They Laughed When I Left, So I Came Home the Town's Doctor novel · Chapter 9 of 24

Chapter 9: The Nice Kiss

I told nobody what Kaarina had said in the kitchen.

I put it in a drawer in my head and went to work.

On Monday I treated a roofer who had fallen off a roof, a toddler who had swallowed a marble, and a retired teacher who had decided at ninety that she wanted a second opinion on her own birth certificate.

On Tuesday the chief of surgery caught me at the vending machine.

"The hospital gala is the twenty-fifth," he said. "I'd like you at my table."

"I have two children," I said.

"Bring a sitter."

"I have two children, and neither of them takes a sitter."

"Take the evening, Sanna." He leaned a shoulder on the machine, close. "A woman in your position needs people to see she belongs. I can make that happen."

"I belong because I'm good at my job."

"Of course." The smile did not move. "And because you've had a very public few weeks."

I took my pretzels and left him there.

At five Paavo texted a photograph of a pilot boat bobbing in the lower harbor, with the words Sunset run. Bring a coat. No agenda.

I wrote back, Agenda?

He wrote, A small one.

I went.

The pilot boat was thirty feet of white steel with a wheelhouse and a rail, and he took it out past the breakwater in the last of the light.

The lake was flat and gray.

An ore boat sat anchored far out, with a tiny red light on its mast.

I stood beside him in the wheelhouse with a mug of cocoa from his thermos, and for a long time neither of us said anything.

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