Her smile was like heaven. I don’t think I’d ever seen a smile that made me so happy before in my life. I realized I’d spent so long on my own, without caring about another person at all, except for my patients, and even they were more like puzzles that needed to be solved.
Lori lit something up inside of me, something that I never wanted dimmed again.
“I love you too,” she said.
I pulled her against me and hugged her amidst the broken glass and the blood.
We were doctors. A little chaos didn’t bother us.
And besides, we won, finally, after all this, we won. I could have her, and would have her, despite the complications. I knew there’d be talk about me dating my resident, but I didn’t give a damn.
Nothing mattered but Lori.
31
Lori
Five Years Later
“What do you think, doctor?” The nurse, a young girl named Leanne, stood next to me in pink scrubs. We looked down at the patient, an older man named Rex, with a stitched-up incision in his chest, his lungs rising and falling. All eyes fell to me.
“I think we’re finished,” I said, nodding to myself. “It only took, what, three hours?”
“Five,” Leanne corrected. “Time flies when you’re cutting someone open, right?”
I grinned at her, but she couldn’t see through my surgical mask. “Finish this up for me,” I said.
“Of course, doctor.”
I left the operating room and scrubbed myself out. I tossed my gloves, my gown, my hair covering, and my mask. I felt worn down and loose, and more alive than I’d ever felt in my entire life. I stood there basking in that glow, thinking back to that surgery, to each motion, each stitch at the end. I was in complete control, and I owed a lot of that to Piers. He’d imparted everything he had to me, and then some. We’d both grown as people, and as surgeons.
I pushed open the door to walk into the hall, but stopped with one foot on the tile.
Piers held out a bouquet of flowers. “Congratulations, doctor,” he said.
“What are these for?” I took them, and held them to my nose. Tulips were my favorite, and these were beautiful: deep, impossible purple.
“Your first surgery as an attending,” he said. “How does it feel?”
“Good,” I said. “Really good. Honestly, do you feel like this after every procedure?”
He laughed and draped an arm across my shoulder. Five years hadn’t done a thing to blunt my incredible attraction to him. Despite everything we’d gone through, I still craved every touch, every kiss, every second we spent alone.
Five years of training. Five long, long years of working hard, every single day, and planning. We put our life on hold so I could finish my residency, and now that it was over—I felt strangely torn on the whole thing.
“Usually,” he admitted. “But it dulls a little, I think.”
I leaned my head against his shoulder. “Thanks for the flowers. It means a lot.”
“What’s the matter?” he asked, probably sensing something in my tone.
“Nothing,” I said, which of course was a lie.
And he saw through it. “Come on,” he said, facing me again. “Spit it out.”
“Well, it’s bittersweet, you know? I finished my residency, I’m done with all that, but it’s like—where do we go from here?”
So much had changed over the last five years. So much had also stayed the same. We were friendly with Rees, though he still kept to himself. My brother moved out of my father’s house. And we visited my mother’s grave every first Sunday of the month.
Best of all, I heard that Robert Tippett went through a lengthy and complicated court case against his sister—and ultimately lost. He never received his inheritance. I like to think we had a hand in that and I truly hoped he was miserable.
So much was different, but really, it was all one big cycle. Without Piers to ground me, I wasn’t sure I would’ve been able to hold on through it all, the five long years of back-breaking work, honing my skills, learning everything I could from him.
And at the end of it, I was a better surgeon—a damn good surgeon, I thought.
“You know what we do next,” he said, kissing me gently. “Private practice. We do the procedures we want, and only take on the patients we choose. We save lives. And let’s face it, between the two of us, we’re going to save a shitload of people.”
I grinned a little. We hadn’t talked about going private for a couple of years now, but I knew it’d still been in his mind, hovering in the background. “Are you sure?” I asked. “Things are good and steady here. And you know we don’t need the money.” Which was an understatement: the hospital wrote a big, fat check to each of us for ten million dollars. After paying off my debt and investing the rest, I could more or less quit working for the rest of my life if I wanted.