Page 1 of Between Our Hearts

Chapter 1?

Sadie strode through the brightly illuminated surgical step-down unit at her usual quick clip, overhearing, “An apple a day keeps me away. Now . . . why would you want to do that?”

Leaning his arm against the wall of a charting enclave, a black-haired doctor stood towering over a young nurse. Her eyes were wide while her mouth was occupied by a substantial bite of a Granny Smith.

Not hitching her pace, Sadie zeroed in on the part of his white coat where his name was embroidered. Above the blue lettered stitches, the insignia for the residents was sewn. He wasn’t one of her orthopedic trauma residents. If he had been, he’d be a dead man.

Keep moving. Not your service, not your problem. You’ve already got a mountain of things today.

“Uhh . . .” The nurse with a blonde bob stalled over her mouthful.

Nope, can’t do it.

Sadie halted abruptly next to the two. “You know what? No,” she said, staring down the resident. Since she was five foot nine barefoot, her black clogs made her easily two inches taller than this troll.

“Excuse me.” He raised his eyebrows as he straightened slightly.

“We don’t hit on nurses. It’s not 1950. She’s working. Leave her alone.” Sadie’s words fell like a surgical hammer on titanium before she checked her watch—ten minutes until she was due in the OR.

The nurse nearly choked, trying to cover her surprised laughter.

His eyes narrowed as he took in her pale green surgical scrubs. “Who do you think you are?”

This was a common mistake made by chauvinistic jerks like him. They saw her without her white coat and assumed she was a surgical nurse. As if female physicians didn’t exist.

“I’mthe director of orthopedic surgery.She’s”—Sadie pointed to the nurse—“aprofessionalon my team who doesn’t need to hear your lame come-ons when she’s got patients to care for.”

The resident’s mouth opened, closed, and opened again.

“So if you don’t have orders to give regarding a patient, I recommend you find yourself another wall to hold up.”

The resident let out a startled exhale, blinking rapidly.

“Anytime now,” Sadie urged.

He silently took his hand off the wall and walked away.

“Thanks,” the young nurse whispered.

“Don’t worry about it,” Sadie said, glancing again at her watch before looking into the nearby room. “He’s one of mine.” She pointed to the patient in the bed. “I expect him to be out of bed and in a chair for breakfast. That needs to happen first thing every morning.”

“Oh, okay.” The nurse wrapped her apple in a plastic bag and tucked it into her scrub pocket. “Sorry.”

Sadie nodded once before continuing down the hall.

???

A ten-hour surgical day felt compressed into the time span of a heartbeat, and before she knew it, Sadie was sitting at a table for two in an upscale bar waiting for her friend Parker.

Over the last few years, the long surgical hours had felt like more of a rush than earlier in her career. In the beginning, she’d simply languished in the beauty of surgery, always craving more. More tough cases. More of her hands reconnecting parts of a person’s body back together.

Sadie loved working with hardware and all the unfinicky parts of her field, choosing early to specialize as an orthopedic trauma surgeon. Physically resetting pieces of an established skeletal system made a lot more sense to Sadie than noodling around in someone’s brain or having to intentionally stop a patient’s heart to try and fix it. Give her a shattered person any day of the week, and she’d happily screw and pin for hours.

She often lost herself in the slow, steady beep of her patient’s heartbeat as it played a background rhythm to the whir of her bone drill. She never minded the sting of antiseptic that pricked at her nostrils and rarely grimaced when the burnt taste from the cauterizer soured her tongue. It was all a necessary part of the resulting satisfaction of realigning two, or more, bone pieces and restoring them to their formerly whole state.

Sadie’s stomach twisted as she tried to ignore therealreason she wished she had more time in the artificially lit, reassuringly icy rooms of the OR. There, she was in her element, and each decision came to her like breathing. Automatic. Instinctual. Effortless.

At home, it felt like instead of putting things back together, everything kept breaking apart. Especially now that she’d seen that blue cross telling her she was pregnant again.

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