Victoria nodded. “I did supervise Dr. Proctor’s work, though she hardly needed it. Once we had the new vessels, while they were closing up the entry points in the patient’s legs, I began my phase of the surgery.”
Anna noticed that Victoria had gone from “Mr. Jennings” to “the patient.”Detaching herself, creating a distance from the patient and the events.She didn’t dare make a note of it, but she would once Victoria had left the office.
Victoria kept explaining the surgery, every tiny little step she had taken. Anna couldn’t follow along with most of it, but she could follow along with Victoria’s microscopically small shifts in expression and posture. The deeper she got into the weeds of her descriptions, the more her hands tightened around the mug she held until she set it aside. Then she reached up to tuck a strand of hair behind her ear, though all of her hair was precisely smoothed back into that low chignon from which no flaxen lock dared escape. The jade pendant, the ribbed collar of her sweater, the golden links of her still too-loose watch, none of it escaped being fiddled with, and Anna was sure Victoria didn’t even realize she was doing it.
She was also surely not aware that her voice grew more and more detached and distant the further along she got, that her gaze wandered to a point above Anna’s head and remained there, unfocused.She’s dissociating, Anna noted with a pang in her heart.
If Victoria knew how much she was revealing right now, she’d run out screaming. All Anna could do was hold her breath as the litany went on, growing increasingly drone-like. What she wanted to do was get up and wrap her arms around the other woman, hold her tight and assure her she was in a safe space to collapse. But she didn’t dare.
“…I accepted the needles and the filaments from the scrub nurse, and we were prepared to close.” Victoria’s hand wrapped around the jade pendant at her throat. “The alarms went off before I could begin. I knew what it had to be immediately. A pulmonary embolism. We pushed Heparin…” The slow droneof her voice was interrupted by the smallest hitch, then she faltered. “I attempted defib. I placed the paddles on her chest?—”
Her?Anna sat up straight.
“However, we were unable to resuscitate Ms. Jensen?—”
Jensen?The patient had been Jennings…
Abruptly, Victoria stood up, grabbing her bag as she went. “Excuse me,” she gasped out, and before Anna could say a word, she was gone from the office at top speed. Anna’s first impulse was to run after her, but she managed to wrestle it under control.
She wondered if Victoria knew just how many clues to her breakdown she’d just revealed. Anna now had a handful of breadcrumbs she could take to Elaine Martin and get some answers. What she would do with those answers, she couldn’t begin to know. But she supposed the first step, once she had them, would be to get Victoria back into her office. If she could.
Anna looked up at her office clock.
An entire hour had, somehow, passed. As shattered as Victoria had been when she ran out, she’d still finally gotten through the full session.
“We did it once, we can do it again,” Anna said aloud, and went off to find Elaine Martin.
5
VICTORIA
Victoria smoothed her hair back, bundling the honey-gold waves into a thick ponytail at the nape of her neck. With practiced fingers, she coiled the mass into a large chignon and pinned it in place. A bit of water and a comb had any bold wisps tamed. She turned her head from side to side, examining it closely in the large mirror in her gleaming, spotlessly clean bathroom.
She’d spent hours just last night scrubbing the floor tiles with a fresh new toothbrush. Why not? It wasn’t like she was sleeping.
It had been three days since she’d gotten up and walked out on Anna Monroe after recounting David Jennings’ disastrous surgery. Her memory of that hour was incredibly foggy. She had the nagging feeling that somehow, despite her carefully chosen words, she had revealed too much of something.
Neither Anna nor Elaine Martin had reached out to her to set up another appointment, which only fueled her paranoia. The silence was deafening, and they had to be plotting something.I said something. I gave something away. But what? What? What did I say? What could I have possibly said?
She had to shake this off. Today she had an extremely critical surgery scheduled, a full pneumonectomy. The removal of an entire adult lung wasn’t a task Victoria took lightly. She’d only done it a few times in her career, because it was rather a drastic step to take in one’s cancer journey. It was a procedure that would radically affect her patient’s entire remaining life. This patient, a middle-aged woman named Gina Cuthbert, was a marathon-running, sourdough-baking, fiery little dynamo of a home health nurse who just had the bad luck to contract lung cancer. She was looking forward to getting back to her life as near to normal as she could manage it, and Victoria was determined to help her on that journey.
It was the biggest surgery she’d been allowed to schedule since the day she had frozen in the OR and Ashley had had to take over. Today was a day thatcould notgo wrong.
What thefuckhad she said to Anna Monroe?
Closing her eyes, Victoria took a long, deep breath in through her nose and held it, willing herself to set this one specific nagging fear aside. “Now is not the time,” she said aloud, squeezing her eyes more tightly shut, her hands wrapping around the white porcelain rim of her sink. “Not now. Not today.”
Not ever, if she had her way about it. Victoria opened her eyes and pointed at her reflection. “Donotfuck this up, Victoria.”
She needed steady hands and a cool head today. And her best armor. Clad only in a red La Perla bra and panty set, she pushed away from the sink and headed into her bedroom, making a beeline for the closet. Her fingers flipped nimbly through the hangers, over plastic dry-cleaning bags that crinkled under her touch. Today was a day for something tailored, for clean lines, sharp enough to cut.
A pair of black wool trousers she’d had specially tailored for a close fit at Knatchbull in London went on first, the side zip moving as though it had been buttered. Then a Givenchy blouse, stark white and starched within an inch of its life. It, too, had been tailored to nip in at her waistline, though she noticed that as Anna had pointed out the other day, all of her clothing was a touch too large now. It spoiled the line, but there was nothing Victoria could do about it other than move on. She tucked the blouse into the trousers and wrapped an extra-wide leather belt around her waist.
Hermès ankle boots went over thin cashmere socks, and then Victoria put on her jewelry. Her jade pendant, and the delicate gold watch her mother had given her when she graduated from medical school. She’d finally gone to a jeweler to have a few links removed, so now there was no risk she would lose it to a rogue handwave.
Victoria looked in her bedroom mirror. Smoothly polished perfection, there was no other way to put it. She looked sharp, cool, wholly inaccessible, an iceberg in human form. Woe betide any passing ship.
Armor complete, she picked up her bag and coat and strode confidently out to her car. Today was going to be an incredible day.
