The word goes through me like a current.
My fist moves before my brain finishes processing the sentence. No wind-up, no warning, just my knuckles connecting with the left side of his jaw with a crack that I feel all the way to my shoulder.
Axel hits the door. His shoulder catches the frame, and he rebounds and drops to one knee.
Pain detonates up my wrist. I fold over it for one breath, and then I grab the front of his coat with my other hand and haul him up to where I need his face.
“Listen to me.” My voice is even. I find that surprising. “If you breathe one word about Grayson or his son, I will go to every senior consultant in this hospital with what you said to me last night. Every single one. See how that lands on your record.”
His eyes, watering from the hit, narrow. His jaw is already swelling.
He pushes to his feet. His free hand moves toward my arm.
The door bangs open behind him.
Two orderlies stop dead on the threshold. They take in the scene: Axel on one knee, my fist in his lapel, his face going red, my wrist held at an angle that is definitely not nothing.
The silence stretches for a very long beat.
I let go of his coat.
I straighten. Axel straightens. The orderlies don’t move.
I look at Axel. He looks at me, and then at the orderlies, and the sly smile on his lips makes my heart sink.
I know exactly what this is going to look like.
I’m in trouble.
A week.
That’s how long it takes to lose a job I’ve been at for eight years. I knew they weren’t going to keep me after the orderlies witnessed me assaulting Axel. HR was sympathetic to what I told them in the review, and I believe they meant it, but I still assaulted an attending on hospital grounds. The termination letter sits on the table in front of me.
My wrist is wrapped and propped on a cushion. Hairline fracture, a combination of that patient twisting my wrist and then me proceeding to punch Axel with the same hand.
Brooke comes out of the kitchen and puts a mug in my uninjured hand. I take it without looking up from the letter.
She sits across from me. Looks at it too.
“I’ll help you find something,” she says. “We can start looking today if you want. There are other hospitals.”
“Yeah.”
“Miranda.” Her voice is heavy. “Miranda, don’t do this.”
“He’s got influence, Brooke.” I wrap both hands around the mug and then remember my wrist and unwrap the bad one. “He’s been in this city for twelve years. He plays golf with department heads. He’s on two hiring committees.” I look at her. “I’m not going to get anything local. Not for a while.”
She opens her mouth.
“I know.” I cut her off, not unkindly. “You want to tell me that’s not how it works. That there are procedures. That I could file a complaint.” I look back at the letter. “I did file a complaint. In the HR meeting. I told them exactly what he said to me at dinner, exactly what kind of environment he created on the ward. I told them about the patient reassignments. And they listened very carefully and gave me a termination letter for striking a colleague.”
Brooke’s jaw tightens.
“At least I scared him,” I say, and I mean it, and that’s the only part of this that doesn’t feel like a total loss. In the second review meeting, I told them exactly what Axel said on that roof. Word for word. The threat about the media, about Grayson, about his son. I had no choice but to reveal Ethan’s existence to the HR director, but it was the only way I knew how to protect him. I watched the man’s expression go very still, and I knew, right then, that I’d handed them a problem they did not want. A senior attending threatening to leak a private individual’s family information to the press. Whatever Grayson Wolfe’s lawyers would do with that, the hospital didn’t want to find out.
By the end of the day, Axel had been spoken to by legal, and whatever he’d planned to say about Ethan, he won’t be saying it. The color that drained out of his face in that corridor afterward is something I’m going to think about for a long time.
He can’t go after Grayson. The hospital made sure of that.
