“Ah.” The brown stain on his shirt is probably barbecue sauce. “By yourself? You should have messaged me.” There’s something really sad about the thought of Ethan spending the evening alone at a pub.
“I didn’t want another lecture,” he says with a bitter laugh. “I already had one at home. Jess thinks I drink too much, and since I didn’t want to fight with her, I went out for dinner.”
Out for dinner, and for drinks. For once, I agree with Jessica.
There’s a beat of silence while I think about how best to phrase what I need to say. “We’re just concerned about you, Ethan.”
He shakes his head. “I don’t have a drinking problem, Luke.”
“Okay.” He’s evidently still in the denial phase.
An awkward silence falls. To give myself something todo, I walk to the cupboard and bring back a bag of potato chips.
Ethan takes a single chip and studies it carefully before popping it into his mouth.
“Salt and vinegar,” he says thoughtfully. “Good choice.”
“Yeah,” I say, grabbing my own handful of chips.
My phone pings in my pocket. “I’m on call,” I tell Ethan apologetically, as I pull it out and read the message.
I’d hoped it would be a text from Melissa, but it’s the hospital, asking me to call the ward. My heart sinks; my colon cancer patient must be crashing. As I wait for the nurse to answer the phone, I mentally prepare myself to drive in and take him back to the OR.
The nurse finally answers. As it turns out, no one’s crashing; she just wants me to order eyedrops for a patient with dry eyes.
“Another life saved,” Ethan says sarcastically after I hang up. He glances at his watch. “A ten P.M. call for eyedrops, huh?”
“Yep.”
“Do you ever wonder why you went to med school, Luke?” he asks. “I mean, you’re a smart guy. You could have done finance or something, made a shit-ton more money.”
“I guess so.”
Ethan takes a sip of water before he continues. “This morning I had a patient whine at me because he didn’t like his breakfast. Does he think I control what comes out of the hospital kitchen? If you’re well enough to whine about the food, you should probably go home and make your own fucking breakfast.”
“Yeah,” I agree. Ethan isn’t wrong.
“But you can’t tell a patient to go home and make hisown fucking breakfast,” he continues. “Because he’d probably complain to admin. Then you’d get your wrist slapped by some middle manager who’s never held a scalpel. Someone who’s never stood next to an operating table at two A.M. and sweated because a patient’s bleeding out.”
“Yeah.”
“There’s no respect anymore,” Ethan continues. “Admin tries to tell us how to do our jobs, but wants us to take all the responsibility.” He pauses and crunches a potato chip. “I guess I’m the real sucker, because I don’t even need to work. I could sit on my ass all day watching Netflix. Live off my trust fund.”
I raise an eyebrow. I knew Ethan’s family was wealthy—his dad’s a well-known surgeon in Montreal—but I didn’t know he was rich enough to have a trust fund. It’s the sort of information he’d never share if he wasn’t tipsy.
“My grandfather founded the Cochrane Corporation,” he explains.
“Wow.” Cochrane’s one of the biggest property developers in the country. Ethan really does have the money to sit on his ass all day.
“Uh huh,” he says. “But I still chose to torture myself by becoming a surgeon.”
“Because you didn’t want to live off inherited money, and you knew you’d get bored of Netflix.”
He shrugs. “My sister doesn’t work, and she seems pretty happy. She’s surfing in California this week.”
“Yeah, but you’re doing something worthwhile. You’ve helped a lot of people, Ethan.”
He shrugs again, and I can tell he doesn’t really believe me. “A lot of people in Montreal thought I was a nepo baby. Said I only got into surgery because of my dad.”
