Chapter 10 #2
Leaning on the railing, I look at the city below.
My thoughts flicker back to the dress.
Why? Why did he get that dress? It had nothing to do with him. He could’ve just let it go. My chest pulls tight.
I press a fist to my sternum, right over the spot where it lives.
Don’t. Don’t do this.
I don’t want to feel this way for anyone. I don’t want to sit and examine what this annoying man makes me feel. It’s easier to ignore it, but when he does things like these, I can’t stop the flutter in my heart.
When was the last time someone looked out for me, tried to protect me? Why is it that when I’m with Grayson and his son, I don’t want to go home? They make me forget my own loneliness and the dark, dismal life that is mine.
I’m convenient. I’m useful. That’s all this is supposed to be.
I don’t know what to do with any of this.
I’m so busy telling myself what not to think about that I don’t hear the door until it’s already open. I straighten, push off the railing, and start crossing toward the other side of the roof.
“Well.” The voice stops me cold. “Now I understand.”
I know that voice. I keep walking.
The dry snap of a lighter. The first exhale of a cigarette.
“I was trying to work it out,” Axel says from behind me.
Conversational, like we’re colleagues catching up between rounds.
“Why you stood me up the first time. Why you acted like such a stuck-up bitch at dinner last night.” He pauses.
“And then I remembered why that man who threw the money on the table looked so familiar.”
I stop. I don’t turn around.
“You’ve been spreading your legs for a hockey player.”
The words land on the back of my neck like ice.
I turn around.
Axel is near the door with a cigarette between two fingers, his white coat open. He’s looking at me with something I recognize now and didn’t name correctly before. Not interest. Possession, or the assumption of it. Colder. More dangerous.
“You want to repeat that?” My voice comes out very steady.
“I didn’t take you for somebody like that.” He tilts his head, and the sneer settles into his face like it’s been waiting there. “A groupie.”
I walk toward him. The wind pulls at my hair. “Grayson is my—” I stop. “My friend.”
“Your friend.” He drags on the cigarette, unhurried. “Grayson Wolfe. Never seen with the same woman twice.” He blows the smoke out slowly. “Funny thing, though. I don’t recall Grayson Wolfe having a son.”
The roof goes quiet.
He means Ethan. I can see it in his eyes, the outline of the knowledge, the pleasure of having it. I don’t know how. I don’t know what he saw or heard or pieced together. But he has something, and he knows I know it.
Petty asshole.
I take three steps toward him. “What do you want?”
“Nothing now.” He drops the cigarette and grinds it under his shoe. His eyes stay on my face, cold and amused. “I don’t like being rejected, Miranda. Not by anyone.” He tilts his head. “Especially not by someone like you.”
“Someone like me?” I narrow my eyes.
“I wonder what the media would say,” he says mockingly. “About a playboy hockey player. With his whore.” The pause is deliberate. “And his bastard son.”
The word goes through me like a current.
My fist moves before my brain finishes processing the sentence. No wind-up, no warning, just my knuckles connecting with the left side of his jaw with a crack that I feel all the way to my shoulder.
Axel hits the door. His shoulder catches the frame, and he rebounds and drops to one knee.
Pain detonates up my wrist. I fold over it for one breath, and then I grab the front of his coat with my other hand and haul him up to where I need his face.
“Listen to me.” My voice is even. I find that surprising. “If you breathe one word about Grayson or his son, I will go to every senior consultant in this hospital with what you said to me last night. Every single one. See how that lands on your record.”
His eyes, watering from the hit, narrow. His jaw is already swelling.
He pushes to his feet. His free hand moves toward my arm.
The door bangs open behind him.
Two orderlies stop dead on the threshold. They take in the scene: Axel on one knee, my fist in his lapel, his face going red, my wrist held at an angle that is definitely not nothing.
The silence stretches for a very long beat.
I let go of his coat.
I straighten. Axel straightens. The orderlies don’t move.
I look at Axel. He looks at me, and then at the orderlies, and the sly smile on his lips makes my heart sink.
I know exactly what this is going to look like.
I’m in trouble.
A week.
That’s how long it takes to lose a job I’ve been at for eight years.
I knew they weren’t going to keep me after the orderlies witnessed me assaulting Axel.
HR was sympathetic to what I told them in the review, and I believe they meant it, but I still assaulted an attending on hospital grounds.
The termination letter sits on the table in front of me.
My wrist is wrapped and propped on a cushion. Hairline fracture, a combination of that patient twisting my wrist and then me proceeding to punch Axel with the same hand.
Brooke comes out of the kitchen and puts a mug in my uninjured hand. I take it without looking up from the letter.
She sits across from me. Looks at it too.
“I’ll help you find something,” she says. “We can start looking today if you want. There are other hospitals.”
“Yeah.”
“Miranda.” Her voice is heavy. “Miranda, don’t do this.”
“He’s got influence, Brooke.” I wrap both hands around the mug and then remember my wrist and unwrap the bad one. “He’s been in this city for twelve years. He plays golf with department heads. He’s on two hiring committees.” I look at her. “I’m not going to get anything local. Not for a while.”
She opens her mouth.
“I know.” I cut her off, not unkindly. “You want to tell me that’s not how it works.
That there are procedures. That I could file a complaint.
” I look back at the letter. “I did file a complaint. In the HR meeting. I told them exactly what he said to me at dinner, exactly what kind of environment he created on the ward. I told them about the patient reassignments. And they listened very carefully and gave me a termination letter for striking a colleague.”
Brooke’s jaw tightens.
“At least I scared him,” I say, and I mean it, and that’s the only part of this that doesn’t feel like a total loss.
In the second review meeting, I told them exactly what Axel said on that roof.
Word for word. The threat about the media, about Grayson, about his son.
I had no choice but to reveal Ethan’s existence to the HR director, but it was the only way I knew how to protect him.
I watched the man’s expression go very still, and I knew, right then, that I’d handed them a problem they did not want.
A senior attending threatening to leak a private individual’s family information to the press.
Whatever Grayson Wolfe’s lawyers would do with that, the hospital didn’t want to find out.
By the end of the day, Axel had been spoken to by legal, and whatever he’d planned to say about Ethan, he won’t be saying it. The color that drained out of his face in that corridor afterward is something I’m going to think about for a long time.
He can’t go after Grayson. The hospital made sure of that.
But he could still go after me. And they let him.
I look at the letter again.
Why did I do that? Why did I hit him? My body just moved, that’s the honest answer, but honest doesn’t pay rent, and I’ve got enough left in my account to cover this month and then I’m looking at bad options. I was already looking at bad options. Now they’re just worse and closer.