4. Tessa
TESSA
The waiting room smelled like disinfectant and worry.
I pushed through the glass door and all seven of them looked up.
An older man with his arm wrapped in a dish towel stained rust-brown.
A young mother holding a toddler who kept rubbing his ear and whimpering.
A teenager slumped in the corner with his hood pulled low.
A pregnant woman with her hand pressed to her lower back.
An elderly woman with her purse on her lap.
A man in work boots. A girl picking at the skin around her thumbnail until it bled.
They all looked up when I walked in.
I nodded and kept moving toward the intake desk.
Ruth Delgado stood behind it with the phone tucked between her shoulder and her ear, writing on a clipboard.
She saw me, held up one finger, and finished the call.
When she hung up she looked at me like I was the answer to a question she had been asking all morning.
"Tessa. Thank God." She pushed the clipboard across the desk.
"We've got an abscess that needs draining in room two, possible strep throat in room three, and Mrs. Kahale just walked in with chest pain radiating down her left arm.
I called it in but the ambulance is twenty minutes out and I need someone to monitor her until they get here. "
I took the clipboard. Mrs. Kahale was the pregnant woman. "I'll take her first."
"Priya's setting her up in room one now."
I was already moving. Mrs. Kahale was sitting on the exam table with her legs dangling and her hand still pressed to her back when I came in. Priya Raman had the blood pressure cuff wrapped around her arm and was watching the numbers climb.
"One forty over ninety-five," Priya said without looking at me. She unwrapped the cuff and wrote it down. "Pulse is elevated. She says the pain started about an hour ago."
I washed my hands at the sink and pulled on gloves. "Mrs. Kahale, I'm Tessa. Can you tell me exactly where the pain is?"
She pointed to the center of her chest. "Here. It goes down my arm sometimes." Her voice shook. "Is my baby okay?"
"We're going to find out." I pulled the stethoscope from around my neck and listened to her heart. Fast but steady. No murmur that I could hear. I moved the stethoscope lower and listened to her lungs. Clear on both sides. "How far along are you?"
"Thirty-two weeks."
"Any swelling in your hands or feet?"
She nodded. "My feet. They've been bad the last few days."
Priya was already getting the fetal monitor out of the cabinet. I glanced at her and she nodded back. We had worked together long enough that half the time we did not need to say anything out loud. She knew what I was thinking and I knew she would handle it.
I checked Mrs. Kahale's reflexes and looked at her feet.
The swelling was significant. Her ankles were puffy and when I pressed my thumb into the skin it left a dent that stayed.
Pitting edema. My chest tightened but I kept my face calm.
Preeclampsia, maybe, or just normal pregnancy nonsense that felt like the end of the world.
I was not a doctor and I could not say for sure, but I knew enough to know she needed someone who could.
"The ambulance will be here soon," I told her. I pulled off my gloves and washed my hands again. "I'm going to stay with you until they arrive, all right? Priya's going to check the baby's heartbeat."
Mrs. Kahale nodded. She looked scared. I sat down on the rolling stool and pulled it close to the exam table so she could see my face. I wanted her to know I was not going anywhere.
Priya wrapped the monitor around Mrs. Kahale's belly and turned it on. The sound of the baby's heartbeat filled the room, fast and strong, and Mrs. Kahale started crying. I reached out and took her hand. Her fingers were cold.
"That's a good sound," I said.
She nodded and wiped her face with her other hand. "I'm sorry. I'm just—God, I was so scared."
"You don't have to apologize."
The heartbeat kept going, steady as anything.
Priya wrote down the rate and checked the monitor twice.
One hundred and forty-eight. Normal. I felt some of the tightness in my chest let go but not all of it.
The baby was fine right now but Mrs. Kahale's blood pressure was still too high and the swelling was still there and the pain was still real.
We stayed like that until the paramedics came. I gave them the rundown and they loaded Mrs. Kahale onto the stretcher and wheeled her out. Priya and I stood in the hallway and watched them go.
"Think she'll be okay?" Priya asked.
"I think she got here in time."
Priya looked at me for a second longer than she needed to, then nodded and turned back toward the waiting room. I followed her. There were still six people out there and the kid with the earache had started crying louder.
I took the abscess in room two. The older man with the dish towel turned out to have a gash on his forearm from a broken bottle.
It was deep but clean. I numbed it and irrigated it and stitched it closed while he told me about his grandson who was starting college in the fall.
Twelve stitches, neat and even, the kind of work I could do in my sleep.
He thanked me three times before he left.
The strep throat in room three was actually strep throat.
I swabbed the teenager's throat and ran the rapid test and it came back positive in five minutes.
I wrote him a prescription for amoxicillin and told him to finish the whole bottle even if he felt better.
He nodded and put his earbuds back in before I finished talking.
Priya handled the kid with the ear infection and the girl with the bleeding thumb, who turned out to have anxiety bad enough that she picked at her skin until it opened up.
The elderly woman with the purse had a blood pressure check scheduled and nothing else.
The man in the work boots had a cough that had been going on for three weeks.
I listened to his lungs and did not like what I heard, so I sent him for a chest X-ray at Bellhaven General and told him to follow up with his doctor.
He said he did not have a doctor. I gave him Ruth's card and told him to call the clinic and we would find him one.
By the time the waiting room cleared out it was nearly noon. My feet hurt and I had skipped breakfast. Again. I was washing my hands at the sink in the hallway when Ruth came around the corner carrying a stack of files that looked like it might tip over.
"Tessa," she said. "Do you have a minute?"
I dried my hands. "Sure."
She shifted the files to one arm and pulled a folder off the top.
"I know you're already doing more than your share here, but we just got word that Dr. Alvarez is leaving at the end of the month.
Budget cuts. That means we're down to one part-time physician for the whole clinic, and we've got a waiting list three weeks long for people who need wound care and minor surgical procedures.
I was wondering if you'd be willing to take on some of the overflow.
Nothing complicated. Just the things you've been doing anyway—abscess drainage, suturing, basic wound management. I can pay you for the extra hours."
I looked at the folder in her hand. It was thick. "How many extra hours are we talking about?"
"Four a week. Maybe five."
I was already working twenty hours a week at the clinic and another twenty at Bellhaven General.
Four more would put me at forty-four. Sophie had a school play coming up in two weeks and Owen had a field trip I had promised to chaperone.
Callum would not be there for either of those things.
He never was. If I took on five more hours a week I would not be there either.
But I looked at Ruth's face and I knew she would not have asked if there was anyone else.
The clinic was always short of money and short of people and the patients kept coming anyway because they had nowhere else to go.
If I said no, someone would sit in that waiting room for three weeks with an infected wound that could have been cleaned and closed in twenty minutes.
"Okay," I said.
Ruth's whole face changed. "Really?"
"Yeah. I'll make it work."
She handed me the folder. "Thank you, Tessa. I mean it. You're saving my life here."
I took the folder. It felt heavier than it should have. "I'll look this over and we can talk about scheduling later this week."
She nodded and shifted the rest of the files back to both arms. "You're a lifesaver. Seriously."
I watched her walk away and felt like an idiot for saying yes so fast. I did not have five extra hours. I barely had the hours I already had. But it was done now, so I tucked the folder under my arm and went to find somewhere quiet to sit down before the afternoon shift started rolling in.
Priya found me in the break room. I was sitting at the table with a cup of terrible coffee and the folder Ruth had given me, trying to figure out how I was going to fit five more hours into a week that already did not have enough space in it.
Priya shut the door behind her and sat down across from me without asking.
"Ruth got to you," she said.
I looked up. "How did you know?"
"Because I saw her coming and I hid in the supply closet." She folded her arms on the table. "Let me guess. She asked you to cover Alvarez's wound-care patients and you said yes."
"Four or five hours a week."
"Tessa."
"I know."
She shook her head. "You can't keep doing this. You're already stretched too thin."
I took a sip of the coffee. It tasted like burnt water. "Someone has to do it."
"That someone doesn't have to be you every single time." She leaned forward. "When's the last time Callum was home for dinner?"
My stomach dropped. I put the cup down. "What does that have to do with anything?"
"When?"
I thought about it. Tuesday, maybe. No, Tuesday he had a consult that ran late. Monday was Sophie's birthday dinner and he did not come home at all. The week before that was a blur of operating rooms and late nights and texts that said Don't wait up. I could not actually remember.
"I don't know," I said. "A while."
"And where is he now?"
"At the hospital." My throat felt tight. I hated the way she was looking at me. "He had early rounds this morning and then a full surgical schedule. That's just how it is."
"And Ingrid Halvorsen is with him."
"She's his surgical partner. Of course she's with him."
Priya did not say anything. She just looked at me, and I felt my face get hot because I knew what she was thinking and I did not want to hear it said out loud.
"I'm not imagining it, am I?" I said.
"No," Priya said. "You're not."
My chest hurt. I looked down at my hands.
The thin gold band on my left ring finger caught the light, and I could see all the tiny scratches on the inside from eleven years of wear.
I never took it off. Not when scrubbing in, not when washing my hands, not when doing the dishes with Sophie and Owen at home.
I twisted it around my finger and felt something crack open inside me that I had been holding closed for a very long time.
"He's never home," I said. My voice sounded strange.
"And when he is home, he's not really there.
He answers me without looking up. He manages everything with money and arrangements, like we're a problem he already solved.
And Ingrid is always with him. Always. Every consult, every surgery, every hospital event.
I tried to tell myself it was just work, that it didn't mean anything, but—" I stopped. I could not finish the sentence.
"But you don't believe that anymore," Priya said.
I shook my head.
Priya was quiet for a long moment. Then she said, "You need to go to his world, Tessa."
I looked up. "What?"
"You need to insert yourself into it. Show up at the hospital. Go to the next donor gala or hospital board dinner or whatever the hell it is that Callum Reid does when he's not in the operating room. Make him see you."
My stomach twisted. "I don't want to do that."
"Why not?"
"Because—" I stopped. Because I was afraid.
Because if I went to his world and saw him with Ingrid, really saw them together, I would have to admit that something was happening that I could not explain away anymore.
Because I did not know what I would find when I got there and I was not sure I wanted to know.
"Because it feels pathetic," I said instead. "Like I'm chasing after my own husband."
"You're not chasing him." Priya's voice was firm. "You're reminding him that you exist. There's a difference."
I twisted the ring around my finger again. "What if it doesn't change anything?"
"What if it does?"
I did not have an answer for that. I sat there with my terrible coffee and the folder full of extra work I had already agreed to take on, and I thought about Callum standing in the operating room with Ingrid Halvorsen across from him, the two of them working together like they had their own language that nobody else could speak.
I thought about coming home to Sophie and Owen and trying to explain why their father missed another school play, another field trip, another dinner.
I thought about standing in the hallway two days ago with the phone in my hand, listening to Callum tell me that the work needed him more than his daughter did.
I was so tired of being fine with it.
"Okay," I said.
Priya blinked. "Okay?"
"I'll go." I looked up at her. "I'll go to his world and I'll make him see me."
Priya smiled. It was small but it was real. "Good."
I did not feel good. I felt terrified. But I nodded anyway, and I knew I would do it.