The Surgeon He Betrayed Now Belongs to a CEO novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Groom Outside the Glass
On the day her mentor marries her sister, Imogen finishes a six-hour surgery on a stranger, resigns, and flies out of Boston; three years later a board email names the new owner who invited her home.
My sister's wedding began at two o'clock on a Saturday, and at two o'clock I was holding a stranger's spleen together with my fingers.
I was supposed to be in a church in Brookline in a pale green dress.
I had traded my shift for the whole weekend to be her maid of honor.
Then a truck jumped the barrier on the harbor bridge, and the ER called every surgeon in the building.
I was the closest one, and I texted Fiona that I'd be an hour.
She wrote back: "Don't rush, Immy. Honestly, it's easier this way. Nobody will even notice."
I read it once and put the phone in my locker.
The patient was a man in his late thirties with no wallet, no phone and no name.
The trauma nurse cut away his shirt and found a thin chain with a small silver medal on it.
I snipped the chain myself and dropped the medal into the property bag.
The nurse wrote on the chart: unidentified male.
His abdomen was full of blood, and for the first hour I did not think about anything else.
Five weeks earlier my father had collapsed on this same floor, under these same lights.
Desmond Pierce had finished that case, and my grandfather had given him my sister a week after the funeral.
Three hours into the surgery, the circulating nurse pushed the door open.
"Dr. Vaughan," she said quietly, "Dr. Pierce is here."
"Suction," I said.
"He's outside the glass. He's in his wedding suit under a surgical gown."
"Suction, please."
"He says he'll wait for you."
I did not look up.
I could see him anyway, a gray shape at the edge of my light.
Desmond had been an attending for twelve years, and he had never once been late to a case.
He had made residents re-scrub for touching their own masks.
Today he had walked out of his own reception and stood outside my operating room.
At the end of the sixth hour I closed the last layer of skin and cut the suture.
"He'll live," I told the nurse. "Send him to the ICU."
"Dr. Vaughan, Dr. Pierce is still..."
"Tell Dr. Pierce his guests are waiting for the toast."
I went out through the staff passage, because the front corridor ended at the glass.
In the locker room I took the folded letter from my bag.
I had written it three weeks ago and had been carrying it ever since.
It said I resigned, effective today.
I signed it standing up, with the pen from the nurses' station.
He caught me in the passage by the supply carts.
He was still wearing his tuxedo under a paper gown, and the ivory handkerchief in his pocket was spotted with someone's blood.
"Imogen. Don't."
A resident stood three feet away pretending to read a chart, and the nurse from my room had stopped behind him.
I held out the letter.
"You're the chief now. Sign it."
"I'm not taking that."
"Then leave it on the cart."
"I came here because I wanted..."
"I know why you came," I said. "You wanted me to look up."
His mouth closed.
Heels clicked down the corridor behind him, fast and light.
Fiona came around the corner in her wedding dress, her veil crushed in one fist.
She put both arms around me before I could step away.
"Immy, thank God. They said you were in surgery. Are you all right?"
She smelled like roses and hairspray, and she was crying.
"I'm fine."
"Please," she whispered against my ear. "Please don't make a scene today. Not for him. For me."
Over her shoulder, Desmond was looking at the floor.
He did not say my name again, and he did not say stay.
Fiona took his arm, and he let her lead him away.
I set the letter on the supply cart, in front of the resident and the nurse, and walked out through the loading dock.
So I resigned from Boston Harbor Medical Center, and the next morning I boarded a plane to Nairobi.
I spent three years in a field hospital in northern Kenya, with a generator that failed twice a week.
I never learned the stranger's name.
Last month, an email came from the hospital's board, polite and formal.
The hospital was holding its centennial gala, and it would give my father a lifetime achievement award after his death.
His family had to accept it in person, and I was the only surgeon he had left.
At the bottom, under the board's signature, someone had added a line in a different font.
"Mr. Declan Maddox, majority owner of the hospital, has asked for you by name."
I had never heard of him.
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