Page 12 of Obeying

"You sure?" he asks again, louder this time, and now there's an edge to it, a push. Every set of eyes in the bay shifts toward me—the nurse holding the suction, the intern at the foot of the bed, and the respiratory tech. All of them waiting to see what happens when the department head questions the same resident he's been grilling for a week.

"I'm sure." My voice comes out louder than I intended and steadier than I expected. "I've read it twice. The displacement is lateral, not anterior, and if you pull up the coronal view, you can see it clearly. I'm not guessing." I look right at him. "If you don't believe me, pull it up yourself."

Apart from the monitors and the soft hiss of the oxygen line, the bay goes so quiet I can hear my own breathing.

I immediately want to take back every word. Swallow them. Apologize. Regardless of our history, he's the chief of trauma surgery, and I'm a third-year resident who just challenged him in front of his entire team. I don't do this anymore. I don't fight back. I don't raise my voice. I don't stand my ground in a room full of people who outrank me, because I learned the hard way what happens when you push against someone who has power over you.

My hands are trembling at my sides, and I'm already composing the apology in my head, already bracing for the correction, the cold dismissal, the public dressing down that tells everyone in this room exactly where I rank.

But he looks at me, holds my gaze, and nods.

"Good. Trust your reads." He turns back to the patient. "Someone get me a chest tube tray."

The bay moves on. I stand there, and my hands are shaking, but it's not fear. It's something I haven't felt in so long that I barely recognize it. Because for about five seconds, I wasn't the woman who kept her head down and her voice low and her opinions folded up small enough to fit in a pocket. I was the woman who knew she was right and said it out loud in a room full of people.

And Logan Maxwell looked at me like that was exactly what he'd been waiting for.

I get back to work. We stabilize the patient. The chest tube goes in clean, the hemothorax drains, and the lung re-expands on the follow-up film.

The team clears out in shifts. I stay behind to finish documenting, writing until my hands stop trembling, and pressing the pen harder than I need to because the pressure helps.

I don't know what Maxwell is doing. I don't know why he pushes me harder than anyone else, why he singles me out every morning and asks me questions nobody else gets asked. I don't know why he did what he did earlier.

But I know that I walked out of that trauma bay today feeling more awake than I've felt in months. And it felt good. It felt dangerously, terrifyingly good.

Which is why I'm scared. The last time a man's attention made me feel like this, like I mattered, like I was worth seeing, I trusted it. And it cost me everything.

So I finish my notes, put the pen down, strip off my gloves, and drop them in the bin. Yet even as I walk out of the hospital, even as my heart pounds with the old fear, I can still feel it—that fire in my chest when I stood my ground.

I know why he did that. The woman I buried a long time ago, the one who argued and fought and never backed down from anyone, is still in there. I spent years burying her because being her wasn't safe.

And Logan Maxwell is trying to dig her up.

5

LOGAN

I knew it.

I knew she was still in there somewhere.

I haven't stopped thinking about yesterday, when Kristen Portland forgot to be afraid. When her chin came up, her voice filled the bay, and she told me to pull up the scan myself if I didn't believe her. No hesitation, no apology. For a few sweet seconds, she was every bit the surgeon she should have been this whole time.

Then it disappeared. I watched the walls go back up in real time. Her eyes dropped first, then her shoulders pulled in, and by the end of the shift, she was quiet again. Charting in a corner, staying out of the way, shrinking back into the version of herself that I've spent the last week trying to crack open.

But the original version was there. It's still in there. And now that I've seen it, I'm not going to stop pushing until it stays.

My phone buzzes on the desk. I glance at it, and the name on the screen makes me pause.

Dad.

I consider letting it ring. I've considered letting it ring for about three years now, and every time, I answer anyway because not answering a call from Dr. Theo Maxwell creates more problems than answering it does.

"Logan."

"Dad."

"Your mother and I just got back from the symposium in Munich. Excellent program this year. Margaret gave the keynote on vascular reconstruction outcomes. Standing ovation." This is how we talk. Not how are you, how's the weather, your mother and I tried this great restaurant. We trade achievements. Accomplishments are our small talk. "But I heard something interesting from Dr. Toby Yap at dinner last night. He tells me you received the Hargrove Award last month. And that you gave the keynote at the National Trauma Conference."