Interesting.
“Move,” Fred snaps, shoving me away from June, then he follows me down the corridor, but not before he glances back at her.
“You were on a date, huh?” I glance sidelong at him. “Interesting.”
“Drop dead,” Fred grunts, lightly elbowing me in the side. He rushes away before I can say anything else.
Making a pitstop at a vending machine for some soda, I check my phone.
My last two messages to Snow have gone unanswered, but I text her again explaining I won’t be home tonight, but maybe we can have lunch tomorrow.
I’d really like to just spend some time with her.
Refueled by soda by the time I return to the operating theater, I’m immediately pulled into my next surgery.
A woman who was a passenger in a taxi was caught in the carnage at the bottom of the hill with severe internal bleeding. I scrub as carefully and as quickly as I can until my hands throb with a familiar rawness, then I stand as the nurses around mehelp me into my gown and snap fresh, clean gloves onto my hands.
“Alright,” I say as I walk toward the patient on the table, wrinkling my nose slightly under my mask. “What have we got?”
“One of our own, I’m afraid,” says the anesthesiologist.
“Who?” My heart skips slightly as I get closer while the anesthesiologist flips through his chart.
“Uh… oh, you might know her. You’re listed as her primary care.”
My heart pounds and just as her bruised, unconscious face comes into view, her name is read out like a whisper in a cavern.
“Noelle Montoya. She’s… Patient Services, right?”
Snow.
Oh, my God.
She doesn’t look like herself.
Her skin is painfully pale and her lips stretch unnaturally around the tube thrust in her throat to keep her breathing.
Blood stains her neck and mascara smears her cheek.
I can’t breathe.
I stand there with my hands aloft just above the surgical field and stare at her while my heart pounds frantically in my chest as if it’s trying to escape and bring her back to life by my own blood.
Snow.
What happened? Why wasn’t she safe at home?
“You good?” The anesthesiologist’s voice cuts through the fog descending around me, and I glance at him.
“Fine.”
“Then should we get started?” His brow creases. “She’s losing a lot of blood here.”
In this moment, I understand why surgeons aren’t allowed to operate on people they care about.
Having Snow’s life in my hands is sickening, but at the same time there’s no one else I would trust to bring her back to me.
Taking a deep breath, I hold my hand to the nurse on my right. “Scalpel.”
