STICKING AROUND TO defend herself or make excuses would’ve taken valuable time away from the patient, so Belle did as McKeag growled at her, slipped quietly out of the room and found her way back to the nurses’ station.
Her central nervous system couldn’t decide how to react to that whole humiliating set-down. Her face alternated between burning at a temperature best measured in Kelvin and the stormfront of an approaching Ice Age any time she relived the joy of the actual rebuke, and the number of eyes on her, the team working as she failed her first patient.
Still, with the hospital in the throes of a large-scale emergency, standing there, observing the bustle and scurrying about without helping somehow could be nothing short of dereliction of duty.
She wasn’t a doctor. She wasn’t trained for this type of medicine or level of emergency straight out of the gate and had truly only offered her best educated guess when prompted, but it still felt the same when an expert—a peer—immediately found her lacking. Even one she knew to be unpleasant in other circumstances already.
Something about it had felt like a teaching moment, but, in retrospect, she could see it had been a test. An unfair test, the kind of test only a real jerk would lob at a new colleague in the first five minutes on the floor, but still a test she’d failed.
It wasn’t just pride that never wanted to fail a patient. Not everyone went into medicine for the right reasons, but Belle had. Her main role models had been Dad and Nanna, a city cop and a former Army nurse. Belle wanted to help people, it was a core tenet of her personality. Seeing the nurses who’d taken care of not only her dad as he’d lingered in the days between when the bullets had wrecked his insides and when he’d actually died, but also the fourteen-year-old girls who couldn’t leave his side, had solidified that need to help into a calling.
And she was just standing around, while other people helped eased suffering.
If this was just how things went in a large, metropolitan emergency department, she had to either get out now and make this a one-day affair or find that steel Sabetta core and a way to help.
Like a gift from a higher power, the woman they’d initially followed passed by the nurses’ station, a light at the end of the tunnel. Belle stood and gave chase. She’d directed McKeag earlier; she’d have ideas on where Belle could be of use.
“Doctor?” Belle called.
The woman spun to face her as if she’d been expecting her call.
“Ysabelle?” Her smile and the soft southern cadence of her speech seemed to project sunshine from her pretty, freckled face and blazingly blue eyes.
For a moment, Belle even stopped mentally cursing McKeag to a lifetime of stubbing his right pinky toe any time he tried to go shoeless and enjoy the simple pleasure of the earth beneath his feet. This doctor was the exact opposite to McKeag’s surly presence—someone Belle could identify with.
“I’m Dr. Angel Conley, and we’re going to be working together today.” She offered a hand. “Do you prefer to be called Ysabelle or Sabetta? You can call me Angel.”
“Belle,” she managed to get out, then shook the offered hand. “Dr. McKeag wanted me to wait, but—”
“Yeah, Lyons is—Well, he doesn’t work and play well with others.” Angel added, “But I’m sure we can make the request for you to stay with him if you want. Between you and me? I’d rather shadow an angry mule than Lyons when he’s on a tear. Which is nearly always.”
The gentle teasing confidence gave a little shot of hope to counter the increasingly awful rot in her chest.
Belle squeezed Angel’s hand, needing exactly that connection in that moment—she’d have hugged this stranger if she could’ve—it seemed the only thing to go in her favor since she’d arrived in New York. But still. “I’m not sure he should receive all the blame here. I apparently went the entirely wrong direction with the patient.”
“We all have our specialties, and I’m sure we’ll find yours,” Angel said, gesturing for her to follow. “I’m a pediatric emergency specialist. Kids are my specialty, but I still need the help of trauma surgeons in unfortunate instances. Or cardiac specialists. We have a network. But we’ll talk more about this later. How are you with stitching?”
“I’m good at stitching,” Belle said and, with just the simple act of reminding herself that she did have strengths, amended, “I’m actually very good at stitching. If I had my education to do over again, I’d probably become a surgeon. I’m good with my hands.”
And with patients, she reminded herself. She’d become a nurse because she needed to take care of people, and she was good at connecting. She made mistakes, and she didn’t know everything, but she cared and connected, she tried. And would keep trying.
“Perfect. We have a heavy load today because of a subway derailment, which you probably heard, but not all the injuries are critical. Most of them are much more minor. Cuts. Sprains. Broken bones.”
Even with the little mental pep talk, she must’ve looked off still because Angel stepped closer, her voice lowering. “I know what it’s like to be new and feel disconnected from everyone. Don’t let Lyons scare you off. He’s—” She paused, obviously searching for some polite way to describe the arrogant doctor. “Christmas is hard for him. There are extenuating circumstances. Just take whatever he says with a grain of salt, and if you have trouble with anything, come see me. Do you have your comm yet?”
Christmas was hard for him. Even among the other things Angel said, that was what stood out.
The words resonated in Belle’s head, bouncing off her guilt centers and disrupting her presently cursing him to a month of upper lip and tongue burns from the morning’s first over-eager sip of too-hot coffee. It took effort to focus on the other important things Angel had said.
“I’m supposed to get it this afternoon. They said I wouldn’t need it since I’d be shadowing today,” Belle said, ceasing her ever ineffective but frequently cathartic cursing because it’d been useless at soothing her ruffled feathers.
Christmas was hard for him. Hard enough to affect his behavior. It hurt him.
He lashed out because he was suffering.
“Right. Well, you’re shadowing me. I’m just going to be in and out with a couple other patients while you stitch. But if you need anything, come to me. Really. I’ve almost been here a year, but I’ve pretty much sorted out the people to see to get things done. I also know all the best places to hide if you need a minute to practice a completely silent, faux primal scream because they might sedate you if you actually let your feelings out.”
“My locker.” Belle wanted to laugh at the image of her screaming soundlessly into some cabinet because she was stressing out, but facing Lyons again was right there in the front of her mind, taking the humor out of living. “My locker is stuck. The emergency call came, and McKeag tossed my things into his locker so we could get down here. It’d be really nice to have it working for tomorrow.”
It wouldn’t save her facing him this evening to get her stuff back, but it would allow her to start tomorrow with some distance.
“I can do that. What’s the number?”
A moment later, Angel was on her comm, walking off in the other direction, and Belle had a folder in hand, and slipped into the room of a man with a large leg gash to stitch.
“Hi, my name is Ysabelle Sabetta and I’m a nurse practitioner. I’m going to help you get that gash sorted out,” she said to the man sitting with his trouser leg ripped open and a bloody wad of gauze keeping it from bleeding too much. After confirming his identity, she got started.
“Please numb it.” Mr. Axler said three words to her, and then laid back on the table. No comments on her qualifications