That Space In Your Heart
Chapter 3. Liability
“Welcome back, Dr. Corday,” said the silky voice from behind her.
Elizabeth, who had been resting on a chair in the surgeon’s lounge before she picked Ella up, spun around. Yes, there he was, his chest thrust forward aggressively, his right hand at his hip. Her hackles rose, recognizing the challenge in his face.
“What are you talking about?” He could be so random … so surprising. “Shouldn’t I be welcoming you?”
He licked his lips, enjoying whatever edge he thought he’d found. “I thought you’d abandoned me for the land of the ethically upright,” he said. “I’m rather glad to find out I was mistaken.”
“I don’t know what you mean by that,
Dr. Romano,” she lied with impeccable dignity.
He jutted his chin out skeptically. “I knew the old, ruthless Corday was lurking in there somewhere.”
“If you’re referring to Mr. Fish…”
He smirked, and Elizabeth answered with an icy scowl. Romano had always commented acerbically on whatever moral lapses he could detect, and his indictments had never had such an effect on her.
“It
wasn’t an ethical lapse. I believed it was the right course of action considering his symptoms and the history of success with patients at his stage of development.”
“So cutting open Mr. Fish’s liver before his time was up had everything to do with his best interests and not with trying out the latest cool trick you saw demonstrated by some hotshot visiting surgeon, is that it?”
“You think I mistreated a patient based on—”
“Your lust for a challenge?” he pronounced. “I don’t know if I think that. You always did strike me as the adventurous type, though.”
He added this last with a wry little flourish, and Elizabeth felt a flush stain her face. She was uncomfortably aware of the double entendres, and the deliberate emphasis he’d put on the word
adventurous.
Hastily covering her confusion, she said, “There was a complication, I admit, but it was the tube that nicked a blood vessel and it had nothing to do with the procedure itself—”
“Save the posturing for the deposition, all right?” he said.
“Well, you accused me, didn’t you?” Elizabeth said. “You can’t ask me not to defend myself.”
He gave her a cool, appraising look that brought an unwelcome flush of embarrassment to the tips of her ears. It would look like she was blushing before his intense scrutiny. She was really thinking about Fish’s liver. Not Romano’s eyes…
“Defend yourself…?” he repeated. “If I know you, you’ll always be able to do that.”
She clenched her jaw, willing the heat to recede from her earlobes.
“You know, I meant what I said before,” he said.
She looked up, only to realize Romano was still watching her face with dark, cagey eyes. “What did you say?” Maybe he was going to explain that comment about coming back “as long as she was here”.
“That I had no idea you still had this sort of thing in you. I thought you’d gone alarmingly upright over the years. The word soft even crossed my mind once in awhile.”
Elizabeth smiled roguishly, masking an odd twinge of disappointment that she’d misinterpreted him. “Are you calling me a burnout?”
“Heaven forbid,” he said calmly. “I’m calling you a liability.”
She cast around for a good, cutting, brilliant response, but Romano’s face grew tense and pale, his lips pinched together as if he were angry. Before Elizabeth could muster her guns for another round, the door had shut behind him.
She sank back in her chair, her heart pounding. The encounter had left her winded. Or off-balance, rather. He’d been humorless, almost nasty, as if he were dealing with Peter Benton instead of his old friend Lizzie.
*
When the door swung open again, Elizabeth half-expected Romano to return. But it was only an intern: Lindsay Marshall, young, cocky, with too many blonde streaks in her dark hair. “You seem worried,” Marshall said when she saw Elizabeth’s contemplative frown.
“Just my liver patient.”
“I heard about that,” Marshall said. “I’ve always wanted to do that, but I never found the chance. Was it fun?”
“Sure,” Elizabeth said. “Until he went into a coma.”
The other woman either didn’t hear the edge in Elizabeth’s voice or simply didn’t care. “Too bad,” she offered under her shoulder as she left with the papers she’d fetched.
Elizabeth snorted under her breath. “Yeah.”
She pictured the calculated, glossy expression that Romano hadn’t allowed to crack since his return, and something sour curled up into her throat. He’d thrown her at first with his unexpected formality, especially after his drug-induced confession, but she’d regain her footing. She wasn’t going to let Romano revert to treating her like his intern, she didn’t have to answer to him anymore.
Anger propelled her quickly down the stairs and to the door of his office. She stood outside for a minute in indecision, wondering what exactly she’d say; then, without knocking, she pushed her way inside.
The office was unlit except for a small desk lamp casting thin beams over stacks of neatly organized papers. Elizabeth thought the office was empty until she noticed Robert standing by the wall. His arm was outstretched, propping him against a shelf in his bookcase, and his head was bent sharply forward.
“Most people feel the need to knock before coming into a private office,” he muttered without turning around.
“Robert, it’s me.” She took a few steps inside, closing the door behind her.
“Dr. Corday,” he said without moving. “Conscience prickling you?”
“A little. But it’s not your concern, is it? You’re not my superior anymore, have you forgotten?”
A sharp note of laughter shook his shoulders. “Oh, I was never your superior.”
“You know what I mean,” she pressed on. “I don’t answer to you anymore. I’m not your problem; I’m my own problem, since I’m the chief of surgery now—”
“Okay, I get it, I’ve been demoted and you’ve taken yet another step up the ladder… can we talk about this later?”
Curious, she approached further, almost on tiptoe, craning her neck to see his face. His mouth was as tightly controlled as always, his eyes obscured with shadow. There was nothing in his expression, not anger or even sadness, to tell her why he wasn’t moving.
“Robert?” she said, laying her hand lightly on his shoulder.
He jumped and she snatched away her hand, recalling belatedly that she shouldn’t have touched him. Maybe his kindness to Ella earlier, so surprising that she’d had to look over her shoulder to verify it was really he who held her daughter’s hand so tenderly, had tricked her into forgetting who he was: Rocket Romano, the untouchable.
“I mean it,” he said. “Give me five minutes, and then I promise you can storm in here again and yell all you want to.”
A drop of perspiration ran down his temple, attracting Elizabeth’s attention.
“Are you in pain?” she asked.
“No,” he said shortly. Robert’s shoulder had felt solid, strong, beneath her fingertips in that brief moment of concern, yet now he seemed almost unable to stand. The hand holding the bookshelf was shaking, the sinewy muscles in his forearm quivering, as if his own weight was too much for him to hold up.
Elizabeth adopted the businesslike attitude that usually smoothed things out. They’d fought all the time last year, before the amputation, but if she came at Robert with scissors and scalpel, he’d always sit still and let her deal with the wound. Now, she asked impassively, “What does it feel like?”
“Like someone chopped off my arm,” he grunted.
“I meant, is it stump pain or phantom limb pain?”
“Why?”
“I’ll write you a scrip—”
“No,” he interrupted. “Don’t get me anything. I’m not taking any painkillers anymore.”
“Have you seen a doctor about this?”
“It’s never happened before,” he said.
“Well, then let me get you something, just for now,” she said. “You can see a specialist tomorrow.”
Romano finally turned a dull, set face toward her. She was close enough to hear his shallow, tight breaths, see the tiny white marks of tension at the sides of his nose. “I’ll see someone about it,” he said. “But you need to leave me now.”
Elizabeth stared at him for a moment, wishing she could see beyond the pools of darkness shadowing his deep-set eyes. It occurred to her then that she had spent a lot of time today trying to read his expressions.
“All right,” she said after a moment. “Good night.”
Chapter 4: Turncoat
