Chapter 10
JESS
Iset up my laptop at the kitchen table much earlier than I needed to, which told me everything about where my head was.
The video call with Barnett was scheduled for ten o'clock.
By the time I had my notes organized, my coffee made, my hair done, and had changed my shirt twice, I still had more time than I knew what to do with.
Rosa had taken Justin to camp early, bless her, so the house was quiet in the way it got when it was just me and whatever I was trying to think through clearly.
I knew I needed to call Carter before the interview.
Not because I had anything to say exactly, but because I needed to hear his voice for thirty seconds before I walked into the most important interview of my career — and because I could feel the nerves building in a way that only one person had ever been able to quiet.
I called Carter first.
He answered on the second ring — still at the facility, from the sound of it, slightly out of breath, the faint echo of a weight room in the background. He'd been there since seven, the way he always was.
"Hey, you." He picked up immediately, voice warm, like he'd been sitting with his phone waiting and didn't care if I knew it. "How are you feeling?"
"Terrified. Prepared. Terrified again."
"In that order?"
"On a rotating basis." I exhaled. "Tell me something good."
"You're the most capable person I know. You've been doing this work for over a decade and you're extraordinary at it.
They looked at every candidate available to them and came to you specifically.
And you are about to walk into that call and remind them exactly why.
" A pause, quieter. "Also I miss you and I wish I was there. "
Something in my chest did the thing it always did when he said things like that — the warm, slightly terrifying thing I still hadn't quite gotten used to. "I'm going to be fine."
"I know you are. Go be incredible." Then, softer: "And I want to hear everything the second you're done."
"The second," I promised.
The call went well. Better than well — it ran significantly over the scheduled time, which Dr. Howe apologized for and which I took as the best possible sign.
Dr. Patricia Howe ran the interview with the kind of warm efficiency I immediately respected — she wasn't wasting my time or hers, but she also wasn't rushing past the things that mattered.
She introduced the team: the Chief Medical Officer, the head of the OB residency program, and the current interim Director of L&D who was transitioning out after fifteen years.
They were building something, Dr. Howe had said on the first call, and I understood better now what she meant.
The unit was strong but ready to evolve — new protocols, expanded high-risk capacity, a deeper integration with the residency program that would put Barnett's L&D nurses in a teaching role they hadn't fully occupied before.
That was the part that made me lean forward without meaning to.
"What does the teaching component look like in practice?" I asked. "Day-to-day, not just on paper."
Dr. Howe smiled like I'd asked exactly the right question. "It means your nurses aren't just delivering care — they're modeling it. Our OB residents rotate through L&D for six weeks at a time.
Your nurses would be their primary clinical instructors for everything that happens in that unit — working side by side with residents, teaching hands-on, shaping how the next generation of both nurses and physicians approach labor and delivery.
You'd be shaping not just your floor but the standard of care those residents carry into their entire careers. "
I thought about every nurse who'd ever mentored me, the ones whose voices I still heard in my head during complicated deliveries, the ones who'd shown me by example what it meant to stay calm when everything was moving fast and too much was at stake.
The ones whose influence I'd been quietly passing forward for years without ever quite naming it as teaching.
"That's what I want to be doing," I said. "That's exactly what I want to be doing."
The salary was 60% above my current role.
The relocation package covered moving expenses in full, plus a bonus.
They had a dedicated relocation team — a coordinator named Sarah who apparently specialized in helping new hires navigate everything from school enrollment to neighborhood selection to finding the right pediatrician.
Dr. Howe mentioned this almost in passing, like it was standard, and I wrote it down three times.
When the call ended I leaped out of my chair and let out a sound that was somewhere between a scream and a laugh — loud enough that I was briefly grateful Rosa had taken Justin to camp.
I stood there in my kitchen for a full ten seconds, both hands pressed to my face, just feeling the size of what had just happened.
Wow. I thought it about four times in a row. What an opportunity.
Then I made myself sit back down, took a breath, looked at my notes, and opened a new document and started a list.
PROS
Director title. Not head of a unit — Director. The kind of role I'd been quietly working toward for a decade without letting myself say it out loud because it felt presumptuous.
Teaching hospital. Washington University affiliation. The ability to shape not just my floor but the next generation of nurses and residents who'd carry what they learned here into delivery rooms and operating rooms across the country for the next thirty years.
60% salary increase. I wrote the number out in full, just to look at it. It was a lot of money. And that was before factoring in that St. Louis cost of living ran roughly 30% lower than Chicago — housing, groceries, childcare, all of it.
The actual difference in what I'd be able to do with that money wasn't 60% better.
It was closer to double. It was the kind of number that changed what was possible for Justin, for his education, for the margin I'd always kept deliberately thin because I was doing this alone and thin margins were honest ones.
Full relocation package. Moving expenses, relocation bonus, a coordinator named Sarah whose entire job was to make this transition easier. I'd never had that before — every move I'd ever made, I'd managed on my own, the way I managed everything.
St. Louis. Same city as Carter. Three and a half hours from my parents in Kansas City instead of seven. Anne already there, already part of the fabric of the city, already someone Justin knew and trusted.
Finn. Justin's best friend, who would no longer require a scheduled visit and a four-hour drive to see.
CONS
Chicago. I'd lived here for eleven years.
I knew every good restaurant within walking distance of the brownstone and the fastest route to the hospital at two in the morning and the name of the woman at the dry cleaner who always remembered to put extra starch in the collar.
I knew this city the way you only knew a place you'd chosen on purpose and stayed in long enough to actually belong to.
The brownstone. I'd bought it four years ago, the first property I'd ever owned, and I'd painted every room myself over a long weekend while Rosa watched Justin and I listened to podcasts and felt, for the first time in my adult life, like something was actually, permanently mine.
Selling it felt like more than a real estate transaction.
Renting it felt strange in a different way — like keeping a door open I'd already decided to walk through.
Rosa. I stopped on this one longer than the others.
Rosa wasn't a con exactly — she wasn't a thing I was giving up, she was a person I loved, and the honest entry belonged in a different category entirely.
I drew a line through it and wrote her name separately, at the bottom of the page, with a small asterisk.
Separate conversation. Not a pro or con. A person.
Justin's school. He'd just finished kindergarten at a school he loved, with a teacher he adored and a best friend named Tyler who shared his opinions about icing and offsides with equal conviction.
Starting over in first grade at a new school in a new city wasn't nothing, even for a resilient kid.
I added research St. Louis schools with three stars next to it and made a mental note to call Anne.
I called Carter before anyone else. He answered so fast he must have had the phone in his hand. "Tell me everything."
So I did — all of it, the teaching component that had made me lean forward, the salary, the relocation package, Sarah, the way the conversation had kept going long past when it was supposed to end.
He listened without interrupting, which was something I'd noticed about him from the beginning, the way he actually listened instead of just waiting for his turn.
When I finished, he was quiet for a second.
"Jess."
"I know."
"That's everything you've ever wanted."
"I'm well aware."
"In St. Louis."
"Howdy, neighbor." I laughed, a little giddy with it. "Think St. Louis is ready for me?"
"St. Louis has no idea what's about to hit it," he said.
"I'm not going to tell you what to do," he went on. "But I will tell you that I have never in my life wanted anything as much as I want you in this city. And I need you to make this decision knowing that — not because of it, but knowing it."
"I know that too," I said. "I want it just as much as you do. Job, city, you — all of it. That's exactly why this feels like some kind of miracle I'm not sure I'm allowed to have."
A comfortable silence settled between us for a moment, the kind we'd gotten good at lately — not awkward, just two people sitting with something together across four hundred miles.
"I want to see you," he said finally. "Can I come up this weekend? I need to actually be in the same room as you for this."
"Yes." I didn't even have to think about it. "Come up Friday. Stay through Sunday."