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They stared at me blankly.
“Smoking?” Mav finally asked.
I winced. “Fuck that shit. No. The hospital.”
Now they blinked in unison.
“You quit the hospital,” Bridget said. “Um…congratulations.” She gave her support but the end was more of a question than exuberance.
Mav didn’t look happy. He looked… perplexed.
“You can just quit? Don’t you have a fellowship or residency or something?”
“Finished residency and the fellowship, fucker. You’re not the only one who’s old.” I was only a year younger than Mav.
“So you’re an unemployed, overeducated trauma surgeon who no longer fucks cadaver women,” Mav said, getting his head around it.
I shut my eyes, ran a hand over my face. Bridget laughed.
“Jesus. Don’t say shit like that out loud. I’ll be arrested or lose my license or something.”
“One look at Maude and you’d be cleared,” Mav grumbled and took a pull of his beer. He’d met her at some charity function last spring and didn’t like her from the get go. Neither had Silas or Dex.
“So…unemployed. Good thing you’re a billionaire,” he added dryly.
Bridget laughed. “You can come work with me at the high school. They’re always looking for substitute teachers.”
She’d been working as a long-term sub herself as a Physics teacher at Hunter Valley high school. From what Mav had told me, she loved it.
I had no idea what the salary of a substitute teacher was, but it wasn’t billions. It seemed Bridget didn’t care about Mav’s money, or she was too smart to sit around and do nothing. Or both. We were alike in that way. I couldn’t sit on my ass. I’d lose my shit if I was bored enough for my brain to start telling me things. Things I really didn’t want to hear.
Like quitting and taking a small town doctor job. I wasn’t sure if this was the dumbest or smartest thing I ever did.
Time would tell.
But high schoolers? Fuck no.
I gave her a look and pointed at my face. “Do I look like the kind of person who likes kids?”
She pursed her lips, pushed her glasses up. “No.”
I didn’t like them. Didn’t know how to talk to them. Deal with them. No way could I be trusted with making them smart citizens or whatever was required for them to graduate.
“So what are you going to do?” she asked. “You’re not giving up medicine, right?”
I’d gone to school for pretty much fifteen years. Worked eighty or more hours a week. I had a closet full of clothes but spent all my time in scrubs. No way in hell was I giving up medicine. Besides, in that same amount of time, I’d had zero life.
Zero. Proof–or maybe the last straw–was that I’d dated Dr. Maude Fleisher. Podiatrist. Foot fetishist. Per Mav, a woman as cold as a cadaver.
Fuck my life. That’s what I said to myself in Phoenix, having a midlife epiphany. Bradley, Mav’s overly skilled PA, had called with a job he’d thought I might be interested in. I wasn’t sure why he thought I would be. Maybe he was also a fortune teller. Read tarot. Licensed psychologist on the side. Whatever. For some reason, he’d found me a fucking job. And, standing in the middle of a high-end hotel’s lunch buffet without thinking twice, I accepted.
“A doctor here in Hunter Valley is retiring and looking for a replacement for her small practice. I start next week.”
* * *
