Page 8 of Obeying

Her mouth is open, but nothing comes out. The heat is aggressively climbing up her neck and spreading across her cheeks, and she's blinking too fast. For the first time in four years of knowing Kristen Portland, she has absolutely nothing to say. She's not angry. If she were angry, I'd already be bleeding. She's flustered. And maybe, hopefully, she liked it.

"Have you gone insane, you pervert?! What the hell was that for?"

"Sealing the bet." I step back. "A handshake felt underwhelming. A blood pact felt excessive. This seemed like the middle ground."

She opens her mouth, closes it, opens it again. "I…fine." She clears her throat, straightens her cap, and clears her throat again, her cheeks still flushed. "It's sealed, then."

"Good."

"Good."

She turns and walks away too fast, so I watch her go, hands in my pockets, grinning like an idiot, because Kristen Portland just short-circuited, and I'm the one who did it.

As it turns out, a human can turn beetroot red.

The first thing I thought when I saw Kristen Portland's name on the resident roster was that somebody was playing a joke on me.

I was in my office, glasses off, pinching the bridge of my nose because I'd been reading charts since five and my eyes were done. The roster came in that morning. New rotation, fresh batch of residents, names I'd memorize by the end of the week and forget by the end of the year. Standard. Until I got to the P's, and the name sitting there was one I thought I'd never see.

After graduation, we kept in touch. Texted about which hospitals we'd matched at, compared notes, talked shit about the ones we didn't pick. We ended up in the same program. Of course we did. She sent me a text that night.

Kristen

Great, four more years of your face

Me

You love my face.

She replied with a middle finger emoji, and I sat there looking at it longer than any reasonable person should look at a middle finger emoji.

But when residency started, she never showed up. On the first day, I looked for her name on the check-in sheet. It wasn't there. I figured it was a delay: paperwork, something administrative. I texted her, got no response. Called the next day, went to voicemail. Called a week later, and the number didn't connect anymore.

I tried for a while. Longer than I'd admit to anyone. I even looked her up online, which felt desperate, but there was nothing. No social media, no publications, no forwarding address through the school. Kristen Portland had disappeared as cleanly as if someone had erased her, and at some point, you have to accept that a person who wants to be found makes it possible.

But she'd made it impossible.

I did my residency without her. It was fine. Everyone was competent and predictable. No one argued with me during rounds or made me defend answers I thought were obvious. No one threw things at my head when I was right. No one looked at me during a simulation and said that's wrong, and I can prove it with their whole body before they even opened their mouth. It was fine, but it was quiet in a way I never got used to.

But I'd said I was going to be the head, and when I say something, I do it. With or without her. I blazed through residency, fellowship, and junior attending, all on the fastest track the program had seen, because I'm a Maxwell. The only son of Dr. Theo Maxwell and Dr. Margaret Maxwell. You don't coast on that name. You prove every day that you earned it. So I proved it.

And somewhere at the back of my mind, through every late night, every promotion, every decision I made about how to run my department, I heard her voice: All you've ever done is show up, score the highest, and leave. Being a department head isn't just about being the best. I wanted to prove her wrong. I wanted to prove to myself that she wasn't right.

Now I'm the youngest department head this hospital has ever had. And the woman who challenged it out of me is on my resident roster. I fix my glasses.

She knocks on the door frame, and she's standing there, stiff, shoulders pulled in, hands gripping each other. She's positioned herself at the very edge of the doorway, like she's left half of herself in the hall in case she needs to retreat. She looks like she's bracing for a firing squad, not a conversation.

I lean back in my chair and lace my fingers together on the desk—the same way I sit before delivering a difficult prognosis.

"Close the door."

She does.

I look at her, really take her in for the first time since that trauma activation, when I was too focused on keeping a patient alive to register anything except that whoever was assisting me was good. It was the kind of assist you don't get from most residents. And then I checked the roster afterward, and the name next to the shift was Portland. I looked at her properly after two days of watching her during rounds, hiding behind that tablet, answering in a voice so quiet you'd think she was apologizing for knowing things. Two days of standing at the back of every group, like that was where she belonged.

The Kristen Portland I knew didn't belong at the back of anything. She'd always sit in the front of classes and stand in front of huddles.

Now she stays standing. Doesn't move any further into the room. There's a chair across from my desk, and she doesn't take it. I don't tell her to, because I'm watching the way she holds herself, and it's telling me more than she'd want it to.