and Dr. Proctor is an excellent and very precise surgeon herself. She rather enjoys harvest surgeries and has a particular knack for them. For me, it made sense to provide Mr. Jennings with the very best possible care to ensure the best possible outcome.”
Anna could see the logic, though she was fairly certain the patient’s insurance company might have cost concerns.
And she was interested in the fact that Victoria volunteered the information that the two surgeon approach was atypical.
She would have to check with Dr. Martin to see if Victoria did this often, was it a new behavior, how far back did it go.
.. that little hesitation and flash of dark doubt she’d seen flicker across Victoria’s face told her it was not something to touch on right now, with her.
All she said now was, “I can understand that.”
Victoria nodded. “I did supervise Dr. Proctor’s work, though she hardly needed it. Once we had the new vessels, while they were closing up the entry points in the patient’s legs, I began my phase of the surgery.”
Anna noticed that Victoria had gone from “Mr. Jennings” to “the patient.” Detaching herself, creating a distance from the patient and the events. She didn’t dare make a note of it, but she would once Victoria had left the office.
Victoria kept explaining the surgery, every tiny little step she had taken.
Anna couldn’t follow along with most of it, but she could follow along with Victoria’s microscopically small shifts in expression and posture.
The deeper she got into the weeds of her descriptions, the more her hands tightened around the mug she held until she set it aside.
Then she reached up to tuck a strand of hair behind her ear, though all of her hair was precisely smoothed back into that low chignon from which no flaxen lock dared escape.
The jade pendant, the ribbed collar of her sweater, the golden links of her still too-loose watch, none of it escaped being fiddled with, and Anna was sure Victoria didn’t even realize she was doing it.
She was also surely not aware that her voice grew more and more detached and distant the further along she got, that her gaze wandered to a point above Anna’s head and remained there, unfocused. She’s dissociating, Anna noted with a pang in her heart.
If Victoria knew how much she was revealing right now, she’d run out screaming.
All Anna could do was hold her breath as the litany went on, growing increasingly drone-like.
What she wanted to do was get up and wrap her arms around the other woman, hold her tight and assure her she was in a safe space to collapse. But she didn’t dare.
“…I accepted the needles and the filaments from the scrub nurse, and we were prepared to close.” Victoria’s hand wrapped around the jade pendant at her throat.
“The alarms went off before I could begin. I knew what it had to be immediately. A pulmonary embolism. We pushed Heparin…” The slow drone of her voice was interrupted by the smallest hitch, then she faltered.
“I attempted defib. I placed the paddles on her chest—”
Her? Anna sat up straight.
“However, we were unable to resuscitate Ms. Jensen—”
Jensen? The patient had been Jennings…
Abruptly, Victoria stood up, grabbing her bag as she went. “Excuse me,” she gasped out, and before Anna could say a word, she was gone from the office at top speed. Anna’s first impulse was to run after her, but she managed to wrestle it under control.
She wondered if Victoria knew just how many clues to her breakdown she’d just revealed.
Anna now had a handful of breadcrumbs she could take to Elaine Martin and get some answers.
What she would do with those answers, she couldn’t begin to know.
But she supposed the first step, once she had them, would be to get Victoria back into her office. If she could.
Anna looked up at her office clock.
An entire hour had, somehow, passed. As shattered as Victoria had been when she ran out, she’d still finally gotten through the full session.
“We did it once, we can do it again,” Anna said aloud, and went off to find Elaine Martin.