I leave the room, congratulating them both. My feet skid into Pod A, our dictation room, before I collapse into a chair in laughter. The counter is cluttered with travel mugs, binders sporting the Corpus Christi Medical Center logo, filled with the pervasive specter known asHospital Policy—a greedy and foolish god, if we’re being truthful—and four desktop computers. Above it all, the fetal monitors display squiggly lines for two other patients in labor on the floor.
Luckily, neither patient is mine.
Need sleep. Laughter is now impossible to contain. Misty eyes, aching abs—the whole bit.
“What is it?” asks Raquel, one of the nurses, peeking up from her computer.
I shake my head. Too tired to explain.
A quick badge-tap and the desktop wakes, signing me in to our electronic medical record called LEGENDARY. Aspirational thinking on the part of the people who named it, I’m sure. LEGENDARY will go down in history as nothing but an epic failure. Like Blockbuster. Or Elizabeth Holmes.
As I type, Jocelyn plonks into the rollie chair next to mine, spinning to face me. She’s got her I-need-sleep-you-better-have-good-news face on.
Heh. Sleepy Joss is fantastic. Prickly. A bit cheeky. Always good for a laugh.
I grin. “Hey there, bestie, you need something?”
Small hands grip my arm and shake it, peppering my delivery note with typos. “Please tell me she delivered, so I can go home.”
The harsh fluorescent lighting brings out the dark circles beneath Joss’s warm brown eyes. I tug on a blond lock escaped from her bun and tickle her nose with it. “Is someone a little grumpy?”
She shoos away my hand. “It’s three a.m., Asher. Only people like you are chipper at this hour.”
“People like me?”
“Yeah.” She gestures toward me, face scrunched. “Happy people.Optimists.”
“Wow.” I fire a bright smile at her. “How’d that word taste coming out of your mouth?”
“Like acid. So, is she delivered?”
I finish the delivery note with a relish and spin toward her. “Signed. Sealed. Delivered.”
She throws her arms in the air, her chair whirling. “Hallelujah.”
The anesthesiologists don’t normally take their overnight calls in the hospital, but when a laboring patient has an epidural, the on-call doc is required to remain in-house until delivery. Joss isn’t a fan of that rule. Or any other rules, really. She’s zipped up in her white Patagonia vest—the uniform of all anesthesiologists everywhere—clearly ready to bounce. Her teal scrub cap peeks out of the breast pocket. It’s patterned with little pink flowers and script letters that sayDon’t Be Extra.
Jocelyn’s favorite phrase.
Once she’s completed a full rotation, I grab her knees to stop her. A glance at the nearby nurses ensures they’re distracted by their own conversation.
She arches one brow. “What’s up?”
The mail I received this morning still burns a hole in my scrub pants pocket, and I’ve been waiting all day to show her. After three years of dedicated service as my best friend, Joss knows me better than anyone. She can read my expressions like words on paper. Open book. Boldface font.
Don’t really want her intuiting what I’m thinking now.
Panicky feeling rises. Suppress. Suppress. Suppress.
Wouldn’t bother her with this, but I just need to hear her thoughts.
With a lowered voice, I ask, “Meet me in the call room after you check on the patient?”
She fake-gasps. “Does someone have a secret? Are you the one who stole Doctor O’Malley’s DIVA Cup?”
“That’s a weird place for your mind to go—”
Her eyes widen comically. “Wait! Did the patient in room seven finally decide clitoral stimulation isn’t adequate pain relief?”
