She just had to survive the next few weeks without giving Marianne any more ammunition.
Which meant being perfect. Flawless. Following every procedure to the letter, even when her instincts screamed that the procedure was wrong. She would document everything before she did it, seek approval for every deviation, turn herself into the kind of careful, hesitant physician she had always despised. It would feel like surgery with her hands tied behind her back. It would feel like betraying everything she believed about medicine.
But she would prove that her judgment was sound, that her methods were valid, that the board's concerns were unfounded. She would give Marianne nothing to criticize, nothing to document, nothing to use against her.
And she would absolutely not think about the way Tamsin's observation had made her heart skip. Would not think about themoment of connection in the trauma bay, the look in Marianne's eyes when she realized that Isla had been right. Would not think about what it might mean that she was acutely conscious of exactly where Marianne stood in every room they shared.
That way lay disaster. That way lay the kind of chaos that Isla had spent her entire adult life avoiding. She had chosen trauma surgery precisely because it was predictable in its unpredictability. The crises came fast and they came hard, but they always ended. You saved the patient or you lost them, and then you moved on to the next one. There was no room for emotional entanglement. No room for complications that couldn't be solved with a scalpel and steady hands.
Marianne Cole was exactly the kind of complication Isla couldn't afford.
"I should go check on my patients," Isla said finally, standing up and draining the rest of her coffee. "Thanks for the debrief."
"Anytime." Tamsin's voice was gentle. "And Isla? Be careful. Whatever's happening with Ms. Cole... just be careful."
Isla paused at the door, her hand on the frame. Part of her wanted to turn around, to ask Tamsin what she meant, to have the kind of honest conversation about feelings that she had spent her entire adult life avoiding. But that would require admitting that there was something to be careful about. That would require acknowledging that Marianne Cole had gotten under her skin in a way that had nothing to do with the audit and everything to do with the way her pulse jumped whenever they were in the same room.
She wasn't ready for that conversation. Might never be ready.
"I'm always careful," she said instead, the lie tasting bitter on her tongue.
She walked out of the lounge without looking back, her jaw tight with determination. The hallway stretched out before her, leading back to the patients who needed her, the charts thatdemanded her attention, the endless work that defined her life. Somewhere in this hospital, Marianne Cole was probably writing up her observations from the morning, documenting every protocol deviation, building a case that might end Isla's career.
Let her write. Let her document. Let her try to reduce the art of saving lives to checkboxes and compliance metrics.
Isla was going to show her that medicine couldn't be contained in a spreadsheet. She was going to be so goddamn perfect that Marianne wouldn't have a single legitimate criticism to offer. And when the audit was over, when the board had been satisfied, she would go back to practicing medicine the way it was meant to be practiced.
On instinct. Without hesitation. Without anyone watching over her shoulder.
The audit was a test. And Dr. Isla Bennett had never failed a test in her life.
4
MARIANNE
Marianne had seen trauma medicine before.
Or so she had thought.
She had reviewed incident reports and mortality statistics. She had studied the flow charts that guided emergency decisions. She had sat in conference rooms with physicians who explained their protocols and procedures with the measured confidence of people who had everything under control. She understood, intellectually, that trauma surgery was chaotic and time-sensitive and occasionally required deviation from standard practice.
But she had never seen Isla Bennett work.
Standing in the corner of the trauma bay with her clipboard and her neutral expression, Marianne watched as four patients came through the doors in a cascade of blood and screaming monitors and controlled panic. Watched as Isla moved through the chaos with a grace that bordered on the supernatural, her orders cutting through noise like a blade through silk, her hands steady and precise as she assessed injuries that would have made lesser physicians freeze.
There was no hesitation. No uncertainty. No moment where Isla consulted guidelines or sought approval. She simply acted, moving from patient to patient with the fluid efficiency of someone who had done this so many times that the motions had become instinct.
"Push another unit of O-neg," Isla called out, and a nurse was already reaching for the blood.
"Get respiratory down here," she ordered, and someone was paging before she finished the sentence.
"I need a trocar," she demanded, and the instrument appeared in her hand as if by magic.
Marianne's pen had stopped moving. She realized this only when she tried to take a note and found that she had been standing motionless for nearly three minutes, watching Isla save a teenage boy's life through a procedure that wasn't in any textbook she had ever read.
The tube repositioning had been wrong by every metric Marianne knew how to measure. The protocol called for imaging confirmation. The protocol called for consultation with a senior physician. The protocol existed precisely because procedures like this carried significant risk and should not be performed on instinct alone.
Marianne had challenged her. Had raised her objection in front of the entire team, watching Isla's eyes flash with fury and exasperation both. She had expected pushback. She had expected argument. What she hadn't expected was the absolute certainty with which Isla had dismissed her concern and proceeded anyway.
