“Rough day?” I ask, stepping beside her to take a cup of my own.
She jolts hard enough to slosh coffee onto her hand, then groans when she sees me. “Jesus, Nathaniel. You walk quieter than a corpse.”
Mentally preparing oneself to commit murder and then seeing it done will do that to a person, I suppose.
I almost smile at that. Almost.
“Sorry.” I flash her an apologetic look instead. “Been wanting to disappear lately. All those stares have me feeling weird.”
It’s not particularly a lie, but it’s not particularly true either. A perfect in-between. The kind of half-confession that raises the probability of her taking pity on me, softening her guard, making her more keen to offer up the information I want to fish out of her. Manipulation dressed as vulnerability. My specialty, if I’m being honest.
Marisa puts her hands on the counter. Her shoulders drop.
“You should take some time off, you know?” she says. “Get a breather.”
“Nah.” I pour the hot water into my cup without meeting her eyes, watching the steam curl instead and letting the silence sit for exactly the right amount of time. “Wouldn’t even know what to do with myself. Here there’s at least always something to do.”
“Understatement of the year,” she mutters.
I take the opportunity to ask about her shift. To my pleasant surprise, she follows along. She tells me about a few urgent cases that came in while I was gone, her voice loosening the way it always does when she’s talking medicine instead of feelings. She doesn’t ask how I am. She doesn’t mention my mother’s death. There is discomfort in her, though. I can see it in the way she holds her cup a little too tightly, in the pauses she fills with sips instead of words.
She is trying so hard to be kind without being intrusive.
Eventually, when she starts drinking her coffee in earnest, I decide to land the hook.
“I need this, I think.” I gesture in a circle with my finger, pointing around us. “Keeps me going.”
“Yeah? Not thinking about changing professions? I know I do.”
“Professions?” I echo. “Never. Hospitals? Maybe.”
She lifts her brows but doesn’t push.
That’s Marisa. She has this quality about her, a kind of deliberate gentleness, where she never steps on anyone’s toes, never asks questions that corner a person into answering unless it’s a patient on her table and she needs the truth to do her job. Her discretion about my mother’s death comes from the same place. She heard, she acknowledged it, and she sealed it away behind that careful, polished courtesy of hers.
It would be endearing if it didn’t make my plan a little too difficult.
“I’ve been thinking about taking an offer I got once for a private clinic,” I say.
Only now she’s willing to bite.
“Where?”
“Westbridge Private Clinic.”
She puts the coffee onto the table and stares at me. Not a casual look. A stare.
“That’s a name I haven’t heard in a while,” she says.
“I was offered a position there a few months ago,” I say. “I didn’t take it, but... who knows? Maybe it’s exactly what I need.”
“I mean...” she blows a raspberry. “With your credentials, they’d be lucky to have you, but...”
She hesitates.
“But?”
Marisa licks her lips and looks at her coffee. Then a slow wince crawls onto her face like it’s something dragged unwillingly to the surface, and I know this is the moment. Push now or lose it. Whatever feeling’s got her acting like this will pass, overtaken by her politeness, swallowed by that instinct she has to smooth things over and keep the peace, and I won’t get another opening.
