Chapter Eight #2
An unpleasant jangle of fear vibrates down my spine.
It’s safer to be a lot of things. Safer to be at home working a job I don’t care about instead of in this tent trying to launch something I’m afraid I could love.
Do I have to offer up everything for this company?
My history, my heart, the safety of being angry instead of the vulnerability of terror or grief?
He releases a long breath. “And I push back against you because I’ve seen you fight fair even when you’re angry.
If I offered you a silver platter with an engraved invitation to take advantage of me, you’d put something of yours on the platter and shove it back in my face.
So if you want to lie there under your thundercloud—”
“I do not have a thundercloud !”
“—that’s fine. As long as you’re kind to the guests, you don’t have to perform niceness to me.
But you and I need a connection. Our business depends on it.
Safety and lives depend on it. Give me something I can work with.
Tell me about Stellar J Byrd. If possible…
” He hesitates. “Trust me with something you regret. One true thing you and I can build on. And I’ll give you the same. ”
There’s nothing I hate more than people who give me something I didn’t ask for, then turn around and claim I owe them something in return, like my dad reeling in a mark.
But McHuge isn’t doing that. This is a deal, negotiated up front. We both know the terms.
I swallow hard, finding myself wanting to be honest with him the way he’s honest with me—with everyone, really; I’m not special to him. He’s such a good person, while there’s nothing about me that’s simultaneously honest and good.
I’m the kind of person you turn into when your dad’s a third-rate con artist who spent most of your teen years in prison, then screwed up your life even worse when he got out. Suspicious. Guarded. Not very nice. I don’t trust most people enough to be their friend, let alone their girlfriend.
Although McHuge doesn’t want honest and good, does he? He wants honest and bad . That, I might be able to do.
“Something, Stellar,” McHuge says into the lengthening silence. “ Anything .”
“I’m thinking.” It comes out testier than I mean it to. Fury is so ingrained in me, sometimes it’s hard to turn it off.
“Why don’t I go first then,” he whispers.
My skin pulls tight under my shirt. Outside, it’s still twilight, but in here the darkness is the perfect density to hold a whisper, making words last long after the sound dies.
Even with the visual impact of him covered by night, McHuge still has the power to wallop me with that gentle why don’t I go first . With him, the most unexpected things reach inside my heart and hammer something that echoes and echoes.
“The worst thing I ever did,” he says conversationally, “was fracture a kid’s skull for taking something from my locker. He was hospitalized for a month. I almost went to juvie.”
“Holy shit. You?! No.” Shocked, I roll onto my side, facing his half of the tent. “Really?”
“Really,” he says, calm like we’re discussing the time he smoked a cigarette and learned his lesson like Deanna in Season 4 of Cow Pie High .
“What did he take?”
“A family photo. He didn’t want the pic—he wanted to fight me.”
“Were you the school badass?” I try and fail to imagine McHuge with an attitude. McHuge hurting someone.
“No. But when you’re my size, it’s kind of all people see.
I was like Everest—they wanted to fight me because I was there .
There was this kid a grade ahead of me who goaded me for months.
Stepped on my feet, knocked my lunch onto the floor, dumped milk into my backpack.
He was looking for the red button, and he found it. He even threw the first punch.”
“ He started it, and he was older, and you almost went to juvie?” I’m angry for little Lyle McHugh, who even then was big Lyle McHugh.
“He gave me three stitches in my eyebrow. I gave him major surgery and an ICU stay. And it was worse because I chased him. He was running away, and I—” He clears his throat.
“It was super hard on my family. My younger brother Tavish was sick at the time. Leukemia. My mom was so pissed at me for taking her away from his chemo to go to my legal appointments. I never wanted to feel that way ever again. And mostly I haven’t.
I try to be the bigger person whenever I can. ”
He tries hard to be kind, instead of right. God, I’m an asshole.
The only thing I can think to say is, “I’m sorry that happened to you.”
He takes a long breath, in for maybe fifteen seconds, out for the same length of time. “Thank you,” he says simply.
And now I’m on the hook. He shared his, now I have to share mine. I want to; I’m afraid to.
“Promise you won’t tell.” My voice sounds small and uncertain, two things I hate being.
“Promise.” He’s not making fun of me even a little.
“The stupidest thing I ever did was steal a liter of milk.” I wince, glad he can’t see me. “No, forget it. I’ll think of a better one.”
“Sounds like a good story to me.”
He’s so convincing. After a year of trusting hardly anyone—not even myself—I’m perilously close to believing anything he says. Just the thought is dizzying and dangerous.
“It’s ridiculous. It’s milk .”
“Somehow, I don’t think it’s about the milk.”
It is and it isn’t. “Five years ago, the media got a tip about Grey Tusk General. Their chief of emergency medicine hadn’t hired a female doc or approved a rotation for a female resident in sixteen years.”
“I remember that. It was national news.”
“It was,” I say, bitter regret rising in my throat.
“They did good crisis PR: Fired the old chief, hired me and another new female grad named Kat, and hunkered down until the news cycle moved on. They made all the right noises about culture change, equality—all the DEI buzzwords. They told us we were lucky to be there.”
I had felt lucky. I’d wanted to live near Liz, but with three years of residency training instead of the more desirable five, I never thought I’d get a position with the exciting scope of practice Grey Tusk had.
“It took me four years to figure out Kat and I were getting the shaft.” My hands clench around my sleeping bag.
“Twice as many night shifts, weekends, and holidays; all the unpaid committee work that didn’t count for promotion; none of the shifts with senior residents who could lighten the workload.
I spent months putting together the data, then presented my findings to the department.
“My colleagues couldn’t deny my numbers. But they could, and did, vote down my motion to investigate how it happened. And refuse to make up the financial and career damage to me and Kat. We need to put the past behind us , they said.
“But I couldn’t. I’d given everything to that place.
The only thing that got me through the pandemic shit show was feeling like even if I’d lost faith in the system, I could believe in my colleagues.
I trusted them when they said they were ‘immunocompromised,’ so would I please intubate their COVID patients.
I put my life on the line for them, and in return they acted like their bad behavior wasn’t a problem, but my being angry about it was. ”
I thought helping them meant one day they’d help me in return. I thought they cared .
But I was a mark.
“Then one night I went to the doctors’ lounge for a snack.
In the fridge, there was milk for coffee.
All the staff doctors contributed to the coffee fund.
That was the rule. Forty bucks a month—not cheap.
But I couldn’t drink coffee. I’d been doing all the work my colleagues didn’t want, and on top of that, I’d paid for their coffee with my money, my time, my body, my soul .
And I just… reached for a carton of milk.
Put it in my backpack, zipped it up, done.
“When I turned around, my department chief was standing in the doorway. The way he was smiling.” I shiver, remembering.
“I could’ve fought back when he asked me to resign, but for what?
A job with people who hated me for holding them accountable?
Doctors are supposed to be better than that.
They’re supposed to do no harm. I loved being a doctor, and after they took it all away…
yeah. I was so ashamed of getting taken for a ride, I didn’t even tell Liz.
I left town and told my best friend I wanted to explore rural medicine. Pretty fucking sad.”
I lie there, eyes dry and hot. McHuge doesn’t rush to fill the silence. I love that about him—that he’s willing to let things take as long as they take.
“They didn’t steal everything,” he says, after a while. “They took a lot, but you kept yourself. When you walked out the door, your talent and drive and creativity went with you. They lost a lot when they lost you.”
The simplicity of it takes my breath away. I’ve heard “it’s their loss” before—when I’ve gotten dumped, been passed over for an award, suffered injustices large and small.
But “their loss” isn’t the same as “you kept yourself—good job you.”
I swallow. “No one’s ever said that to me before.”
For the first time, I believe the hospital lost something when they lost me, and they know it . For the first time, I realize that when Liz said you need something , she understood I was afraid I couldn’t hold on to anything—including who I was.
McHuge makes a considering sound, slow and deliberate. “Someone should have, because it’s true. If you could go back, would you do it differently?”
“No.” The word is out before I even know I’m going to say it.
“I mean… mostly no. I’d leave, but I’d try to preserve my job options.
Every hospital within a couple hundred kilometers of Grey Tusk knew my name after that.
I was the angry woman who made damaging allegations against a department that needed to stay trouble free.
I bean-counted everything and bitched to the scheduling coordinator and wanted to get as much milk as I paid for.
‘Stellar Byrd, milk vigilante: do not hire.’”
To my amazement, he laughs. Until this moment, I would’ve sworn he laughed all the time. Now that I hear this laugh, I know I’ve never experienced the real thing before—warm and low like an outboard engine thrown into gear.
“Stellar Byrd, milk vigilante,” he repeats, and I can hear his smile through the soft patter of drizzle. “Well. I’m glad I got the chance to hire you, Stellar Byrd. Going to steal any milk?”
“Are you kidding? Jas would murder me. I may not be afraid of you, but I am afraid of him.”
I’m not sure that’s exactly true, though.
After tonight, I don’t know if I have it in me to be angry with McHuge anymore.
His laughter shrank my fear and shame into a shape that was tiny and bittersweet and more than a little sad.
That version of me I told him about—she tried so hard and cared so much.
I feel her stir deep down, the Stellar who believed in things.
Even if McHuge himself doesn’t scare me, the possibility that I’m about to start believing in things and putting my heart on the line again— that should scare me plenty.