Page 4 of Doctor Enemy

The human heart can’t take too many beats of this.

I know that we’ve only got one more chance. I take it—but again, after the jerk, Sawyer’s heart monitor remains the same.

I lower my hands. “He’s not coming back to us.”

Lori presses a hand to her mouth and makes a low, keening sound in the back of her throat. “Oh my God.”

“What happened?” I direct the question to the nurse in the room with us, Julia.

Julia shakes her head. “He stroked.”

“It was too much on his body,” I say.

Carefully, I put the defibrillator paddles back on the cart, and let Julia move them out of the way.

I check my watch for the exact time, clear my throat, and announce, “Time of death, one forty-nine a.m.”

Lori turns and leaves the room without a word. It’s a sign that, despite how smart she is and how much she tries to act as though she’s ready for the big leagues, she’s just notthereyet. It isn’t her fault. Losing a patient is always hard.

The young ones, they hurt the worst.

Julia says, “I’ll get everything charted.” And then, “Do you want me to have someone go check on her?”

I remember when I was doing my residency. Every time I lost a patient, it felt like a personal failure. Like I had done something wrong.

The truth is, some patients are just like Sawyer: doomed from the start.

“No,” I say, unrelenting in my opinion. “She needs to figure out how to handle losing patients, or she’s never going to make it when her residency is up.”

Julia doesn’t look like she agrees with the way that I’m handling this, but she doesn’t push matters either.

We leave the room together, pulling the door shut behind us. The click of the latch feels like a final goodbye to the poor teenager.

What a shame.

Chapter two

Lori

There’salreadysomeoneinthe doctors’ lounge when I get there, which is the exact opposite of what I need.

I drop down onto the far end of the couch, hoping that I’m exuding enough bad vibes to just be left alone.

No luck.

“You look like you’re having a rough night,” the woman says, holding a hand out. “Cara. You want to talk about it?”

Cara has so many freckles on her, it looks as though she’s been hit with the splatter from a paintbrush, and the kind of long legs that just go on for miles. Her bright orange scrub sleeves are just short enough to show off the nearly neon colors of a rose tattoo that she’s sporting.

“Not really,” I admit, horrified to hear that my voice is crackling with the same unshed tears currently burning in my eyes.

I reach up and scrub my face with one hand, trying to use my palm to discreetly, or not so discreetly, wipe away any tears before they have the chance to fall.

Cara’s clearly a resident too–though I don’t know what she’s specializing in.

Ped residents are usually kept away from others until their last year. It’s easier to focus on how to handle a kid when you aren’t being jerked around to eight other places, with twenty different types of patients around you.

I know she would understand what I’m going through—I just hate crying in front of other people.

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