“But the nurse will call you if something’s wrong, right?”
“I’m on call tonight, so yeah. I’m still worried, though.”
“And here I thought you never worried about anything, Luke Carlton,” Melissa teases.
“What?” If she only knew. “That’s ridiculous, Milly. Of course I worry. And now I’m trying to stop myself from driving back in to the hospital to check on him.”
“Oh,” she says thoughtfully. “Would that be so bad? Maybe you’ll sleep better if you check on him and see he’s fine.”
“Oh, he’s probably fine,” I agree. “But if I go in, I’ll alarm the patient and the nurse, and probably talk myself in to ordering a CT scan to make sure there’s no bowel leak. And then I’ll have to call the radiologist to ask him to read the scan, which will probably be normal. So the patient, nurse, and radiologist will all think I’m crazy.”
“I see,” Melissa replies. “So you want me to talk you down from doing this?”
“Please. I know it seems silly, but?—”
“It doesn’t seem silly,” she interrupts. “You care about your patients. I worry about sillier things all the time.”
“Like what?”
“Promise you won’t laugh?”
“I won’t laugh, Milly.”
“Okay.” She pauses. “It’s hard to know where to start.”
“Don’t overthink it.”
There’s another short pause, and I imagine her chewing her lip. I wonder what she’s wearing, if she’s changed into the slouchy pink sweatpants she wore the night she baked me cookies. The ones that rode low on her hips and showed a sliver of skin.
“I got a part-time teaching job at Brookline Academy,” she says slowly. “Through a connection of your mom’s, actually.”
“That’s great, Melissa.”
“Yeah, I guess. It’s just a temporary contract because someone took a leave last minute, and they couldn’t find another woman qualified to teach math.”
“It’s still great, Melissa.”
“But I feel like an impostor, Luke. I don’t have a teaching degree, and my computer science degree is almost ten years old. I was a stay-at-home mom, so I don’t have any real work experience?—”
“Milly, that school is lucky to have you.”
She sighs. “I don’t know. I might not even last the year. There’s this one girl, Vanessa Abernathy, who’s like, the queen of the mean girls. She talks on the phone during class and everything. But I get the sense she’s Daddy’s Princess, and if I try to discipline her, it’ll backfire on me.”
And just like that, I hate Vanessa Abernathy. “I don’t have any brilliant suggestions, Milly, but I’m sure if anyone can handle her, it’s you.”
“Thanks, Luke,” she says with a laugh.
“Okay, what else are you worried about?”
“Well, my mother thinks I shouldn’t have taken the job at all,” she says slowly. “She thinks it will distract me from parenting.”
“Well, that’s just crazy. Didn’t you say it was part-time?”
“Yeah, only mornings. When Liam’s in preschool.”
“So your kids won’t even notice.”
“Hopefully not.”
