Page 43 of Dr. Grump's Surprise Baby

“What’s all this?” she asked him, taking the seat facing him.

“Don’t you knock?” he said brusquely.

Emily frowned. “I’m sorry,” she said, though she wasn’t, really. “You’ve told me countless times that I don’t need to knock.”

“Well, now I think it would be a good idea if you did.”

“Okay, so fine, I’ll knock next time. How come you didn’t come get coffee?”

“Is there something you need, Emily?”

“Do I have toneedsomething to talk to you all of a sudden? What’s going on, Dominic?”

“Dr. Berger,” he said.

She raised her eyebrows. “It’s like that?”

He let out a sigh. “Emily— Dr. Swinton—” He shook his head, obviously unclear on what he should be calling her. “We almost lost a patient today. You do realize that.”

“Dominic, this is the emergency room. We almost lose patients every day.” She said it as gently as she could. “This is what we do. You know that better than anybody. You’re the one who taughtmethat. I know you feel bad about what happened today, but it wasn’t your fault. There are a lot of people who work here.”

“I was on call, and I missed a page.”

“I know,” Emily said. “But you did get it in the end. You saved that little boy. You should be proud.”

“I should beproud?” He looked up at her suddenly, with such ferocity in his eyes that she almost didn’t recognize him. “I should be proud because I turned my back on my responsibilities and a child almost died?”

“Dominic, you’re not the only doctor in this hospital!” she said. “You’re not the only one who was on duty. There were plenty of people who could have done what you did.”

“There weren’t. If that were true, they would have done it. He wouldn’t have been clinging to life by his fingernails when I got there. You know I’m right, Emily.”

“Maybe you are, but that’s not your fault. You can’t do everything. You physically cannot do everything, Dominic. At some point, you have to let other people take responsibility.”

“Not when it might cost someone their life, I don’t.”

“It’s costing youyourlife! Don’t you get that? You can’t even forgive yourself for spending an extra fifteen minutes in the cafeteria.”

“I missed a page.”

“Dominic, you weren’t even on call!” She threw up her hands. “You should have been able to take a longer lunch. God knows everyone else does. And everyone else goes home at night, and everyone else has a social life outside the hospital, and meanwhile you and I have to sneak around like we’re doing something scandalous every time we have a conversation.”

“You and I?” Dominic shook his head. “There is no you and I, Emily.”

Emily felt as if her veins had turned to ice. She sat very still, staring at him.

“I’m sorry if I gave you the wrong idea,” he said. “But I can’t afford to have a relationship. What happened today is all the evidence I need to convince me of that.”

“What happened today had nothing to do with you and me,” Emily said hotly. “Maybe if you gave yourself permission to do the things you want to do, you would be able to organize your life a little bit better. Maybe we could see each other outside of work like normal people instead of trying to cram it into working hours.”

“We’re not seeing each other,” he said. “We’re not going to be seeing each other. Listen… I know this is my fault. I know I gave you a false impression. I let myself get carried away, because Idolike spending time with you — I won’t deny that. But this is as far as things are going to go. I can’t let anything like this happen ever again. I can’t run the risk that someone will die because I indulged my selfish desires. I couldn’t live with myself if that ever happened.”

“You’re being too hard on yourself,” she told him. She did her best to make her tone gentle, trying one more time to convince him.

“No, I should be hard on myself,” he said. “I should have been a hell of a lot harder on myself than I have been. I’ve been allowing myself to get away with things when I shouldn’t have, and that’s the reason this happened. You get that, don’t you? What happened today happened because you and I let ourselves bend the rules. It really is that simple, Emily.”

“So we won’t let it happen again,” she said. “We’ll keep our lunches to the appropriate amount of time.” She could hear the anxiety in her own voice, as if she was afraid of losing something — her body hadn’t caught up to the feeling yet. “We can even make sure we get back early from now on. And we’ll put our pagers on the table while we eat, both of them, so we’ll be sure to never miss a page again. That will fix things, won’t it?”

“No,” he said. “That won’t fix anything. The problem is that this — all of this, the whole connection between you and me — it’s gotten too far away from the professional and into the personal, and that can’t continue. We’re supposed to be having mentorship lunches. Tell me, are you feeling mentored? Do you feel like you’re getting a lot of professional benefit from our time together?”

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