Page 5 of Obeying

Whatever.

That was ten years ago. That girl was someone else.

The memory fades the way they always do, quick at the edges and slow at the center, and I'm back in the present—standing in the hallway of a hospital where that same man is now my attending. Where I've spent the last two days making sure he never looks directly at me.

It's not hard. During rounds, I stay at the back of the group and hold my tablet up like I'm reviewing charts. I keep it angled just high enough to cover my face, which is pathetic and I know it, but it is also working. He hasn't spoken to me since the trauma activation when I handed him instruments and matched his rhythm and then froze solid when he pulled his mask down.

Two days of this. Two days of sliding behind taller residents, ducking into supply closets when I hear his voice echo off the corridor tiles, timing my coffee runs to miss the routes he takes between the OR and his office. Yesterday, I heard him coming around the corner near the nurses' station and detoured through the dirty utility room. I stood between a biohazard bin and a rack of soiled linens for four minutes, staring at the ceiling, listening to his footsteps pass. A nurse walked in, saw me, opened her mouth to ask, and I said, "Inventory check," with a straight face, then left before she could follow up.

I've memorized his schedule faster than any rotation material I've ever studied, and the irony is not lost on me. I once spent four years trying to outpace this man academically; now I'm using that same focus to avoid being in the same hallway as him.

I keep my answers short when the other attendings ask questions. I stay competent but quiet. I do my job, I help my patients, I write my notes on time, and I treat the head of trauma surgery like a weather system I need to route around.

Because if Logan recognizes me, he'll have questions. I can see them already, clear as a differential. Where have you been? Why is there such a gap in your CV? Why are you a PGY-3 at thirty-five when you graduated the same year I did? What happened to you, Portland?

And the answers to those questions lead to rooms I've boarded shut.

My method works until the third day.

He's running rounds himself. The group of us trails behind him, bed to bed, and there's a different energy when he leads. The other attendings ask questions to teach, but he asks questions to test. With him, the residents stand a little straighter and a little more still, braced for whatever he throws at them.

He stops at a bedside and asks about the management of a splenic laceration. Grade three, hemodynamically stable. The question waits in the air while the other residents shuffle through their mental notes. I already have the answer. I've had it since before he finished the sentence. It's right there, from start to finish, and ten years ago I would have said it before anyone else had the chance to open their mouth.

I stay behind my tablet.

He waits, then looks right at me. My breath hitches.

"You. At the back. Behind the tablet. What's the answer?"

My stomach drops.

I lower the tablet an inch and answer quietly, barely louder than the monitor beeping at the bedside. If I keep my head down and I'm quick enough, maybe he'll take the answer and move on.

"I can't hear you." His voice isn't harsh, but it's sharp. It fills the hallway the same way it fills an operating room, like he doesn't have to try. "Put the tablet down."

I lower it, and my chin dips because I cannot look at him straight on, not yet. I repeat the answer. Louder this time. "Non-operative management with serial abdominal exams, hemoglobin monitoring every six hours, and an ICU bed for observation. CT angiography if there's any contrast blush suggesting active extravasation."

The silence weighs down just long enough for me to feel every pair of eyes in the group shift toward me.

"Correct." He pauses, then adds, quieter but still loud enough for the group, "Next time, answer like you mean it. You're not doing anyone a favor hiding back there."

He moves on to the next bed, the other residents shuffle forward, and I stand rooted for a second too long before my legs remember how to work, pushing me back into step at the rear of the pack, my tablet at my side now because what's the point.

He didn't recognize me, I don't think. He called me you, not Portland. But he looked at me, and being looked at by Logan Maxwell is like standing in front of an imaging machine. And even if he didn't see me fully today, he caught enough to look harder next time.

After rounds, I try to shake it off. I chart at the nurses' station, keeping my handwriting steady while my pulse takes its time settling. I check on Walter, who takes one look at me and narrows his eyes.

"You look like you've swallowed something that disagreed with you," he says from his bed, arms crossed like a man who has nowhere to be and all day to study the people who do. "And it wasn't the cafeteria food, because even you're not that brave."

"Good morning to you too, Walter."

"Don't 'good morning' me. What's wrong?"

"Nothing's wrong. How's the hip today?"

"The hip is fine. You're deflecting."

"I'm your doctor. I'm allowed to redirect the conversation toward your health."