Under the Knife(73)

“What? No, Chase!”

“The narcotics, maybe? Or the benzos?”

“No! That’s … absurd. I never did any of those drugs. I’ve never done drugs in my life.”

“Then how did they end up in your blood?”

“I don’t know. Are you sure it was my blood? That there hasn’t been a mistake? Maybe you should have the lab check again—”

“We already have. Twice.”

“Maybe somebody, I don’t know—put them there, somehow, in the samples—”

“Please, Rita,” he said, his face flushing with anger. “Now you’re sounding ridiculous. Why would someone have done that?”

“I—” She broke off, because she suddenly knew there was no point in debating this anymore. The realization, the comprehension of her terrible predicament, crashed over her, and she knew exactly how the drugs and the alcohol had gotten into her body. It all made sense: elegant and horrible sense.

Finney.

The hungover, sluggish feeling she’d had all morning, and her inability to remember what had happened last night. Finney had somehow drugged her and left her on the OR table naked. He’d set her up, in the nastiest way possible, in front of her colleagues and Chase.

In front of everyone.

Oh, dear God, how could she ever talk her way out of this?

“I thought you’d stayed sober, Rita.” A note of hurt had crept into Montgomery’s voice. Of confidence betrayed. “Since that business with the appendectomy. I thought you’d been sober since then.”

“I have, Chase.” She laid her head back on the pillow. God, but she was tired. “I have.”

“I helped you—” He glanced over his shoulder and leaned in so close she was afraid he would fall off the chair. “I helped you,” he whispered. “I helped you with the understanding that it would never, ever happen again: that business with the drinking. Put my own reputation and career on the line. For you, Rita. Buried that report so that it would never see daylight. Had that nurse transferred to another hospital.”

“I know, Chase. I know.”

“I can’t help you, Rita. Not this time. What a mess. What a goddamn mess you’ve made. This is all going to come out. Negligence is a given. There may even be criminal charges. Assault and battery … who knows? There’s no lack of evidence, that’s for sure. Hell, aside from the thirty goddamn people standing in the room, we got the whole goddamn thing on tape.”

She didn’t say anything. What was there to say?

“Given the circumstances, you realize that the hospital and university will wash their hands of you. They’re going to leave you twisting in the wind.”

“What about you, Chase? What are you going to do?”

He sighed and stared at the wall above her bed. “Do you really want me to answer that, Rita?” he said softly. “Honestly, I shouldn’t even be talking to you right now. I can’t help you this time. I really can’t. Hell, I’ve already called my own lawyer.”

“What did he say?”

“He told me not to talk to you.” With a grunt, he pushed himself out of the chair. “Look. It’s out of my hands. It’s already gone straight to the top—because the top was standing right there in OR 10 when you put the goddamn hole in the liver. By law, the hospital must notify the California Department of Public Health and the Medical Board. Based on the information at hand, the CEO has already placed you on paid administrative leave pending an investigation.”

“Will I lose my license?”

He grasped the handle of the sliding-glass door. “That may be the least of your worries. Just—please, Rita. For God’s sake. Get a lawyer.”

Chase slid the door open. The distant clamor of the ER, the rustlings of sick humanity, intruded, then died away as Chase slammed the door behind him, hard enough to make the glass rattle.

Finney crooned in her left ear, “I knew about the drinking, you know.”

Oh, God.

The drinking.

How could he know?

“I’m curious. When did it start?” Finney asked.

A few months before your wife died, she almost said out loud, but caught herself.

Her mind drifted back to more than a year ago, when Darcy had dropped out of Brown. A surprise text from the airport one Sunday morning, a few more from the cab—and then there she was, at Rita’s front door, having hit the wall, emotionally, physically, in every way one could. Standing there at the door, Darcy hadn’t said anything. She’d just dropped her bags, and wrapped her arms around Rita’s neck, and started sobbing, her emaciated frame—

(God, she’d lost so much weight)

—wracked with dry heaves. She’d smelled of cigarettes.

“Was there a particular reason why you drank?” Finney said

Because it was my fault. Because I hadn’t been there for my baby sister when she’d needed me.

As Darcy had cried uncontrollably, her face buried in Rita’s neck, it had dawned on Rita how selfish she’d been over the years. No, not just selfish. Weak. Weak because she’d let it all happen, had let it come to this.

She would fix it, Rita had decided. She was a surgeon, goddammit. She’d been trained to fix things. Worse things than this. She might not have been there for Darcy before, but she could sure as hell fix her now. She’d resolved, right there in the doorway, to double down, reprioritize, to excise from her life, with surgical precision, all the nonessentials, the selfish and weak things, and focus on Darcy.