Reborn: This Time, I'm Divorcing Him First novel · Chapter 3 of 32

Chapter 3: Hands

Natalie saves a stranger in the St. Brigid's lobby and wins her way back into surgery, then finds a donor referral with her forged signature.

I looked at his hand on the elevator door.

"Then you'd better start calling tonight," I said. "Because I'll be there at seven."

I pressed the button again.

This time he let go.

I spent that night in a motel in Murray Hill that smelled like carpet cleaner.

I had eleven thousand dollars in a savings account in my maiden name.

Residency money. The only money in my life Nathaniel had never touched.

At six in the morning I walked into St. Brigid's Medical Center.

A brand-new building stood across the courtyard.

Gold letters over the doors said THE ASHWORTH WING.

Nathaniel's company had paid thirty million dollars for it.

I went in the other door.

Dr. Ethan Cross's office was on the ninth floor, at the end of the transplant hall.

He'd been my senior resident.

He was chief of transplant surgery now.

His door was open. He was eating a banana over a stack of charts.

He looked up and stopped chewing.

"Lane."

Nobody had called me that in five years.

"It's Ashworth," I said. "For now."

He set the banana down.

"You look like hell."

"I slept in a motel."

"Why?"

"I left my husband last night."

He leaned back in his chair and looked at me for a long time.

His dark hair was longer than I remembered. There was gray at his temples now.

"Three years ago I told you not to quit," he said. "You told me I didn't understand love."

"You didn't. Neither did I."

"What do you want, Natalie?"

"A job. Any job. I'll take call. I'll take nights. I'll hold retractors for interns."

He shook his head slowly.

"You've been out for three years. Your spot's gone. The board would never sign off. And your husband's name is on that building across the street."

"I know."

"So you know it's a no."

I'd expected that.

I turned to leave.

In the hallway, somebody screamed.

A man in a gray suit was down on the floor by the elevators.

His wife was on her knees beside him, shaking his shoulder.

I was running before I thought about it.

He was sweating and gray. His lips were blue.

His neck veins bulged.

I put two fingers on his wrist. Fast and thin.

I pressed my ear to his chest.

The heart sounds were far away.

"He had heart surgery last week," his wife sobbed. "They sent him home Friday."

Blood was filling the sac around his heart.

It was squeezing it shut.

"I need a long needle, a syringe, and an ultrasound," I said. "Now."

A nurse stared at me.

"Who are you?"

Ethan's voice came from behind me.

"Do what she says."

The nurse ran.

A moment later I was kneeling on the floor with a needle in my hand.

I hadn't held one in three years.

My hands didn't shake.

I slid it in under his breastbone, angled toward his left shoulder.

I watched the screen.

Dark blood filled the syringe.

I pulled back again. And again.

The man gasped.

Color came back into his lips.

His wife burst into tears.

A crowd had gathered around us. Nurses. Two interns. A janitor with his mop.

Someone started clapping.

The code team arrived and took over.

I stood up. My knees were wet from the floor.

Ethan was leaning on the wall with his arms folded.

"Three years," he said.

"Three years."

"You didn't even check the landmarks twice."

"I didn't need to."

He pushed off the wall.

"Probationary fellowship. Ninety days. You scrub on my cases only. One mistake and the board eats us both."

"Deal."

"You start now."

He handed me a pager.

By noon I was in navy scrubs with my hair in a knot.

I felt like I'd put my own skin back on.

At four, Ethan called me back to his office.

He wasn't smiling.

He turned his monitor so I could see it.

"This came in from an outside clinic an hour ago," he said. "They want to do the transplant here."

It was a directed-donor referral from the Pierce Renal Clinic.

Recipient: Camille Hollister.

Referring physician: Dr. Stuart Pierce.

Living donor: Natalie Ashworth.

At the bottom was a scanned consent form.

My name was signed on the line.

In my handwriting.

Except I had torn that form in half and thrown it away.

I leaned closer.

The loops were too careful.

It was the signature of someone who had watched me sign birthday cards for five years.

"Is that yours?" Ethan asked.

"No," I said. "That's my husband's."

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