Page 81 of The Devil Gets His Due

I send an email to both Fox and Joliet, notifying them aboutMindy and Mills, which airs this afternoon, relieved neither of them will be in for a while so I don’t have to hear about it. It’s eleven before Dr. Fox appears at my office door.

“Are you serious?” she demands, holding her phone aloft. “You went onto a nationally televised broadcast as a representative of this practice without running it by us first? You had no business—”

“Where I work was never discussed,” I reply, enjoying the irritation on her face far more than I should.

“So you just lost the practice a very valuable opportunity to get some good publicity.”

I meant to grovel. I really did. But I’ve seen ten patients already and she’s just walking in, and I know for a fact that she’ll be cutting out of here long before rush hour, leaving me to handle all the last-minute additions this afternoon. “If it’s a problem to say I’m with the practice and a problem if I don’t, what did you want? Is there any way I could come out of this havingnotdispleased you?”

She stares at me, her arms now folded across her chest. She expected an apology and isn’t sure how to react in its absence.

Her brow raises. “Since you don’t seem to care about this job, you should probably start looking for a new one,” she finally says, glancing at my stomach. “Good luck finding anythingnow.”

Great. Just fucking great.

Why didn’t I grovel? I sigh as I rise from my desk to see my next patient. I should probably be calling Gemma, but the truth is Graham is the only one I want to talk to. To vent, and possibly to rest my head against his chest the way I did last night. Perhaps, even, to climb into his bed and pick up where we left off, though obviously I’m not going to do that.

I spend the rest of the day counting the minutes until I can talk to him, but when I get to the apartment, he is on his way out. “Dinner’s in the fridge if you’re hungry,” he says, distracted. “Colin and Mandy had a fight so I’m meeting him out.”

I stare at him, feeling lost. I wanted him to solvemyproblems, to make it all better. I wanted him to act like a boyfriend, basically, while refusing to give him any of the benefits of actually being one. “Is there anything I can do?” I ask.

He glances up at me from his phone. “Just eat something, okay?”

“Sure,” I reply, pretending to be nonchalant.

I was so busy worrying about Graham’s reaction after we slept together...it never occurred to me I might need to worry a little bit about myself.

I ignore dinner and go downstairs to bring Mark his muffin. “Sorry it’s a day late,” I tell him.

He grins. “You know how many carbs are in this thing? You should be apologizing for getting me addicted to them in the first place.”

“How have you been, anyway? I feel like ever since Graham moved in and work got busy, I barely see you.”

He smiles. “Things are real good, Keeley. Seems like they’re good for you too.”

My eyes widen. Graham wouldn’t have told him we slept together, would he? That’s the kind of oversharingI’dbe prone to, not him.

“What do you mean?”

“You and Graham. I can tell it’s changed. The things you used to tell me…you now tell him. Which is exactly how it should be.”

“It’s not like we’re a couple,” I say quickly. “He’s still leaving for New York once the baby’s born.”

Mark glances at me through one eye. “You’re definitely a couple, whether you’re calling it that or not.”

“We aren’t. You know I don’t want that.”

He nods, staring off into the distance for a moment. “Did I ever tell you I used to own a ’59 Les Paul?”

I put my chin in my hand. “I don’t know what that is, but it sounds exclusive so now I want one.”

He laughs. “It’s a guitar. A really good guitar. But the fucked-up thing was I barely played guitar. I didn’t need to blow two hundred grand on anything, much less that, but I was trying to convince myself that…it was all worth it.”

“Thatwhatwas worth it?”

“The hours I worked, the pressure. This panic begins anytime the market dips. Your investors get scared and start calling you, and if enough of them call and you can’t talk them down, you’re fucked. Or you take some gamble, certain it’s going to pay off, and discover you’ve lost billions. So anyway, buying stuff—stupid stuff I didn’t need—was how I convinced myself it was worth it.”

I love Mark, but he’s a little heavy-handed with the allegories.Irrelevantallegories, as I wasn’t even talking about shopping for once.

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