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I felt my curls start to shake with my anger. Sweat pooled under my arms, and my heart beat furiously because I did about as well with confrontation as I did with insults to my intelligence. I got it a lot—red, curly hair, big, green eyes, and a small frame. I looked like a pocket doll, and people generally assumed I had plastic for brains, too.
I blocked his path, scowling furiously. Dr. Brady stopped, his dark eyes widening in surprise.
“You just went through four receptionists in less than a year—so you tell me. Do you want me to go home?” I challenged.
He considered me, his eyes roving over my features, his one hand in his lab coat pocket and the other cupping the file. Finally, he said, “I’m not your nanny, Ms. Matthews. Go home if you want, or you can stay and do your job. It’s up to you.” He stepped around me and disappeared toward the conference room.
I shook like a jacked-up washing machine. “Thatpompous—” I started to seethe, but stopped when Carla breezed by with a clipboard and her “leadership book.”
She gave me a suspicious look. “What did he say?”
“Nothing,” I ground out. I cracked my neck and marched down the hall toward my desk. “If he wants diligence, I’ll give him diligence.”
Two
Amos
Isaw my receptionist’s bra, and then she set me on fire. Somehow that ended up being my fault, but as per usual, that’s how my luck turned out.
Maybe the fussy patients and overly sensitive receptionists had been right to complain—I did give off crotchety neighbor vibes. But I didn’t think it was so extreme to expect my receptionist to do her only job.
The anger that radiated out from her tiny frame was almost enough to make me feel some guilt. Almost. But I got the feeling that June Matthews responded better to a little uncomfortable nudging rather than gentle coaxing. She might not like it, and she might not have been pushed a day in her cushy, middle-class life, but she would respond to it, and we would both move on with our lives more content with our jobs and more aware of our roles in the workplace.
If she didn’t, she would leave, and I would find someone else.
Although Andrews and Collins would probably kill me. They liked June. She had a cute, friendly artist vibe that made our patients feel at ease, and she had learned the system pretty quickly.
Her enormous, Pixar-like green eyes stared at me, wide with incredulity and shimmering with unadulterated hatred.Sorry June. You’re about as terrifying as a baby panda. Keep trying to intimidate me, though. It’s entertaining.
I breezed by her, hoping our interaction would spur her toward more efficient pursuits, and headed for the conference room. I heard her mutter something under her breath, and I felt my lips twitch up. She’d get there. It wasn’t like I was asking her to survive residency. I shuddered at the memory.
In our small conference room, Andrews lounged in an office chair. He had the back tilted as far down as it would go, and he kept his eyes closed and hands resting on his stomach when I entered. The man looked like he ate an apple and a healthy puff of oxygen every day, and his long, string bean fingers had interlocked over his concave stomach. I knew he ate—I saw it. But the man was as stressed as they came. He had like a million kids—okay, seven—and worked as some kind of volunteer clergyman for his church in all his non-existent free time.
He opened one brown eye hesitantly. “You’re interrupting my five-minute nap.”
If I remembered right, his wife had just had a baby four months before. I didn’t imagine he got a lot of sleep. “The future of brain imaging waits for no man,” I said with some amusement.
With a sigh, Irving Andrews sat up straight and rolled his chair to the oval conference table. We had a phone set up at the end, and in a minute or two, my colleague at UCHealth in Colorado would call to discuss using their MRI 3T to add some necessary data to the study we’d been working on since my fellowship.
Our real ace in the hole, a doctor and the closest person I could call to a friend, Dr. Cade, had left the city to live in some small town in Idaho near his brother. But the man was brilliant, and if Andrews and I could supply the funding and obtain the right equipment, I knew his brains would do the rest.
“The NIH grant was a no-go,” Irving said, rubbing a long hand over his thin face. “Although, no surprise there.”
I scratched my hairline, taking a seat next to him. “Yeah, that was a slim chance. Melanie didn’t seem hopeful even when she wrote it. There’s still the CANN grant. Melanie has that almost finished.”
“Yeah, I just wish we had better news for Cade, but here we are.”
The phone rang, but at the same moment, I got a ding on my work phone from our inter-office messaging system. Andrews motioned for me to get it and answered the phone on speaker.
I looked at my screen while Andrews and Sterling greeted each other.
June: A. Hernandez just finished her bloodwork. She says schedule for a month?
My brows snapped together. What kind of question was that? If I’d written on her papers that I wanted to see her in a month, then that’s when I wanted to see her. She didn’t need to confirm that with me.
Dr. Brady: Yes.
“… we got your proposal, and we’d love to schedule you, but we didn’t hear back about your funding requests,” Sterling said.
