But I’m pretty sure anything we had for lunch would have tasted delicious. I’m so relieved that Drew’s appointment went well that I can barely focus on everything else. I hadn’t realized how worried I was until Drew told me he was okay, and I felt as if an enormous weight had been lifted off my shoulders.
“Of course I was tempted to stay in Toronto,” Drew replies. “And not just for the food. I’d be on call a lot less often in a bigger department, and there’s more money for research. But . . .”
“But . . .” I prompt.
“The big centers will always be able to recruit good people, and that’s not necessarily true for the smaller ones.”
“You like to fight for the underdog, huh?” I remember Breanna’s comment about Drew having a need to rescue people.
“I guess so, yeah.” Drew’s eyes slide to me for a moment before returning to the road. “And my mother was treated atSomerset Hospital before she died,” he says quietly. “While she was dying, really. She’d been hit by a car while she was crossing the street. Some guy had a heart attack and blew through a red light.”
“Drew, I’m so sorry.”
“Yeah. Thanks.” He glances over at me again. “I should have asked if you wanted to hear this.”
“Yes,” I say immediately. “If you don’t mind telling it.”
He shrugs. “She made it to the hospital, and they operated for seven hours, but they couldn’t save her. She died in the ICU the next day.”
“I’m so sorry.” I know I’m repeating myself, and the words seem inadequate.
“Thanks,” he says. “Anyway, it screwed us all up for a while. Breanna, my dad and me. A couple months later, Breanna got married to a guy she’d basically just met. She was only twenty, but fortunately, it worked out. My dad quit his job and moved to Calgary. He got married again eight months later.”
“Damn,” I say softly.
“Yep,” Drew agrees, and I can tell he hasn’t forgiven his dad for moving on so quickly. “I guess he did what he had to do to cope.”
“And you were how old?”
“Eighteen,” he replies. “I’d just finished first year engineering at Queen’s. And I needed someone to blame, but I couldn’t blame the guy who hit my mother because he was dead. The heart attack killed him. So I decided to blame the doctors who hadn’t been able to save her.”
He meets my eye for a moment before focusing back on the highway. “Somerset’s the smallest trauma center in the country,” he says. “And somehow I convinced myself that if she’d been helicoptered to Toronto, she could have been saved. Or ifshe’d just had better doctors in Somerset. In retrospect, it wasn’t rational, but . . .” he trails off and lets his sentence hang.
“But you were eighteen, and you’d just lost your mom.”
“Yeah. I made my dad request a copy of the hospital records—she’d barely been there twenty-four hours, but there were ninety-seven pages. And I read them over and over, determined to find a mistake. I couldn’t, but I didn’t really know what I was looking for. I even persuaded my dad to meet with a lawyer, but the guy didn’t think there were grounds for a lawsuit.”
He taps his fingers on the steering wheel. “But I still convinced myself that if I’d been a doctor, I could have done better. And when I finished engineering, I went to med school. I couldn’t save my mom, but I guess I thought if I could save other people it might give her death some meaning. It’s a fairly common reason to end up in med school, but I think I was more obsessed than most.”
Drew runs his hand through his hair. “And partway through my residency, I read my mother’s hospital records again.”
“Did you find a mistake?” I ask.
“There was no mistake, Ally,” he says with a sigh. “Even if that accident had happened in the parking lot of the world’s best trauma center, she wouldn’t have survived those injuries. It was a miracle that the team in Somerset kept her alive for as long as they did.”
He’s staring straight ahead so I can only see his profile, but it’s enough to see the weight of his feelings.
“And I guess I felt guilty for blaming them, assuming they were incompetent. I’m not sure it makes sense either, but when I was deciding where to practice, coming back to Somerset just felt right.”
“It makes sense to me,” I tell him.
We don’t talk much for the rest of the drive home, but it’s a comfortable silence. We know each other well enough thatwe can enjoy each other’s company, even if we’re not saying anything.
“Is Hayley the sister who said you didn’t have reflexes?” Drew asks as we drive to Nico’s for dinner.
“Hayley’s my only sister, and she said I barely have reflexes.”
“Hmm.”
