Page 1 of A Doctor's Promise

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“You’ll do whatever this hospital needs of you, Finn.”

Doctor Finlay Cooper took a deep breath, his jaw clenched. The two grey haired, grey-suited men stared at him from the other side of the boardroom table, their eyes steely, their mouths set.

“What if I say no?” Finn asked, his hard voice masking the nerves he felt inside.

“We’ll have no choice but to let you go,” one of the men replied.

Finn laughed, short and sharp.

“IamNorfolk Coastal General; you can’tlet me go.”

The greyer of the two men opposite sat up in his chair. Finn knew he’d overstepped the mark. He wiped his palms on his thighs under the table, not willing to back down now.

“No-one is bigger than the hospital, Finn,” the man said. “You will do what is asked of you, or you can find another surgical theatre to strut about in.”

The man collected the papers strewn in front of him and slotted them back into a worn leather satchel. He stood and looked down at Finn.

“It’ll do you good to engage in a bit of team work,” he said, softer now. “I expect the papers to be signed and on my desk by Monday morning because that’s when the subjects are due to arrive in Norfolk.”

He left the boardroom, closely followed by his companion, leaving Finn with a silence that was too easy to fill with the embarrassment of the words he’d just spoken. He could have kicked himself. Of all the ways to talk with the Clinical Director of Surgery and the Medical Director of the hospital, he perhaps hadn’t picked the best one.

I am Norfolk Coastal General.Urgh, Finn, what were you thinking?

He dropped his elbows on the table and his head into his hands. Running his fingers through his thick hair Finn wondered, not for the first time that day, at the practicalities of this hard-faced persona he’d developed. Why couldn’t he just tell them the truth about not wanting to work closely with others? About never wanting to work in Oncology. There was a reason Finn had chosen to specialise in Cardiothoracic surgery: heart bypasses and their 98% survival rate. And his fear of death was very much that reason.

He had grown up surrounded by cancer and death, losing his mother to breast cancer when he was only a child, his maternal grandmother soon after. Then his already fragile world had crashed down around him when his wife and unborn daughter had succumbed to the vicious disease years later. Finn had fled Aberdeen and everyone who knew him and had built a wall so high around himself he could no longer see over it. He wasn’t the rude Finn that people knew him as, but if being rude to people kept them at arm’s length then that was the price he was willing to pay to never feel that kind of hurt again.

He looked through the papers scattered on the walnut veneer in front of him and sighed. He had no choice, he knew that. He couldn’t just up and leave Norfolk Coastal General. He had ties, he had a reputation asthesurgeon to be under that had taken him years to build, he was top of the surgical food chain and didn’t want to have to start all over again somewhere new. It was exhausting enough pretending to be someone he wasn’t, and certainly nobody at Norfolk Coastal General knew his history, but to start all over again somewhere else? Finn just didn’t have the energy. Really, what was three months out of the rest of his working life? Nothing.

The papers glared up at him. CLINCAL TRIALS: MALIGNANT PRIMARY CARDIAC TUMOURS. The words sent a trickle of ice-cold fear into his stomach. He avoided oncology at the best of times, but now he was being forced to lead a team he’d have to face it head on. He wasn’t sure he could do it, yet he knew any excuses that spilled from his lips would be menial, so far from the truth. They would be dismissed by the Clinical Director quicker than he could speak them, and Finn knew he couldn’t afford more upset any more than he could afford to tell the truth.

With his heart rate higher than healthy, especially for a cardiac surgeon, a glimmer of hope sparked a light in Finn. If he was to head up the clinical trial, he could at least pick his team. He could surround himself with people he knew would keep out of his way. The good thing about his reputation was that people would be clambering over themselves to join the trial, yet they all knew once they were in, they were better off at arm’s length. This would provide the perfect opportunity to select the best workers while maintaining his distance.

He gathered up the papers and made his way back to his office, his stride more purposeful than normal, batting on-comers out of the way without so much as a touch. He marched through the old part of the hospital and into the new addition. Not that it was new anymore, but ten years old was a baby in comparison to the century and a half since the original wing was built. Norfolk Coastal General was, as the name suggests, found on the cliff tops of North Norfolk. The unpredictable North Sea on one side, vast expanses of agricultural land on the other. The building stood out with its mixture of original and modern, meshed together with a clever fluidity.

Truth be told, Finn preferred the grey granite—originally shipped down from his native Aberdeen in the 1900s to protect the old hospital from the battering of the North Sea winds—to the glass and chrome of the new addition. But people assumed he would prefer new and sleek and shiny, so when he’d been given a new and sleek and shiny office who had he been to argue?

Sweeping past the waiting patients in the bright atrium of the surgical wing, Finn kept his head down and tapped his I.D. card for access to the private corridors beyond. Away from the gaze of the public, these corridors lacked the light and decor that the atrium offered up in abundance with its three-story high ceilings and windows that swept the length of both sides. One side offering up views of the vibrant yellow rape-seed fields, dotted with red splashes of poppies; the other offering a view of each of the three floors of the wing, mostly of offices hidden behind vertical blinds. Finn’s office was tucked down at the end of the corridor on the ground floor, away from the peering eyes of the atrium.

Now Finn, too, was away from the gaze of the public he felt his shoulders relax a little. Just a few more steps and he could hide away in his office until his first afternoon clinic. Carrying the weight of secrecy was so much easier when he was on his own.

“There was someone waiting for you in reception, Doctor Cooper,” his secretary, Moira, shouted through her open door as Finn walked past her office towards his own. “I put them in the Relatives’ Room for safe keeping. Edie Fletcher.”

He stopped in his tracks, looking at the girl behind the desk. Her bright red lips clashed with her bright orange hair, yet she could pull it off; her young age and blooming confidence helped. Finn knew all the staff in the surgical team thought there was something going on between him and Moira, amongst others, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. She was a great worker and she gave him the freedom to act like the fake Finn without taking him too personally. But that was where their relationship began and ended. Stemming those rumours would leave him open to more questions about his personal life, so he let them bubble away under the surface. As long as it wasn’t bothering Moira, it wasn’t bothering him.

“I don’t have a meeting booked and I don’t know an Eddie Fletcher,” he said in a stony voice, starting back towards his own office.

“Not yet,” Moira shouted after him. “Part of our new clinical trial team. Psychotherapist”

Finn almost gave himself whiplash as he jerked his head back and peered into Moira’s office. She had a wry smile on her face but was too busy tapping away at her keyboard to look up at him.

“What! I’m supposed to be picking the team. And how do you know about it?”

It was a rhetorical question, as he was half-way to his own office by the time he’d fired the words out. His palms were sweating again, the loss of control ate right through his bravado and set his heart racing. He swore under his breath, dumped his bags on the floor and the papers onto his desk, and stormed back out into the atrium to the Relatives’ Room. The door swung open with less resistance than he’d remembered, banging against the wall behind it. A young woman flinched, dropping the magazine she’d been reading, and looked up at Finn in a way that snatched the breath right out of him.

She was beautiful. Not just attractive, but truly beautiful. Despite the rude interruption she had a poise to the way she was sitting. Confident, with a presence that drew his eyes in and wouldn’t let them go. Her long dark hair was pulled back in a ponytail, a smattering of freckles covered her button nose, and her large almond-shaped eyes shone with the colours of the Norfolk bluebells; a purply-blue that Finn had never seen outside of the woods before. He was stumped, completely lost for words. A blossom of heat bloomed in his neck and he could feel it rising up his cheeks as he remembered to breathe.