“Like respect,” Roland provided, though he knew that wasn’t exactly helpful as soon as her lovely brow furrowed. “For example,” he said, lifting a finger, “we stop paying for night patrols and they give us a medical student or two for the night shifts. The student gets their teaching case experience during the witching hours, and because one of their own is working inside, they won’t resume attacks.”
“Oh,” said Mae, staring at him wide-eyed. “Oh, that is brilliant, Roland.”
“Well,” he said with a shrug and half a smile. “I wasn’t going to say so.”
“No,” said Ezra. “I mean, yes, that is damned genius and we should definitely add it to the list, but that’s still a trade, not a demand. They need to retract those articles they wrote about us. About you.”
“A retraction is going to wound their pride,” Mae reasoned, chewing at her lip. “It might be more sensible instead to suggest they cosign our rebuttal. They save face and we nudge the narrative back into place over time.”
“That’s fine and well,” Roland said. “But hardly worth being on the table at this meeting. People forget gossip in a matter of weeks, most of the time. Mention it, yes, but it’s not your demand. Just another thing they need to set right. We’re still balancing the scales with that one, not demanding recompense.”
Mae sighed, digging her fingers into her hips and tilting her head back to look up at the ceiling. The streaks of talc and flecks of black thread on her apron shone in the shafts of afternoon light. “I can’t think of anything,” she confessed, frowning heavenward. “Am I bad at wanting things?”
“Certainly not,” said Roland in a low voice that made Ezra clear his throat and turn pink again.
This got a laugh out of Roland and a snapping glare from Mae.
“If we weren’t already overwhelmed with students, I’d say they should send us referrals in turn,” Ezra managed, attempting to steer the conversation back to comfort. “Training the injured and permanently ill for better vocation is a worthy cause, but one we’re already drowning in.”
“Education,” said Roland thoughtfully. “Now that is an idea. We can ask them to sponsor education for our healers, not our patients, couldn’t we?”
“I don’t follow,” said Ezra. “Our healers are already trained.”
“Today they are,” said Roland. “Nothing is permanent. And new innovations are always happening, aren’t they? We want to be prepared for Dr. Bethel retiring one day. For the clinic expanding and needing more hands, and so on, too.”
“Winston,” said Mae softly, seeing directly through all of his careful explanations. “You want to send Winston to school.”
He looked back at her and deflated a little, realizing there really was no need to build a façade around his ultimate desire. “Yes,” he said. “He deserves a chance to be a real doctor, Mae. Doesn’t he?”
She was still for a moment, as though each word were landing in her ears with a buffer of seconds between them, her big dark eyes blinking slowly, and then she stepped around the desk, bent down, grabbed his cheeks, and kissed him very hard on the mouth.
Poor Ezra cleared his throat three times and stared at the floor. “It is a good idea,” he mumbled. “Winston’s a good boy.”
Mae pulled back from the kiss, her eyes sparkling and her dimples deep in her cheeks before she released Roland’s face and turned back to her sheets.
“So let’s make amendments,” she said, tapping them. “This one is the draft of the official letter I’ll bring. Ezra, I’ll need you to help me pretty up the language. Roland, if you can think of any other patients for the list, we will add them now. And this is just my thinking sheet. I’ll add all our new ideas here.”
“I’ll get you a quill,” Ezra said, lurching up and darting to the sideboard in enthusiasm for his task. “This is thrilling. I almost want to cancel today’s class.”
“Don’t,” she said. “Don’t. There is time. We want to get this right. I want to get this right.”
Roland reached out and took her wrist, sliding his fingers down until they laced through hers. “You will,” he assured her. “We all know that you will.”
CHAPTER 30
It all came together quite a lot faster than Mae felt properly prepared for, even though she knew, logically, that she was very well prepared, all around.
The entire business had become such a buzz of happening throughout the clinic, and even farther beyond to the doors of Holy Comfort and the Becks’ gambling clubs as well, that she found the oddest people stopping by the clinic to give her well-wishes, advice, and even, in some instances, offering up their own medical peculiarities to aid her cause.
“I’ve an odd hammer toe. Oddest you’ve ever seen,” a man would say, waiting by the door at the crack of dawn.
And then in the evening, as she departed, a woman would emerge from the shadows, whipping away a scarf to present an impressively large goiter, wiggling her eyebrows as though she knew she had a treasure in her throat.
The whole thing was just as heartening as it was ridiculous.
And beside it all was Roland. Perhaps the most surprising thing about all of this, from beginning to end.
“I’ve been thinking quite a lot about what happens after we’ve reached an accord,” he’d said to her over the dinner they had shared in the classroom next to the nursery on the night before the meeting. “When they wave the white flag, so to speak,” he’d said, picking up the towelette to demonstrate, “am I to go back to working nights at the Vixen, whilst you work days here? We’ll never see one another properly again.”
