Rough Edge (The Edge #1)(19)

“Okay. I’ll meet you there.”

“Barring unforseens.”

“Yes,” I said. “Barring unforseens.”

“I love you, Caden.”

“I love you too.”

I hung up, and with the separation, the Thing became clear in my mind. Very loud. And for the first time, it had a well-defined thought I could read.

You don’t love her. I do.



* * *



The front desk had a vertical whiteboard with the rooms, procedures, and the doctors performing. I scanned it as Wilhelmina picked up the eraser.

“Looking for something, doctor?” she asked, getting up on a stool to reach the top.

“Not yet.”

Checking her clipboard, she erased Dr. Everett’s name.

“What happened to Everett?” I asked.

“Strep.”

Nurse Bergstrom picked up the phone. “Samuelson’s on call.”

“I have it,” I cut in.

Wil looked at me as if I’d just clucked like a chicken. “It’s an assist.”

“I know. It’s fine. I got it.”

Will shrugged and wrote St. John in the empty space.





Chapter Ten





Greyson





Caden wasn’t going to make it to the play. My answering service picked up the message, and delivered it as I was putting on my shoes. He’d taken on another patient, and the patient needed pre-op monitoring.

I should have gone myself, but I didn’t want to. I wanted to go with him.

He’d been worried I was going to burn out, but maybe he was the one who needed to snuff one end of the candle. And maybe this was why he’d been so distant and preoccupied.

Maybe.

People weren’t always predictable. They didn’t react the same exact way even when in very similar situations.

The last time I’d seen Caden under tremendous stress was during the war, and he hadn’t been rigid and distant. On the contrary, even when he was closest to his breaking point, he’d been funny, even charming, as day three of his hands in men’s bodies crested into day four without relief. I was giving him vitamin shots and an uncomfortable amount of amphetamine. He seemed to thrive, and yet… no one thrives when someone loses an arm or a leg on the table and you have to move to the next without a break.

He was like a carnival wheel spinning long after the barker’s hand had left the rail. Spiraling on his own juice and energy, ball bearings lubricated to go on and on, he couldn’t calm himself. Even after I’d given him a sedative, he couldn’t sleep. I’d crawled onto the mattress with him, and finally, relieved of a single thing to do but sleep, he held me in his bed.

I knew how to be detached. My job required it. But I couldn’t be. Not with him. At first, he hadn’t been more to me than the next overworked army doc. But he was the only one I’d ever let pull me onto his cot fully clothed. He wasn’t the only one who had wept with me, but he was the only one I’d wept with.

Was this what it was to love someone? To have that wall of detachment crumble and be rebuilt into a bridge?

I thought so. I swore it to myself because after those hours, we were so real together no one had to ask what was going on. Caden and I were an incurable condition.

Dispassion had a place in our lives, but not with each other.

The situation was different now. We were civilians living in New York City, not soldiers trying to save people in a war zone. Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised or concerned by his distance. He might be far away for a reason that had nothing to do with me or our marriage. Maybe it was him, just him.

“Is everything all right?” he asked after I’d beeped him twice. His voice was flat, as if he was asking a patient if they were in any pain and could they please describe it.

“You’re not home,” I said, meaning something completely different.

There’s a nagging ache in the center of my chest.

“I had rounds.” He had a different meaning under his answer.

On a scale of one to ten, with ten being unbearable, how would you rate your pain?

“I missed you at dinner,” I said.

I want to say it’s a three, but it’s closer to a seven.

“I missed you too.”

Here’s an aspirin.

“When are you coming home?”

Maybe I can have something stronger?

“Samuelson’s got strep. I have to fill in for him again.”

No.

“Okay.”

I’ll manage then.

“I love you.”

Maybe try acupuncture.

“Yeah.” I hung up the phone.

Shove it.



* * *



Mid-afternoon.

I’d been in session all morning. I heard Caden upstairs while I was with a patient, heard the old pipes rattle in the walls when the shower went on, then saw his feet come down the front steps. I was seeing a patient in and couldn’t catch Caden without disrupting the gentle flow that was part of my job.

“How were you this week?” I asked Specialist Leslie Yarrow, who liked to sit in the chair with the high cushions. She still wore her dog tags under her polo T-shirt and kept her hair very short. She’d been sent home with a shoulder injury that was healing better than her mind.