Sadie
Tuesday starts wrong.
My alarm doesn't go off, which means my phone died in the night. The outlet by my bed must be bad, so I need to remember to buy a power strip I can't afford. I'm out the door in nineteen minutes with damp hair and no breakfast, and I'm chewing a glucose tab at the corner of Chandler and Fifth because I forgot to eat one before I left and my legs feel like cotton wool.
I hate this. I hate rushing. Rushing is how I make mistakes, and I don't want to make mistakes at work.
It’s colder than yesterday and my coat isn't quite enough as I walk with my hands in my pockets and my chin tucked into the collar. I move past the closed dry cleaner, the bar that props its door open in the afternoons, and a woman walking a small white dog that sniffs at my flats and then loses interest. It's six blocks from my building to the corner of Chandler and Fifth, and somewhere around the third block the back of my neck starts to prickle.
There’s no one behind me when I glance over my shoulder. I keep walking. The prickle doesn't go away. I tell myself it's the groceries or the fact that I know now that somebody, somewhere, watched me look at blueberries in a corner store and bought them for me. I tell myself that's enough to make any woman feel paranoid for the next week of her life, and thatI should file it under the growing list of things I don’t have the bandwidth to think about on a workday morning before I’ve even had my first coffee.
I pull my coat tighter and I walk the rest of the way to the clinic without looking behind me again. The prickle stays until I push through the staff door and the warmth of the lobby closes around me, and then, in the business of the day, it is gone.
Priya is already at the coffee machine. She looks at my wet hair and hands me a cup without asking.
"Rough morning?" she asks, a sympathetic tilt to her head.
"Phone died,” I manage after a gulp of hot coffee.
"Happens." She watches me take another sip. "You eaten?"
"Glucose tab."
She opens a drawer and pushes a granola bar across the counter at me. "Eat that. Dr. Mehta's got a heavy morning. You're in rooms three and five."
I eat the granola bar standing up in the break room while scrolling through the appointments diary. My hands have the faint tremor they get when I've run my sugar down, and I breathe slowly as I wait for the carbs to catch up with me. By the time I'm pulling my scrub top over my t-shirt, I'm steady again.
Work settles me the way it always does. The smell of the soap, the steady whirring and then clean beep of a blood pressure reading. I’m good at this. I’m good at this, and nobody at this clinic has any reason to think otherwise.
I pull up my schedule on the tablet.
Eight, a twelve-year-old with a sinus infection. Eight-thirty, a new patient intake, male, forty-one, name blocked out on my screen asConfidentialbecause Dr. Mehta has a handful of patients she rooms herself for reasons she doesn't explain and I don't ask. Nine, an annual physical. Nine-thirty, a sports injury.
I like the rhythm of it. I like knowing what's coming.
By ten-fifteen I'm washing my hands at the sink outside room two and thinking about whether I'm going to walk to the deli at lunch or eat the sad peanut butter sandwich I made in a rush this morning.
Denise rounds the corner with her arms full of paper charts.
"Sadie. Mehta wants you in four."
"I thought four was hers."
"She's running behind in six. Needs you to do the vitals and the intake. Follow-up on stitches." She's already past me. "Patient's already in the room. Big guy. Tip your head up, not down, he'll scare the shit out of you if you're not ready."
My hand is on the door before the words catch up to me.
Big guy.
I open the door.
He's standing beside the exam table.
He turns his head to look at me, and for one second the whole room goes silent. Gray eyes. Dark hair. A charcoal suit jacket draped neatly on the exam table beside him. The sleeve of his white shirt is rolled up over a bandage on his left bicep, similar to the one that I taped there myself eleven days ago.
My hand is still on the door.
"Good morning," he says.
