There were a few more vulnerable patients I wanted to keep an eye on so, while I remained behind, Amy had ferried back and forth between the surgery and the care home, handling any scheduled appointments. Spoiler: there still weren’t many.
By Thursday, I’d cleared away so much vomit, I knew I’d never look at porridge the same way. When I finally threatened to fall asleep in a patient’s bed-pan, I took a quick nap on the break-room sofa.
I woke up to find Amy staring at me. “You’re human after all, Macabe. Who’d have guessed?” The words were muffled around a mouthful of cereal.
Standing, I rinsed my face in the small sink. “Do they have many outbreaks like this?”
She’d pushed a limp strand of hair out of her face. “Once or twice a year. Rural care staff are becoming harder and harder to hold on to.” There was no bitterness in her tone. Maybe she was simply too tired to dislike me right then. “You did an okay job, for a city boy. You better hope whoever replaces you can hack it.”
Acid churned in my stomach. I hadn’t heard from Sarah at MedSearch in almost two weeks. I’d barely even thought about it, if I was being honest.
Not that it even mattered until I got the patient feedback scores up. Reports were sent out monthly, so I wouldn’t know how we’d fared for another week or two.
And now I was so dog-tired I couldn’t even bring myself to worry.
In that single day alone I’d seen more patients than in the previous two weeks. Someone had vomited down my shirt, and a ninety-year-old resident named Mrs Gillespie had attempted to grope my arse while I’d performed an abdominal palpation. But I felt jittery. More alive than I had in a long, long time.
How practising medicine used to make me feel.
Or maybe it was Isla, because when I checked my phone while turning on the coffee pot, I saw that, at some point during the day, she’d sent me a text. Done avoiding me, it seemed.
I swiped it open to find a selfie, hand squeezing around the phone.
I hadn’t seen her in almost a week, and I ate up the sight of her.
Her hair was out of its braid, long curls framing her face as she smiled into the camera, the strappy little sleeves of a sundress slipping off one shoulder. She looked beautiful. A little sultry. Pure Isla.
Save this as your background. It’ll make it more convincing, her text read.
No need to ask me twice.
Before I could reply, my phone rang in my hand. I brought it to my ear, half in a daze.
“Where are you?” Her voice spooled out. A taut, golden thread.
“The care home at Corry.” Less than a twenty-minute drive from Kinleith. It suddenly felt like the other side of the world.
“Yes, thank you. Find My Friends already showed me that.”
“What?”Was I still dreaming?
In a blink, I recalled her on her back, biting her lower lip as she arched through one orgasm then another.Fuck.
“Jeez, it’s a joke. Lighten up. I’m making sure you aren’t dead.” I heard what she didn’t say:Making sure things aren’t weird between us.
“Worried about me, Lang?”
I heard her huff, and something in my chest eased. This was good.Normal.
“I’m too young to be a widow, and I look terrible in black.” I didn’t point out that we’d need to be married for that – usually I wouldn’t have been able to help myself, but on this occasion, I was more than happy to listen to her mind whirl. “I mean, full disclosure on the tracking thing . . . I tried the day you gave me your number, but you don’t have your location turned on.”
Was it weird that I had the sudden urge to track her? Not for stalkerish reasons. Well, perhaps for slightly stalkerish reasons. But then I would see that little Isla dot make it safely home from work, safe in the knowledge that hunk of junk she called a car hadn’t let her down again. “You scare me, Isla.”
“Yes, yes. Now, are you alone?”
“No.”
“Good. Repeat exactly what I tell you.”
