I Was Billed For Every Minute Of Their Love novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Dr. Kearney

The man who texted her goodbye two years ago starts Monday and treats her like a stranger, until she watches him give a scared boy forty free minutes. Her father walks in.

Monday night, the whiteboard at the nurses' station said ATTENDING: KEARNEY in green marker.

Bev had written it herself, and she had underlined it twice, which was not like her.

"I can move you to day float this week," she said. "Nobody would ask why."

"I'm not rearranging my life for a text from two years ago."

"I didn't say rearranging. I said moving."

"Same thing."

"It really isn't," Bev said, and went to find a chart.

At seven-fifteen, he walked in.

He was taller than I remembered, and there was gray in his dark hair above the ears that had not been there before.

He read the board, and the room, and then he found me.

For one second his face did something I couldn't read.

Then it went smooth.

"Nurse Sorensen."

"Dr. Kearney."

"Good to see you."

He said it to a spot just over my shoulder.

My stomach dropped, and I picked up the nearest chart and read the same line three times.

I took the next patient and gave him the rest of the department.

For three hours, that was the whole arrangement.

He was precise and quiet, and he said please to the techs.

He caught an allergy I had missed on a chart and fixed it without a word about it.

That made me angrier than if he had said something.

At ten-twenty, a boy came in with a broken arm.

He was seven, and a neighbor had dropped him off because his mother was working a double and couldn't leave.

He sat on the gurney with his good hand clamped around a stuffed rabbit.

He hadn't said a word to triage or to me.

I knew that look.

It belonged to a kid who had learned that asking for things cost more than it was worth.

I knew it because I used to wear it.

Eli came in to set the arm, and I held out the padding.

He reached for the roll of stockinette at the same moment I did.

Our hands met on the cardboard tube.

His fingers were warm, and neither of us moved.

For the first time all night he looked straight at me, and I looked back.

"Sorry," he said.

I let go first, and I hated that I did.

He had the splint on before the boy had time to be afraid of it.

His shift was an orientation half, and it ended at eleven.

At eleven, he pulled a stool up to the gurney.

He looked at the rabbit, not the boy.

"Does he have a name?"

The boy looked at him for a long time.

"Mr. Pickle," he whispered.

"I'm very sorry, Mr. Pickle. I know this is all very boring for you."

He asked the boy to settle something for him, whether a dinosaur or a shark was better.

It took the boy a long while to commit to the shark.

The neighbor went out to move her car and did not come back.

Eli stayed.

The boy's good hand crept out from the rabbit and began to show him how a shark's teeth grew in rows.

I stood at the curtain with a tray I no longer needed.

I wanted him to check the clock.

I wanted him to be exactly what I had decided he was.

He never looked at it once.

The boy's mother arrived at midnight, still in her work uniform.

Eli stood and told her the arm was a clean break and her son had been brave.

Then he told her, "He'll want his rabbit for the cast, so bring it."

She started to cry.

He pretended he hadn't seen.

I followed him into the hallway before I could stop myself.

"That was an hour," I said.

"I know."

"You were off at eleven."

"I know when I was off."

He wouldn't look at me, so I said it flat, in the voice I used for reading numbers off a monitor.

"I can't see you anymore. I'm sorry."

He went very still.

"That's the whole text," I said. "You sent it on a Wednesday, and then you blocked me. I wanted to make sure you remembered it, because I do."

A muscle moved in his jaw.

"Libby."

"Two years, Doctor. I'd like to know what I did."

"You didn't do anything."

"That's what I thought you'd say."

I turned to go, and he said my name again, lower.

"It was never about you. I can't tell you why. I wish I could."

"That's not an answer."

"No," he said. "It isn't."

My palm still remembered the cardboard tube, and I closed my hand around nothing.

Then the double doors at the end of the hall swung open.

A silver-haired man in a charcoal coat came through them with the fast, level stride I had known my whole life.

A step behind him was Dalton, and beside Dalton walked a heavyset man in a board member's lanyard.

My father checked his watch.

"Four minutes to find you," he said. "Hello, Libby."

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