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“Thank me? For what?”
“These lunches have come to mean a lot to me,” he said. “And not just because I know they’ll be good for my career.”
He regarded her for a moment, wondering where this was going. Surely she wasn’t about to actually say the words?
“It’s just… good to feel as if I have a friend here,” she said. “Someone I can really talk to. Someone who can meet me at my level. I have Sara, but we don’t have as much in common as I hoped we would when we first met.”
“No, I wouldn’t think so,” Dominic agreed. “She’s a little shallow.”
“Don’t be mean. She’s nice. And she is still my friend. But I don’t find myself able to really talk to her about medical stuff. She’s more interested in connecting on a superficial level. I do need that. But…” She met Dominic’s eyes. “I need this too.”
She wasn’t alone in that. Dominic wanted to tell her so. He wanted to let her know that their arrangement had come to mean a lot to him as well, and that he didn’t think he could get by without it anymore.
But those were the kinds of things they couldn’t say to one another.
They lingered for a while. Dominic kept meaning to get up and head back to work, but he kept finding reasons to put it off. Finally, at twelve forty-five, he knew he had delayed as much as he could, and he pulled out his pager to check it as he dumped his cafeteria tray in the trash.
He froze where he stood.
He had received a page — and he had missed it.
How had he missed it? The pager had been on his hip, right where it always was. He should have felt it vibrating! He broke into a run, cursing himself, not even noticing where Emily was — whether she was following or not.
He arrived in the emergency room and skidded to a halt. “What’s going on?” he demanded of a passing nurse.
“Poisoning case.” She pointed.
He ran over to the bed. Another doctor was there, a less experienced one, and a look of relief came over his face when he saw Dominic. “I don’t know what to do,” he said, indicating the patient on the bed — an unconscious toddler, pale and shivering. “I’d give him something to make him vomit, but he’s unconscious.”
“What did he ingest?”
“The parents think it was something under the sink, but they don’t know what,” the doctor said. “He was having seizures when he came in, but that’s stopped now. I don’t know what to do,” he said again, helplessly.
“The parents are here?”
“In the waiting room.”
“Okay, go and speak to them. Sit with them.” It was something he would never have thought of before, but Emily had changed him — had changed the way he thought about patient care. Someone needed to be with those parents right now. “Tell them I’ll be out as soon as I have something to tell them.”
“Do you think you’re going to be able to save him?”
“Let me work, will you?”
The doctor left. Dominic took a breath to calm his racing heart.
He knew what to do. He had dealt with situations like this one before.
He instructed a nurse to begin monitoring vitals. Then he began to assess antidotes.
Twenty minutes later, sweating through his scrubs, he went into the waiting room. The little boy’s parents were waiting there, both of them in tears.
“We only took our eyes off him for a minute,” the mother was saying to the other doctor. “I don’t know how this could have happened.”
“A minute is all it takes,” Dominic told them. They looked up at him in surprise — they obviously hadn’t heard him come in. “Don’t let it happen again, okay?”
“I— again?” the father said. He looked as if he could hardly stand to let himself hope that he was hearing correctly.
“He’s going to be okay,” Dominic said. “But you need to hear me when I tell you — this could have ended very differently. You put a childproof lock on whatever it was he got into. Keep an eye on that boy. Otherwise, you’re going to find yourself back here, and you might not be so lucky next time.”
