Broken Oaths in White Coats novel · Chapter 8 of 24

Chapter 8: The Stairwell

That evening I took the stairs down from the fourth floor because I could not stand a closed elevator.

On the landing between the third and second floors, someone was sitting on the steps with her knees pulled up.

It was Janelle, in scrubs, with her face in her hands.

I should have kept walking.

I stopped two steps above her instead.

She heard me and looked up. Her mascara had run, and her nose was red.

She did not wipe it.

"Go ahead," she said. "Say it."

"Say what?"

"That I deserved that. In the hall." Her voice cracked. "Everyone thinks it."

"I don't think anything about your hall. I'm going home."

"You don't have a home," she said. "You have a friend's guest room."

That was true, and it was cruel, and she said it without any heat.

I sat down on the step above her.

I don't know why. I was tired, and my legs were done.

"He told me you were finished," Janelle said after a while. She wiped her face at last, hard, with her sleeve. "From the first night. He said the marriage had been dead for years. That you slept in different rooms."

"We slept in the same bed every night until the gala."

"He said you'd had one foot out the door since the spring."

I looked at her.

For an instant something stirred in the back of my mind, small and cold.

Then it was gone, because it made no sense, and I did not think about it again.

"He said a lot of things," I said.

"He said he'd tell you after the vote. That he'd leave, and we'd have the baby, and I'd be chief resident by June." She laughed, shaky. "I believed him. I believed every word of it. I believed him for five months."

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