Page 61 of Where Are You Now
She cut her eyes at him. “You’re creative. You could figure it out if you wanted to.”
“I don’t want to.”
“It would keep you company.”
“Unless it’s going to surprise me with dinner and help me pick up around my apartment, it won’t earn its keep.”
“A cat would provide other benefits,” she countered.
“Like?”
“Like curling up in your lap after a long day and cuddling next to you at night.”
His eyes roamed the ceiling as he shook his head.
Friends. She could do this. Like everything in her life right now, she just had to get her head around her new reality. “Well, I’ll have lots of time to convince you of that if we’re going to stay in touch—which weare.”
He finally allowed a genuine smile.
Her heart ached at the thought of only having a week more with him. Ava didn’t know how they’d manage the distance, but she was sure she’d be better at it than she was last time. But if she was going to have her best friend back, Avawanted to know whatever it was he’d been dealing with. Would he finally explain?
“You promised to tell me everything if I went to church with you.”
Lucas didn’t answer.
She shifted toward him on the sofa, putting herself into his line of sight. “If you tell me your thing, I’ll tell you mine.”
He took in a deep breath and slowly let out the air. “Can’t we just start from here and not look back?”
“I want to know everything I’ve missed—the goodandthe bad.”
His jaw clenched.
She squeezed his hand. “I was your first best friend, and I’m still your best friend if you want me to be,” she said with an encouraging grin. “You can tell me.”
He took a measured drink of wine; then his shoulders dropped in surrender. “All right.” He set his wine on the table and faced her. Silent words hung on his lips as if the message was a struggle to get out. Anxiety visibly fell upon him, making him look years older than he usually did, his sparkle absent.
“Eight months ago … It was the first surgery of the day. I was implanting electrodes in the patient to ease tremors he was experiencing after a traumatic brain injury. He’d made a pretty amazing recovery from a terrible forklift accident, and he was hoping to go back to work at some point, if we could stop the tremors. While the procedure was complicated, everything was routine, nothing at all out of the ordinary.
“I’d overslept just a couple of minutes that morning, but it wasn’t enough to matter. I’d missed my usual cup of coffee and still gotten to the hospital on time. I spent an hour reviewing my plan, scrutinizing the patient’s records, and getting myself mentally prepared for the lengthy operation. But while I was busy planning, out of nowhere, the questionoccurred to me: Was this career what I really wanted? I hadn’t asked myself that before, and the thought startled me, given that I was about to go into surgery.”
A dark cloud fell over Lucas as he paused for a moment.
“I talked myself out of even questioning what I was doing and tried to push it out of my mind. The patient had asked for me, specifically. He’d heard I was the best. I was supposed to do this job.”
Another pause.
“By the time they had him prepped and I was scrubbed up, it was 9:02 for a 9:00 surgery—perfectly prepared, like every surgery I’d done before.” He swallowed. “And then everything went wrong.” His gaze dropped to the hardwood floor.
The anguish on his face made Ava want to put her arms around him and comfort him, but she wasn’t sure of the new dynamic between them, so instead, she waited patiently for him to get out the rest of his story.
His chest rose and then fell.
“During the procedure, sometimes, the fluid that surrounds the brain can change the pressure inside the skull, and what’s called ‘a brain shift’ can occur. If the surgeon fails to account for the shift, the electrode could penetrate a blood vessel. I thought I had the right pathway. But the patient started to hemorrhage.” Lucas’s voice broke, and he took a minute to gather himself before continuing.
“I didn’t work fast enough, and my patient died on the table.” His eyes glassed over, his lips set in a straight line, the agony of the situation still evident.
“I’m so sorry.” Ava took his hand once more. “You can’t beat yourself up. You’re not perfect. So many things are out of your hands.”
