She should be out there. She knew this. Out there, hands on with patients, directing her staff. She was chief, that was her job.
But it was also her job, as it was every physician’s job, to break awful news to people, and while she was actively avoiding being out working in the ER right now, she was also avoiding having to tell the Greene family sitting out in chairs that their pregnant seventeen-year-old daughter had died under her hands. Two hours ago, Melissa Greene had been in the passenger seat of her boyfriend’s mother’s car, being taken to a routine checkup appointment at an OB/GYN near Oakridge. Now, following a catastrophic car accident, both the boyfriend’s mother and Melissa were dead, and the unnamed baby with them.
Notifying families wasn’t something she was unfamiliar with. She’d had to do it many times in the more than twenty years of her career. It was part of emergency medicine, not everyone who was wheeled through those doors made it. She’d known this for a long, long time.
But there was something extra terrible about young lives ending so much sooner than they deserved. She found it so incredibly difficult to tell parents that the tender green shoot they’d nurtured had been cut down. It wasn’t fair, not to them, not to the lost child. And in this case, two lost children. The baby had never even gotten a chance to have a name.
Deb dropped her head into her hands and fought back tears. She had to go out there soon. Had to deliver the worst news parents could hear. It had taken her too long already; she knew their nerves would be stretched wire-thin by now. But she couldn’t bring herself to get up from her desk.
Her mind wandered back to last week, when she’d seen Hayley Milton sobbing her eyes out in the Derm lounge over the elderly widower she’d lost. She wondered if he’d had family to tell. Hayley had mentioned his wife was gone, but what about any kids they might have had? Did he have siblings? The idea that someone on the opposite end of the spectrum of life from Melissa Greene, someone who had lived a full life, had no one to tell about his death only depressed her further.
But she had a job to do. Deb lifted her head out of her hands. “Get up, Morales,” she said aloud, taking a deep breath. “Let’s do this.”
She lurched up and out of her chair before she could talk herself out of it. There was a mirror by her office door, she checked to make sure she didn’t have any stray mascara streaks on her face, like the ones she’d wiped off of Hayley’s face the other day?—
Not the time to think about that,she told herself firmly. With one last glance to make sure she looked calm and professional, Deb opened her office door and made her way out to the emergency room chairs, where Heather and David Greene were sitting, white-knuckled hand in white-knuckled hand, waiting for Deb to break their hearts.
The Derm lounge was empty again, and Deb made a beeline for the furthest out Reflection Pod. It escaped her why the skin clinic needed such things, but she was grateful they were there. Yanking the door open, she shoved herself in behind the tiny table, shoved her hands into her hair, and opened her mouth wide in a long, silent scream. Her face flushed hot and throbbed with the force of her frustrated, desperate fury.
It had been terrible explaining how a healthy young pregnant girl was no longer on this earth. How hollow it had felt to say that she’d done everything she could when she wasn’t sure shehad, there had to have been something she missed. And the devastation when she’d managed, finally, to tell them that the baby, too, was gone… She was going to see the expressions on their faces in her nightmares for a long, long time.
She clenched her fists, gripping big hunks of her hair tight, and pulled at her scalp until it hurt. Tears streamed down her face, hot and salty and scorching.It’s not fair, it’s not fair, it’s not fair, she was a kid, it’s not fair…
Deb couldn’t remember the last time a patient death had hit her so hard. All she could feel was rage—rage at the injustice, at the afternoon drunk who had hit the car and killed three people, at herself for failing to save Melissa. Her world had shrunk down to nothing but anger and pain and the tears falling from her eyes.
When her nose began to run, she realized she hadn’t thought to grab up a box of tissues before she ducked into the pod. A quick check of her pockets came up fruitless, no surprise there; she rarely ever remembered to put anything useful in those. Deb was left with no choice but to emerge from the pod and retrieve a box of tissues. Fortunately, when she cautiously poked her head out to scan the room, it didn’t look like anyone was there.
Deb eased herself out from behind the little table and out of the pod, aiming right for a fresh box of aloe-infused tissues just a few feet away on one of the clean white countertops that lined the glass-block walls of the room. She was almost there, hand outstretched, when she heard it. “Doctor Morales?”
Clutching at her racing heart, Deb spun around to confront whoever had just scared the life out of her. “What the fuck!”
Blue eyes wide, Hayley Milton backed up, her hands held in the air. “Sorry! I am so sorry. I thought you heard me come in.”
“I did not fucking hear you come in! Jesus! Someone should put a bell on you.” She was having a hard time catching her breath. Reaching out, she grabbed the back of a chair and leaned over, desperately working to get enough air in her lungs.
Fuck. I overdid it.
Panic adrenaline flooded her system as the first anxiety attack she’d had in years struck. She gripped the back of the chair tight with both of her hands, the plastic edge biting into her palms, her knuckles white from the tension. Her ribs ached, her throat narrowed to the diameter of a straw. Trying to suck in any breath, deep or shallow, was impossible. Tears sprang to Deborah’s eyes as sirens blared inside her head.
Through the teary blur, she saw a shapeless blob of black scrubs and a tight blonde bun move to stand in front of her. “Doctor Morales, I’m sorry. Can I get you anything?” Cautious hands gently covered hers. “Breathe with me, Doctor Morales. In through the nose, out through the mouth.”
Deb’s first instinct was to snatch her hands away and run, but she wrestled it down and followed Hayley’s instructions, knowing the best way out of the attack was through it. Hayley’s voice was calm, a soothing guide through the squeezing panic. Deb felt her lungs begin to loosen from the vise grip of anxiety, and the noise in her head began to subside.
She closed her eyes and kept breathing, Hayley’s voice gentling further down into a wordless, calming stream of soothing sounds. Deb’s fingers let go of the chair one by one, itching as blood rushed back into them. Slowly, so slowly, too slowly, the tears stopped flowing from her eyes, her throat opened up, and air began to flow in normally again, not as though through a crumpled straw.
With one last deep breath, Deb felt able to open her eyes and blink. Hayley stood there, her hands still covering Deb’s, blue eyes wide with concern. She looked nothing like the Hayley Deb usually saw, stern-faced and delivering a sarcastic quip. Unsettled, Deb snatched her hands away and stuffed them into the pockets of her coat. “Thanks,” she muttered, taking two hasty steps back.
Hayley straightened up, and a hint of wariness entered her gaze. “Are… you okay?”
“Do I look okay?” It snapped out before Deb even thought, and the blue flash of anger and hurt that went through Hayley’s eyes made her feel a pang of guilt that she immediately resented.
Deb hated the panic attacks, and she’d worked hard with a therapist to help get them under control after they’d nearly derailed her schooling entirely. What she hated even more than the attacks themselves was having them witnessed, and now she was discovering that even more thanthat, she hated having Hayley Milton of all people see her in the grips of one. More than hated it.Loathedit.
Hayley took a deep breath and seemed to brace herself. “I think you could benefit from a snack and a sugary drink.”
“I am capable of managing my own care, Nurse Milton.” She couldn’t keep the snippy tone out of her voice, and she hated the way it made Hayley flinch, even though it was obvious that the woman was trying to hide it. The guilt that shot through her with each miniscule flinch wasn’t helping, either. “Thank you, but we’re done here.”
Before she could give in to the urge to apologize, Deb turned around and strode out of the lounge, cheeks burning at the shame of being caught out weak… and at how rude she’d been to a woman who had just offered her help in that low moment.
