Chapter 1
Briana
They’re calling him Dr. Death.”
Jocelyn stood, peering at me dramatically from beyond the nurses’ station where I sat at my computer charting my patients.
I glanced up at her over my screen and rolled my eyes. “Give him a break,” I said, typing in my notes. “The guy’s been here all of eleven hours. It’s his first day.”
“That’s the point,” she whispered. “He has a hundred percent kill rate.”
I scoffed but didn’t look back up. “You cannot call him that. We don’t need patients hearing nurses whispering about a Dr. Death.”
“Can we call him Doctor D?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because Doctor D sounds like a penis thing.”
She huffed. “Okay, but seriously. Somebody should look into this. Six patients dead?”
I checked my watch. “We work in an ER, Jocelyn. It’s not entirely unheard of.”
“Aren’t you supposed to be chief of emergency medicine? Isn’t it your job to investigate stuff like this?”
I did a final tap into my computer and looked up at her. “Dr. Gibson hasn’t retired yet and the board hasn’t voted on his replacement, so no, it’s not my job.”
“But it will be. You’re totally going to get it. Don’t you think you should dress for the job you want and stop the carnage?” She stood back and crossed her arms.
I could feel the eyes of a dozen other unseen nurses peering at me from around the floor. Jocelyn was sent as an ambassador. Once the nurses latched on to something, they weren’t letting go. This poor guy. He was not going to like it here.
I let out a long sigh. “The first patient was a ninety-six-year-old with a bad heart. The second one was an eighty-nine-year-old stroke victim who had a DNR. There was a car accident crush injury—I got a peek at the X-rays, and nobody but God could have saved that man. Patient four was a gunshot wound to the head, which I don’t need to remind you is ninety percent fatal. The victim was comatose with no evidence of brain stem function upon arrival. Five was a cancer patient on hospice, and six was so septic he was practically dead when he got here.” I looked her in the eye. “Not. His. Fault. Sometimes it happens.”
She pressed her lips into a line. “Sometimes. But not on your first day,” she pointed out.
I had to agree with that. The odds were a little low. But still.
“Just…send all the new patients to me, okay?” I said a little wearily. “He only has another hour. And no Dr. Death. Please.”
She gave me a look. “He’s rude, you know.”
“How is he rude?” I asked.
“He told Hector to put his phone in his locker. You never make us put our phones away.”
“Isn’t Hector in some epic breakup with Jose? He’s probably checking his phone every five seconds. I probably would have made him put it away too.”
The door on room eight slid open, and an auburn-haired white guy in black scrubs came out. His back was to me, so I couldn’t see his face. I watched him peel off his gloves and drop them into a hazardous waste basket. He pinched the bridge of his nose, took a deep breath, then dragged himself toward the locker rooms with his head down.
Hector came out of the room behind him and looked over at us. He held up seven fingers and sucked air through his teeth.
Jocelyn gave me an I-told-you-so look, and I shook my head. “No Dr. Death. Now go. Do something productive.”
She pouted for a second, but then she left.
My cell phone pinged, and I pulled it out.
Alexis: I want to come see you on the 19th.
I typed in my reply:
I’m totally fine.
I wasn’t fine. But I also wasn’t summoning my pregnant best friend out of the warm embrace of her honeymoon period to come hang out with me in the abandoned haunted house my life had turned into. I loved her too much to condemn her.
My phone rang in my hand.
I got up and ducked into an empty room, and swiped the Answer button. “I’m telling you, I’m okay,” I said.
“Nope. I’m coming. What time are you off?”
“Alexis.” I groaned. “I just want to pretend that day is like any other day.”
“It’s not like any other day. It’s the day your divorce is final. It’s a big deal.”
“I’m not going to do anything stupid. I’m not going to drunk-dial him. I’m not going to get shit-faced and throw up in my hair—”
“I’m more worried about you throwing Molotov cocktails through his windows.”
I snorted. “I guess that’s a valid concern,” I mumbled.
I didn’t exactly have a history of being calm and rational when it came to Nick. When I finally found out he’d been cheating, I’d like to tell you that I acted with poise and grace, a vision of dignity in the face of unfathomable betrayal and heartache. What I actually did was lose my fucking mind. I flushed my wedding ring down the toilet and watered his houseplants with bleach. Then I called his mother to let her know what kind of a man she raised—and that was me just getting started. I’d shocked even myself with the levels of pettiness I was willing to sink to. The grand finale of the depths of my depravity was so embarrassing I forbade Alexis to bring it up to this day.
“Unless you have a date, I’m coming to see you,” she said.
“Ha. Right.” I sat on a gurney and put my forehead into my hand.
Since Nick, I had been through some of the worst online dating in the history of the internet. The amount of garbage I sifted through on Tinder over the last year was so bleak, Nick looked like Prince Charming by comparison.
“Still no luck?” she asked.
“Last month I went on a date with a guy who had a court-ordered Breathalyzer installed in his car because he’d had that many DUIs. He asked me to breathe into it so his car would start. There was the one who showed up to our coffee date with a swastika tattoo on his neck. The last date I went on, the guy’s wife, which I didn’t know he had, showed up to the Benihana and asked if this was what he was doing with the money he said he needed for the kids’ school supplies. He told me he didn’t have kids.”
She must have blanched into the phone. “Oh, gross.”
“You have no idea how lucky you are that you found Daniel. Seriously. Make a sacrifice to the dating gods for that one.” I looked at my watch. “I gotta go, I’m on shift. I’ll call you after work.”
“Okay. But really call me, though,” she said.
“I will really call you.”
We hung up. I sat for a moment just staring at the wall. There was a pain-assessment chart hanging there. Little cartoon faces in various expressions over coinciding levels of pain. A green smiley face over the number zero. A red crying face over the number ten.
I fixed my eyes on the ten.
I’d managed not to think too much about the nineteenth. I was hoping if I didn’t focus on the date, maybe I’d luck out and be a few days past it before I realized it had come and gone. It’s not like much would change when the divorce was finalized. Nick and I had been split for a year. This was just making it paperwork official.