“Please call me Ryan. I’m a pretty casual guy generally.” She looked unsure about the idea. “May I call you Lucy?”
She nodded slowly. “Uh, Ryan, I know you’re not a fan of this coordinated patient care arrangement but I’d really like us to work together with as little conflict as possible.”
He liked the way his name sounded when she said it. Kind of easygoing and warm. “I’ll do my part but there have to be some ground rules.”
She pursed her lips and her delicately shaped brows drew closer together. “And those would be?”
“I expect the people that work for me to be punctual and to stay with me as I make rounds. I don’t wait.”
“Dr. O’Doherty, I don’t work for you. I work for the hospital, and ultimately for the patients. If I understood Mr. Matherson correctly, we do coordinated patient care. Which means we work together.”
“My OR schedule, which the hospital dictates, means I don’t have time to stand around waiting for you.”
“And my job, which the hospital and the human heart dictate, is to care for the patient and the family during a difficult time. My job is to help the whole family. We...” She waved a hand around, broadly including him. “This hospital should care for the whole person. That’s my job and I would appreciate you letting me do it.”
He flinched. “My job is to be a surgeon, I fix the problem. I don’t need to hand-hold patients or their families to do my job well.”
“No, you don’t, but it would be nice if you would at least try to on some level.”
His body stiffened and he gave her a questioning look. “The parents of my patients need to hear the truth.”
“I don’t disagree with that. I just question the delivery.”
“I thought that was why you were here?”
“It is, but parents like Brian’s like to hear reassurances from the doctor.”
She met his direct gaze for the first time for longer than a second. He stood. “Point taken.”
“What time’s your first case in the morning?”
“Seven. Why?”
“I like to be here when the child leaves the parents to go into surgery. It’s when they need the most support. Many want to talk. They’re scared. I’ll walk them down to the waiting room.”
He’d never given any thought to how difficult it was for parents to watch their child go into surgery. Didn’t want to think about it. He opened the door.
“It’s hard to let go,” she said with wistfulness in her voice.
Did she know that from personal experience? Her eyes glazed over. Where had her thoughts gone? Thankfully she recovered, the hopeless expression disappearing, to be replaced by that of a trained professional again. That he was more than capable of dealing with.
“I guess it is.” He closed the door between them. What was the woman with the sad, serious eyes hiding?
THAT EVENING LUCY arrived home later than she’d planned. To be at the hospital early for four mornings out of the week meant she had to stay late in the evenings to prepare. On top of that there was the time she spent getting to and from work. Accustomed to the freedom of driving a car, she found using the subway system restricting and oftentimes frustrating. Never good at reading maps, she had a tendency to take the wrong train far too often. This was one aspect of living in a huge city that she’d not thought through.
Her heavy-set, dark-haired landlord, who was standing outside the building, called, “Hello,” as she started climbing the stairs to her studio apartment.
“Hi, Mr. Volpentesta,” she returned with more enthusiasm than she’d had in a long time.
He presented her with a big, white, toothy smile.
Lucy made her way up to the third floor above the Italian bistro. She didn’t mind the climb. It was good exercise and she’d always enjoyed being fit. Staying in shape and eating right were important to her. She sucked in a tight breath. That had been one of the many reasons she’d had no trouble carrying Emily.
Emily. The hurt throbbed deep. She had to get beyond the pain somehow.
Unlocking the door, she pushed it open and stepped into the studio apartment. A nice window allowed light into the space. A bed faced it and there was a small sitting area. In one back corner was a kitchenette, functional but tiny, and in the other corner was the bathroom, which included a tiny closet.
She’d managed to make the place homely with the few things she’d brought with her. When she had time she’d give it the care it deserved. It wasn’t much by most people’s standards but she enjoyed the multicultural, tree-lined neighborhood. She’d been lucky to find a place within her budget.
Alexis, her sister, didn’t understand Lucy’s need to move so far away and Lucy had no intention of ever sharing the real reason she’d left. It was her deepest shame. It had almost killed her but she’d had to get away. It was better for everyone that she leave, despite how much she missed her sister, and Emily. She wanted Alexis and her family to be happy. For her to hang around, wishing she was a part of their close-knit group, hadn’t been healthy for any of them.
Dropping her purse on the table, which had obviously been confiscated from the bistro, she put the kettle on to heat water to make tea. Sweet iced tea was her drink of choice. No matter where she lived she took that small pleasure with her. Even in the cold early spring weather she couldn’t give up that small part of her growing-up years. It was one of the passions she and her sister shared. She wouldn’t go there. Spending her evening crying wasn’t part of her plan.
Taking a deep breath, she moved to her bed, pulled off her business suit and replaced it with sweatpants and sweatshirt, then she tugged on slouchy socks.
The streetlight below her windows flickered on, washing the room in a warm glow that only added to her loneliness. She clicked on a lamp on her way back to the stove and after pouring the hot water over the tea bags and sugar she reached for a can of soup from the open cabinet.
She’d gone from carrying a baby and living in her sister’s home, where love abounded, to a shabby room in an enormous impersonal city. She sank into one of the two chairs she had and put her face in her hands.
Stop it. Get a hold of yourself. You can survive this. You have to make your own life.
* * *
The next afternoon, she entered Daniel Hancock’s room to find Ryan leaning back in a chair as if he made social visits to the teenage boy’s room regularly. Ryan had removed a tumor from the sixteen-year-old’s brain stem the week before.
“Ah, Ms. Edwards, just the person we were looking for,” Ryan said, as if he was genuinely glad to see her, which created suspicion in her mind.
He’d made it clear the day before that he wasn’t interested in her being involved in his cases unless he thought she was needed. Now he acted as if they were old friends and he was planning to ask her a favor. She was unsure how to read his attitude change. Up until this moment she would have characterized their relationship as two dogs circling each other, trying to decide how not to get in each other’s way.
She’d play along. Approaching the end of the bed, she smiled at Daniel. “What can I do for you two gentlemen?”
“I was just telling Daniel that he can’t return to school right away. That he’ll need to be home-schooled for a while until his site heals. Can you help to arrange that?”
“I’ll