Chapter 11 #2
“I’m afraid he’s making contract termination noises,” Elaine said, dragging each word out with a nearly tangible reluctance.
“He’d love to find an excuse to cut you loose.
” She looked down at her hands, and picked up a letter opener, set it aside.
“Steve Sundstrom and I have been able to fend him off for a bit, but…” She bit her lip, picked up her mobile phone, and set it aside next.
“With Dr. Monroe transferring your case to Dr. O’Shea, I’m afraid he smells blood in the water, Victoria. ”
Victoria sat very still, turning all of this over in her mind. “I’ve been a good surgeon,” she said, stunned. “Until this happened… this could have happened to anyone. It’s not… my skills are as sharp as they ever have been.”
“Victoria, I know. Believe me, Steve and I have been reminding Marcus of this.” Elaine swallowed, and she did look very upset about it all.
“He must be under a great deal of budget cutting pressure from up top, is all we can think. Freeing up the amount of your annual salary plus bonuses would be a real coup for him.”
“I should have known about this.” Victoria shook her head, panic beginning to bubble up from her stomach. “Why didn’t I know about this?”
“We all felt you had enough to deal with. It would have been one more thing on your plate.” Elaine spread her hands out, her face helpless. “I didn’t want there to be anything hampering your recovery.”
“But I don’t… this…” And then it hit her. We all felt… all? Who was all? “Did Anna know about this?”
The hunted look returned. “I…”
“Did she?”
Elaine closed her eyes and took in a deep breath through her nose. “Yes. She found out during the last evaluatory panel meeting we had with her.”
Victoria froze. “And when was this?” she whispered.
“A few weeks ago,” Elaine admitted.
Weeks. Weeks. Panic gave way to the gnawing acid of betrayal. “She knew,” Victoria breathed, her hands curling into fists. “She knew.”
“Steve and I agreed that you shouldn’t know, Victoria.” Standing up, Elaine came from around her desk and crouched down in front of Victoria, taking her hands. “It was our idea. We told Anna not to tell you, explicitly told her. She was not on board.”
“But she knew.” Victoria heard her voice, flat and cold.
“She was under orders,” Elaine said firmly. “She could not tell you. She would have, she wanted us to. Told us we needed to sooner rather than later. I don’t think she felt comfortable with keeping anything from you.”
Logically, she understood it. Emotionally, she still felt the sting of betrayal deep in the pit of her stomach. She was careful as she pulled her hands away from Elaine’s and got to her feet. “Thank you for letting me know.”
Elaine stood as well. “Please don’t do anything rash, Victoria.”
“You don’t need to worry about me.” Already, Cameron’s work on getting her to sit with her emotions and examine them before reacting was paying off.
Victoria was furious, but she was going to go to her office right now and think about things calmly and rationally.
She had surgeries to perform today herself, and she did not need betrayal, anger, and fear over losing her job to distract her.
No, she would not do anything rash. “I’ll be in my office if anyone needs me before I do my rounds.” She offered Elaine one short, sharp nod. “Thank you for your time.”
As she walked stiffly towards her office, Victoria felt her mobile buzz in her pocket. She pulled it out to see a new message from Anna. Hope your day is going well! Dinner later?
For a long moment, Victoria stared at the message. Then she put her mobile back into her pocket, leaving it unanswered. “My day is not going well,” she muttered as she unlocked her office door. “It’s not going well at all.”
And she slammed the door behind her so hard, the bang made all the metal blinds in her windows rattle.
Things did not improve at all over the next twenty-four hours.
In fact, they got far, far worse.
Victoria had managed to send a fairly innocuous message back to Anna to decline the dinner invitation, citing exhaustion and a heavy surgical schedule.
Anna’s reply of Oh! Another time then. had been simple and innocent enough, but in Victoria’s current state of mind, she read passive-aggression into it and it only made her more angry with Anna.
She thought her heightened temper might be making her overly paranoid as well.
It felt like people were giving her sidelong glances everywhere she went.
But she’d had things under control for weeks now.
No freezes in the OR. All procedures completed well with excellent patient outcomes. So surely she was imagining it.
Except, she realized, she wasn’t. And it really was everywhere she went in the hospital.
All over the Cardio wing, she caught nurses whispering together and looking at her as she went about her rounds.
In the cafeteria, fellow surgeons she barely knew seemed to be gossiping and staring at her, looking hastily away if she spotted them.
Even Ashley noticed. “But why would Priya Majumdar from Oncology be gossiping about you with…” She squinted to try and see who was hustling out of the cafeteria with the oncological surgeon.
“I think that’s Nate Foster from Trauma. ”
Victoria vaguely remembered Nate from that awful afternoon with the mass casualty event. He’d been on the team with her to try and save the unfortunate burn victim. “I don’t really know how anyone knows each other half the time.”
Ashley was chewing on a piece of chicken from her salad and frowning.
“It’s a strange pairing, trust me. Oh, hi, sweetheart.
” She was beaming as Dr. Jen Colton, the hospital’s transplant coordinator, walked up with her own salad and joined them at the table.
The two women had been together for some time. “Lovely to see you.”
“As if you didn’t see me just this morning.” Jen chuckled, blue eyes twinkling as she pulled a hair elastic out of her hair and tidied up her soft white ponytail. “Hello, Victoria. Ashley, my love, why was Majumdar hightailing it out of here like you put the fear of God in her?”
“It wasn’t me,” Ashley protested. “I’ve been incredibly nice to her lately.”
“Maybe that’s the problem,” Victoria mused. “It’s you, not me. She doesn’t know what to do when you’re not insulting her.”
“They were definitely looking at you,” Ashley said, firm in her conviction. “And talking about you. They didn’t run away when I looked at them, but they couldn’t get out of here fast enough when they saw you’d caught them.”
Jen looked between them both. “Why would a surgeon from Oncology be talking about you?” she asked Victoria.
Victoria could only shrug as she stabbed half-heartedly at her Cobb salad.
“I genuinely have no idea. But they’re not the only ones.
” She stuffed a bite of ham and lettuce into her mouth.
“I saw some nurses in Cardio earlier. And an orderly in the ER was staring at me like he’d seen a ghost. Oh, and a couple of residents in the OR with me today, they were chatting and watching me through the scrub room window, but certainly did shut their mouths quickly when I entered the room. ”
Ashley frowned. “You didn’t tell me about all those.”
“I would have gotten around to it eventually. I think.” Victoria frowned. “To be perfectly honest with you both, up until now I had thought I was imagining things.”
“It would seem not.” Jen propped her chin in her hand and looked thoughtful.
“I haven’t heard anything,” Ashley said, mystified.
“Well, you wouldn’t, would you?” Victoria poked at her salad again. “Everyone knows we’re close friends as well as colleagues. And they know you’re with Jen here, so they’ll take care to keep out of her earshot as well.”
“That’s true,” Jen agreed with a nod.
They ate without speaking for a bit, all of them deep in thought.
Ashley broke the silence. “I could corner Majumdar, maybe,” she offered, her smile almost gleeful at the prospect of tormenting her professional nemesis.
“Like you said, Jen, I’m no stranger to putting the fear of God into her. I can get answers.”
“Please don’t,” Jen replied mildly. “I do have a liver transplant on the books with her for tomorrow. I need her to be unintimidated, if at all possible, she is always so very nervous working with me.”
Ashley actually looked disappointed. “Oh, all right.”
“Ashley, please don’t concern yourself with it.
I’m sure it’s just some new rumor about me ‘cracking up’ going around again.
” Not that the prospect didn’t annoy Victoria greatly, because it very much did.
But of all the things she had to worry about, hospital gossip seemed like bottom of the pile stuff.
Something she could deal with later, mostly passively, simply by continuing to display her cool competence.
Her phone beeped with a reminder. “Ah. I’ve got to get moving. Afternoon rounds for me.”
The women smiled up at her as she got to her feet. “You’re probably right, it’s probably nothing,” Jen told her, reaching over to give her hand a pat.
“I’ll keep my ear to the ground, though,” Ashley assured her.
“Lovely. Thank you.” Somehow, Victoria mustered up a smile, gathered her garbage, and headed for the cafeteria door.
As she was shoving her lunch detritus into a dangerously full can and wincing when she touched a half-eaten Sloppy Joe, a surprised voice hailed her. “Dr. Ellis!”
Victoria turned to see the Emergency Department chief, Deb Morales, standing in the doorway. “Dr. Morales, hello.”