Page 50 of Dr. Roz Harrington
Roz’s pulse thundered in her ears, her chest tight with anger and hurt. “You don’t get to decide that.”
“Oh, don’t be so naïve,” Evelyn said, rising to her feet. She was tall, regal, the firelight casting sharp shadows across her face. “You’ve seen what happens when people with power and responsibility like us make foolish mistakes. You’ve spent your whole life proving yourself in a man’s world. What do you think they’ll say about you when they find out?”
Roz stood, her hands trembling as she fought to keep her composure. “Let them talk. I don’t care.”
“Of course you care!” Evelyn hissed. “You care what your colleagues think, what your patients think, what Catherine and Olivia think. You’ve always cared, Rosalind, because youknowhow quickly respect can vanish.”
The words struck a nerve, and Roz felt her resolve waver. Evelyn stepped closer, her voice softening into something almost maternal but no less cutting. “You’re smarter than this, Roz. You’re stronger. Don’t let one foolish mistake destroy everything you’ve built.”
Roz swallowed hard, blinking back the sting of tears as she forced herself to meet Evelyn’s unrelenting gaze. “So what are you asking me to do?”
“I’m not asking,” Evelyn said coldly. “This ends now.”
Roz’s breath caught, her hands tightening into fists. “You’re asking me to choose.”
“No,” Evelyn replied, turning back toward the fire. “I’mtellingyou to choose.”
The room spun for a moment, her mother’s words slamming into her like a punch to the gut. She wanted to scream, to tellEvelyn she had no right, that this wasn’t her life to dictate. But Evelyn was already done with the conversation, her dismissal clear in the way she stood with her back to Roz.
Roz turned on her heel and strode out of the room, her boots echoing on the marble floor. She felt hollow, like something vital had been ripped from her. But worse than that, she felt like a child again, small and powerless under Evelyn’s unrelenting control.
The air outside hit her like a slap as she stumbled down the steps, her chest heaving with breaths she couldn’t seem to catch. Her car felt like the only safe place left, and she slammed the door shut behind her before resting her forehead against the steering wheel.
Evelyn’s words rattled around in her head: “You cannot have both.”
Roz didn’t know if she was furious or heartbroken or both. But as she sat there, alone in her car outside the house she had never truly belonged to, one truth became painfully clear: Evelyn Harrington always got her way.
And Roz didn’t know if she was strong enough to fight her.
Roz sat in her car for far longer than she intended, the leather seat cold against her back and the silence unbearable. The Harrington mansion loomed behind her like a dark shadow, its pristine façade hiding decades of control and manipulation. She gripped the steering wheel tightly, her knuckles white from the pressure as Evelyn’s words played on repeat in her mind.
“You cannot have both.”
The ultimatum felt like a chain, locking her down, suffocating her. Her breath came sharp and shallow, her pulse an erratic rhythm of anger and helplessness. She hated that her mother could still get to her, still strip her down to her rawest insecurities with just a few calculated words. Roz had spent her entire life fighting to carve out a place for herself—first in thefamily, then in the unforgiving halls of medicine. And yet here she was, reduced to a child desperate for approval.
Her phone buzzed on the passenger seat, pulling her out of her thoughts. She glanced at the screen.
Sam:“Everything okay?”
The simple words hit her harder than she expected. She stared at them for a long moment, her thumb hovering over the keyboard. Sam had no idea what had just happened, and Roz didn’t know how to tell her. How could she explain the suffocating weight of being a Harrington? How Evelyn’s words had crawled under her skin like poison, leaving her shaken and uncertain?
She typed a response. Deleted it. Typed another. Deleted that too. In the end, she turned the screen off and dropped the phone back onto the seat. Sam deserved honesty, but Roz wasn’t sure she had anything left to give right now.
The drive back to her apartment was a blur. Roz wasn’t sure if it was the lack of sleep or the emotional toll of Evelyn’s ultimatum, but the world outside her window felt distorted. Gray skies, blurred the outlines of trees and buildings, everything melting together.
When she finally stepped through her apartment door, the emptiness of the space hit her like a wall. She dropped her keys onto the counter, the sound unnaturally loud in the silence. The apartment was immaculate, cold, and sterile, a reflection of how tightly she had kept her life compartmentalized. Sam’s presence had started to warm these walls, though. The memory of her laugh and the way her body fit against Roz’s under the covers, it lingered here, like a ghost Roz couldn’t banish.
Roz kicked off her shoes and sank onto the couch, her head falling into her hands. The room still smelled faintly like Sam’s perfume, a subtle reminder of what was at stake. Evelyn’s wordsechoed louder now, blending with the memories of Sam’s touch, Sam’s kisses, Sam’s steady presence.
“You cannot have both.”
Roz’s throat tightened. Evelyn wasn’t wrong, not entirely. Rozhadworked too hard for too long to let anyone jeopardize her career, least of all herself. Every inch of respect she’d earned as a surgeon had come at a cost. The whispers in the break rooms, the sideways glances from male colleagues who resented her rise—they had always been there, waiting for her to stumble. A scandal like this would only feed the fire.
And yet…
Sam.
The thought of ending things with her felt unbearable, like carving out a piece of herself and leaving it behind. Sam had cracked open something inside her, something soft and vulnerable, something she didn’t know still existed. Sam didn’t look at her like she was a Harrington or just another ambitious surgeon. Sam looked at her like she mattered. Like she was worth fighting for.
