Chapter 33 TESSA
Tessa
The word is “dismissed.”
O’Brien reads it into the record, and the room starts moving around me. Chairs, the court reporter gathering her things. I catch almost none of it. I’m still standing in that one word. Dismissed. All of it. I get to keep my license. I get to keep being who I am.
Denise turns and pulls me into a hug, and I feel her let out a breath she’s probably been holding as long as I have.
“You did it,” she says into my hair.
“You did it.”
“No.” She pulls back, hands on my shoulders, awe all over her face.
“I did my part. But I’ve been doing this nineteen years, and I have never once walked into a board hearing and found Diane Whitaker at my table telling me what was in my own subpoena return.
That woman doesn’t get out of bed for less than a Boston hospital system. ”
She shakes her head, still looking at me like she’s trying to work me out.
“How did you land her?”
I hold her eyes for a second.
“I didn’t.”
Denise waits for the rest of it, and when it doesn’t come she lets it go with a little laugh. “Well. Whoever did, send them a fruit basket.”
I’m barely listening. I’m already scanning the emptying rows at the back.
The chair he was in is empty.
“Denise.” I take both her hands. “Thank you. I mean that.” My eyes are still on the door. “I’m so sorry, I have to run. There’s something I need to do.”
“Go.” She squeezes my hands and reaches for her bag. “Go on.”
I’m moving before she finishes.
Whitaker is at the end of the table with her file already closed. I stop. “Thank you. Truly.”
She gives me a nod that costs her nothing and goes back to her file.
Bag up, phone in my hand, his name on the screen, and I’m lifting it to my ear when Mercer steps into my path.
“Tessa.” The kind voice, without the smile behind it. “There’s no reason this has to follow either of us.”
“It’s Nurse Quinn.” I don’t stop walking. “And it’s only following one of us.”
I push through the doors into the gray afternoon, phone to my ear. It rings twice and stops. I look at the screen. He sent me to voicemail.
I scan the street both ways.
His car is gone.
Of course it is. He’s furious, and I did that. I kept it from him, and he drove up to save me anyway and then couldn’t stand to be in the same building when it worked.
I get in my car and I don’t start it.
I just sit there, and everything I’ve been holding since June comes up at once, and I put my face in my hands and cry. For the license. For everything that led to it. For the man who sat in that room and saved me and left without a word. For all of it, quiet, alone in a parked car.
Then I make myself stop. I wipe my face, and I reach into my bag, past the license I get to keep, and take out the stethoscope. I packed it in June to find out how heavy it was. I turn it over in my hands, and I smile, because now I know. It’s mine.
I have my license back, and it doesn’t feel like winning. It won’t, if the price was him.
I put it back and pull out onto the coast road.
Forty minutes of it, and I spend every one of them on the same two things.
I hid the hearing from the person I love most because he’d just fought his way back from nearly dying, and I wasn’t going to make him carry this too. He came anyway. He sat through every minute of it, then left before I could reach him.
He deserves the truth from me.
Whatever’s waiting at that house, I’ll stand in it. I’ll own every piece of it.
But I’ll do it to his face.