Page 40 of Hush

“Ben is still Jaden’s doctor, right?” Caitlin said.

“Yeah,” Elise replied. “We actually talked about it on Friday. He had a plan to transfer Jaden’s care to another doctor. I forget her name, though. But it doesn’t matter now.”

“He should pay for this, Elise,” Caitlin said.

Elise sat up to look at her sister. “What do you mean?”

Caitlin’s eyes flashed with a steely look. “You were the one who said it, remember? Doctors aren’t supposed to sleep with family members. There’s got to be a patient-doctor code of conduct. You could get him fired.”

Elise’s chest tingled with fear. “No, Caitlin, I don’t want to do that. He’s a good doctor.”

Caitlin raised her eyebrows.

“He is,” Elise insisted. “Just a shitty boyfriend. Bringing up formal charges would be a huge mess.” Eyeing Jaden, she shook her head. “No,” she said. “We don’t need that.”

“What if you’re not his first?” Caitlin asked carefully.

Elise groaned. “Stop,” she said. “Okay? I can’t go there.”

“I’m sorry,” Caitlin said, then placed a hand over Elise’s. “Just think about it, okay?”

The next few days passed with Elise holding it together until she was alone, then crying until she was a blubbering mess—either in her office, at home, or in bed at night after Jaden was asleep. Jaden hadn’t stopped asking about Ben, and Elise was running out of excuses.

On Thursday, she finally had the nerve to call the clinic and request Jaden be switched to a different doctor. She braced herself for an inquiry, but the receptionist handled the change with no comment.

“You’re all set,” the woman chirped. “Dr. Fitzgibbons is out of the office next week, so I’ll put you down for the follow-up when she returns on December twenty-first.”

Elise thanked the woman before hanging up.

On the final day of classes before the holiday break, Elise attended the staff cocktail party, held in the kitchen space of the house that served as their offices on campus. She did her best to socialize with her coworkers, but her heart felt so far away from Christmas cheer that she left early. Due to the later hour, she had asked Garrett to collect Jaden from school, so she drove to her old home slowly, her mind playing the same endless loop of herself with Ben whenever she was alone.

She had not heard from him besides his simple message for almost two weeks, and knew she needed to accept the fact it was over, that she had made yet another mistake. But her body still yearned for Ben’s touch, a sensation that felt like a betrayal.

After parking next to the tractor and the battered farm pickup, she stepped onto the muddy parking area, her pumps wobbling slightly from the uneven, pebbly ground. To her left stood the tasting room, empty until summer, and behind it, the “lab” as Garrett called it, or where the three hundred cases of boutique wine were made each year. To her right, up a short path, stood Garrett’s house.

It helped knowing Garrett had been new to this property, too—purchasing it with a massive loan from his parents just before he and Elise met. She knew she had been caught up in the romance of it all—living and working at a winery. Even though Garrett knew nothing about farming, or even very much about wine, he had taken the neglected property and turned into something special. She had to give him credit for that.

If only he’d stopped there.

Elise felt a rush of memories flooding into her as she walked the path lined with shrubs she had planted because the leaves turned crimson in the winter. She remembered the first moment she knew something wasn’t right—she had gone to the grocery store and had stood in embarrassed silence when the checker told her that her card had been denied. She ended up using a check from her personal savings to cover it, lying to the checker by saying the card was new and she’d forgotten to activate it.

A call to the bank confirmed her worst fears: her credit had been maxed—over twenty thousand dollars and the payment was late.

A call to Garrett had only made it worse. “It’s temporary. I had an opportunity too good to pass up.”

“How are we supposed to buy groceries?” she asked.

“Just give me a week,” he’d said.

A week had stretched into a month, with Elise digging into her savings. Then she found out what he’d planned, overhearing it from his chief winemaker: a convention center and series of guest cottages in the heart of a property he wanted to convert from an onion farm into a vineyard. While the project had potential—Walla Walla had nothing like it, and demand for higher-end accommodations in the valley was needed—it came with a seven-million-dollar price tag.

Elise was livid. “Why didn’t you tell me about this?”

“Because I knew this was how you’d react,” he’d replied, shoving his hands to his hips.

“What happens if the project fails?”

He chuckled. “Then it’s back to the salt mines, sweetheart.”

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