Reborn: This Time, I'm Divorcing Him First novel · Chapter 18 of 32

Chapter 18: The Committee

"Employee health had it," I said. "Nobody else."

"Employee health doesn't call press conferences."

"No."

Ethan put his hands on his hips and looked up at the sky.

"Every fitness flag on a surgeon goes up to the board," he said. "The patient safety committee. They decide who keeps operating."

"Who sits on it?"

"Five people."

He looked down at me.

"The chair since last spring is Margaret Ashworth."

I'd known that.

She'd written the hospital a check for ten million dollars when Harold's arrest scared every other donor off.

She'd asked for one thing in return. A seat.

I'd sat in a staff meeting and listened to them thank her.

"She read my labs before I finished my first case," I said.

"And she called Camille."

"And she drove her here."

A siren started up at the ambulance bay and stopped again.

Ethan didn't move.

"Show me," he said.

I handed him my phone.

He read the panel, fast and then again slowly.

Then he swiped to the picture I'd saved from the exam room.

His thumb stopped on the black circles.

"Both sides?"

"Both sides."

"Why didn't you come find me?"

"Because the second I told you, you'd start fixing it. I wanted one more case where I was only a surgeon."

"You didn't trust me with it."

"I don't trust anybody with my body. The last man who had a say signed my name."

His voice cracked down the middle of the next thing.

"I'm not him."

He turned away and pressed his fist against the brick.

"I know," I said. "That's why it scared me." He looked at me over his shoulder.

Then he came back and put his arms around me in the staff lot, in front of an ambulance crew and a man smoking in a hospital gown.

He held on hard.

"No more six-forties," he said into my hair.

"No more."

We walked home together at seven.

Our walk-up was on East 69th, three floors, no elevator, a radiator that clanked worse than the one in my old studio.

Ethan had picked the place because of that radiator.

He said he was sentimental.

He went straight to the kitchen and started cooking.

I sat on the counter and watched him chop an onion into dust.

"I'm getting tested tomorrow," he said.

"You can't."

"Watch me."

"Ethan. You're the chief of transplant. If you're not my donor, you'd be the one who wants to be my surgeon."

"I'd rather be your donor."

"And if you're a match, who takes it out of you? Who puts it in me? Your fellows?"

He put the knife down.

"I don't care who holds the knife."

"I do."

"Then we'll find someone you trust."

"I trust you."

"Then let me do this."

He braced both hands on the counter on either side of my knees.

He was close enough that I could smell onion and the hospital soap on his wrists.

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