Victoria sat very still, turning all of this over in her mind. “I’ve been a good surgeon,” she said, stunned. “Until this happened… this could have happened to anyone. It’s not… my skills are as sharp as they ever have been.”
“Victoria, I know. Believe me, Steve and I have been reminding Marcus of this.” Elaine swallowed, and she did look very upset about it all. “He must be under a great deal of budget cutting pressure from up top, is all we can think. Freeing up the amount of your annual salary plus bonuses would be a real coup for him.”
“I should have known about this.” Victoria shook her head, panic beginning to bubble up from her stomach. “Why didn’t I know about this?”
“We all felt you had enough to deal with. It would have been one more thing on your plate.” Elaine spread her hands out, her face helpless. “I didn’t want there to be anything hampering your recovery.”
“But I don’t… this…” And then it hit her.We all felt…all? Who was all? “Did Anna know about this?”
The hunted look returned. “I…”
“Did she?”
Elaine closed her eyes and took in a deep breath through her nose. “Yes. She found out during the last evaluatory panel meeting we had with her.”
Victoria froze. “And when was this?” she whispered.
“A few weeks ago,” Elaine admitted.
Weeks.Weeks. Panic gave way to the gnawing acid of betrayal. “She knew,” Victoria breathed, her hands curling into fists. “Sheknew.”
“Steve and I agreed that you shouldn’t know, Victoria.” Standing up, Elaine came from around her desk and crouched down in front of Victoria, taking her hands. “It was our idea. We told Anna not to tell you, explicitly told her. She was not on board.”
“But she knew.” Victoria heard her voice, flat and cold.
“She was under orders,” Elaine said firmly. “She could not tell you. She would have, she wanted us to. Told us we needed to sooner rather than later. I don’t think she felt comfortable with keeping anything from you.”
Logically, she understood it. Emotionally, she still felt the sting of betrayal deep in the pit of her stomach. She was careful as she pulled her hands away from Elaine’s and got to her feet. “Thank you for letting me know.”
Elaine stood as well. “Please don’t do anything rash, Victoria.”
“You don’t need to worry about me.” Already, Cameron’s work on getting her to sit with her emotions and examine them before reacting was paying off. Victoria was furious, but she was going to go to her office right now and think about things calmly and rationally. She had surgeries to perform today herself, and she did not need betrayal, anger, and fear over losing her job to distract her.
No, she would not do anything rash. “I’ll be in my office if anyone needs me before I do my rounds.” She offered Elaine one short, sharp nod. “Thank you for your time.”
As she walked stiffly towards her office, Victoria felt her mobile buzz in her pocket. She pulled it out to see a new message from Anna.Hope your day is going well! Dinner later?
For a long moment, Victoria stared at the message. Then she put her mobile back into her pocket, leaving it unanswered. “My day isnotgoing well,” she muttered as she unlocked her office door. “It’s not going well atall.”
And she slammed the door behind her so hard, the bang made all the metal blinds in her windows rattle.
Things did not improve at all over the next twenty-four hours.
In fact, they got far, far worse.
Victoria had managed to send a fairly innocuous message back to Anna to decline the dinner invitation, citing exhaustion and a heavy surgical schedule. Anna’s reply ofOh! Another time then. had been simple and innocent enough, but in Victoria’s current state of mind, she read passive-aggression into it and it only made her more angry with Anna.
She thought her heightened temper might be making her overly paranoid as well. It felt like people were giving her sidelong glances everywhere she went. But she’d had things under control for weeks now. No freezes in the OR. All procedures completed well with excellent patient outcomes. So surely she was imagining it.
Except, she realized, she wasn’t. And it really was everywhere she went in the hospital. All over the Cardio wing, she caught nurses whispering together and looking at her as she went about her rounds. In the cafeteria, fellow surgeons she barely knew seemed to be gossiping and staring at her, looking hastily away if she spotted them. Even Ashley noticed. “Butwhywould Priya Majumdar from Oncology be gossiping about you with…” She squinted to try and see who was hustling out of the cafeteriawith the oncological surgeon. “I think that’s Nate Foster from Trauma.”
Victoria vaguely remembered Nate from that awful afternoon with the mass casualty event. He’d been on the team with her to try and save the unfortunate burn victim. “I don’t really know how anyone knows each other half the time.”
Ashley was chewing on a piece of chicken from her salad and frowning. “It’s a strange pairing, trust me. Oh, hi, sweetheart.” She was beaming as Dr. Jen Colton, the hospital’s transplant coordinator, walked up with her own salad and joined them at the table. The two women had been together for some time. “Lovely to see you.”
“As if you didn’t see me just this morning.” Jen chuckled, blue eyes twinkling as she pulled a hair elastic out of her hair and tidied up her soft white ponytail. “Hello, Victoria. Ashley, my love, why was Majumdar hightailing it out of here like you put the fear of God in her?”
“It wasn’t me,” Ashley protested. “I’ve been incredibly nice to her lately.”
