“So,” he said, handing me the glass. His eyes tracked over my face again, more careful this time. “I know what happened at the meeting but tell me about the meeting.”
I took a long sip of ice-cold water, then set the glass down on the counter.
“The meeting was shit,” I said. “It didn’t start off shit, but I did my presentation, shared every detail, all of your notes. And then…”
I shook my head.
“Ambush.”
“Exactly. They were just nitpicking about how many times we tried to call next of kin. It just…that man was dying. He was dying no matter what. She was three fucking hours away and she didn’t check her voicemail? She couldn’t send someone local to be with him? Just…”
I heaved a sigh. Cole gestured toward the water glass. I sucked down another swallow.
“Then out of left field, they started asking who made the decision to operate and did you consult anyone and couldn’t you have waited and suddenly, they want to talk to the surgeon. Like that’s ever a reasonable request.”
“Oh, that’s the whole reason for the meeting,” said Cole. “It was always going to end up that way.”
“Yeah, well. Instead of anyone but me taking up for you, admin and Legal agreed that you should be at the next meeting.”
Cole nodded slowly. His expression didn’t change, didn’t register surprise or anger or anything I expected. “Yeah, Dr. Webb told me.”
I stared at him, searching for some crack in that calm exterior. “And?”
“And what?”
“And I want you to be pissed like I am!” My voice shot up, higher and louder than I’d intended. I had made a promise to myself to stay calm, to keep my cool, to just say things like a normal person.
That promise lasted about two seconds.
“I want you to tell me you’re not going to let them do this to you. I want you to?—”
My words cut off, snagged in my throat. My head was pounding, the bun I’d twisted up this morning now pulling at my scalp, making everything worse.
My fingers clawed at my hair, finding one bobby pin, then another. Cole stepped in and caught my hand. “Hold on.”
He moved in close behind me, taking over, sliding the pins free one by one. Then he tugged the elastic band around the bun loose and pulled it free, his fingers working through the tight coil at the back of my head until the tension gave way and my hair fell loose around my shoulders.
I sighed in instant relief. “Go on,” said Cole.
“Rachel Gaines found a gap in the timeline,” I continued. “I mean, not a real gap, just something she could twist into looking like negligence. She made it sound like we didn’t try hard enough to reach the family.”
I started pacing his kitchen, unable to stand still. The nervous energy had to go somewhere.
“And now she wants Diane Hart to paint you as reckless, as someone who prioritized a procedure over humanity.”
Cole leaned against the counter, arms folded tight across his chest, watching me pace as if everything he’d built wasn’t about to get dragged out into the open and torn apart by strangers’ hands. He took it the way someone might absorb news of a change in weather: mild interest, no panic, no sign of the storm I knew was coming.
“What did you say to that?” he asked.
“Of course I told them no.”
I stopped pacing and turned to face him. Cole pushed off the counter and closed the distance, his hands settling on my shoulders. His thumbs pressed in just enough to ease the tension still sitting there.
I exhaled, some of the edge bleeding off. For a second, I let myself lean into him, my forehead brushing his chest before I straightened again.
“I told Rachel, I told Adrienne, I told Gerald, Dr. Webb, Dr. Rice. I said putting you in a room with the family was setting you up to fail and it sounded like they were building a case for malpractice.”
“And?”
