The Devil Gets His Due (The Devils #4)(30)

I turn away. “This isn’t entirely about you, Keeley. I’m not sure how else I can hammer that home.”

She stomps out, and suddenly the apartment feels empty, desolate. Maybe it’s simply the absence of her incessant noise, which I should be grateful to escape. I send a few emails, then grab my wallet and head downstairs for coffee with no small amount of dread. I lived in my building in New York for five years without enduring a single conversation beyond some patently obvious comment about the weather. Now I can’t even get through the lobby without endless small talk.

“Keeley just got another package,” says the guy at the front desk. “She said it was just another bra and could wait, but you can take it if you want.”

“I’ll get it on the way back,” I say grimly. Why the fuck Keeley needed more bras or had to discuss lingerie with this guy is beyond me.

I walk outside and Keeley’s Homeless Friend waves to me. He’s got The Wall Street Journal open to the trading page. You’d think he’d have more immediate needs than knowing what to buy and sell on the stock exchange.

“Take a look at Press-Kasker,” he suggests. “They make a piece of desalinization equipment that’s going to be in high demand in the next few months.”

Jesus help me. This is what Keeley has brought my life to: I’m back in California, unable to even get a cup of fucking coffee without fourteen conversations and some financial advice from a homeless guy. “I’ll look.” And because I can think of no other way to escape this conversation, I add, “I’m going to Starbucks. You want anything?”

He shakes his head. “I’m all set. Just ate breakfast, and Keeley brought me lunch.”

And he holds up the Tupperware I gave her not an hour before.





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19





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KEELEY





I know the moment I walk into the office that today’s going to go badly.

“Your schedule is totally full,” says Trinny, turning her computer screen toward me.

“I blocked off lunch,” I argue.

She gives me that combination of a wince and a shrug, the kind that says she was simply following orders. “Dr. Fox had stuff she needed to do.”

I swallow. I either nip this in the bud right here or I go home to get scolded by Graham once more. Which is worse?

“I have plans. Dr. Fox will need to reschedule those patients if she can’t make it in.”

Her eyes go wide. She’s scared for us both, now, and it just makes me mad. Completing my residency was supposed to free me from this bullshit—from having no control whatsoever over the hours I work and the cases I take, from having people tell me how disappointing they find me. And now I can’t seem to escape it. Not here. Not in my own apartment.

I’ve just left an examining room when Dr. Fox comes storming in, her hair freshly highlighted. Something came up, my ass.

“Can I speak to you?” she demands. Her voice is thin and high, the voice she normally reserves for support staff who’ve written something down wrong.

“I’ve got someone waiting,” I reply. “What’s up?”

“What’s up is that my whole day is a shambles now because I wasn’t informed until nine this morning you were unable to see my patients. I need to be able to count on you.”

“I wasn’t informed until 8:45 that I even had your patients. I haven’t had a lunch break in over a week, so I actually blocked the time off and I still—”

“Are you serious right now? I’m in here because you wanted a lunch break?”

I should tell her. I should just say, “I’m pregnant, and I can’t keep eating shit from a vending machine because you want to get your hair done.” I can’t. Not yet.

“I need to be able to count on thirty minutes at some point in the day. You’re not the only one offloading patients on me.”

Her left eye twitches. “Don’t forget, Dr. Connolly,” she says, spinning away from me. “You’re still on probation.”

The words hang over me for the rest of the day, and I can’t even plough through a bag of mini Snickers bars to deal with my sadness. I do, however, plough through a quarter of the bag and then throw it in the trash, mad at myself, mad at Dr. Fox, and especially mad at Graham for whom this minor effort at self-restraint would be deemed laughable. When Trinny warns me as I’m leaving that Dr. Fox has scheduled patients during my lunch break the next day, I don’t say a word.

At home, I stop to pick up the mail and Paul tells me his newborn grandson won’t eat. It could be anything—sensitivities, reflux, or something more serious like pyloric stenosis.

“They’ve taken him to a gastroenterologist?” I ask, and he says he isn’t sure.

It’s not my specialty, and I shouldn’t give him medical advice right now, but the real problem is that I can’t do it anyway, and in a few months, I might be the one in his position. I might need to know, and I won’t, and I’ll have Dr. Fox throwing a fucking fit because I’m taking my kid to a specialist to save his or her life.

All I want right now is to curl up on my couch under a blanket for a while, but I can’t because Graham will be there—judging me, angry I skipped lunch, angry that I’m lounging and not stacking gold coins in a safe like Scrooge McDuck or whatever it is he thinks I’m supposed to do in my downtime—so I walk outside to see Mark instead.