Chapter 3

The next morning, at eight o'clock sharp.

I showed up in the General Surgery handover room right on time.

Elmer hadn't arrived yet, but Sadie was already there, sitting by the window with a cup of coffee in her hand, chatting and laughing with the resident beside her.

When she saw me come in, her smile faltered for a moment, and then a look I couldn't read surfaced in her eyes.

I looked away and went to my seat.

I opened the medical records system and started going over today's surgery schedule.

On the schedule, my name had been moved to the third slot, for a routine appendectomy.

And the first slot listed Sadie's name, right there as lead surgeon, with another name beside it—Instructing Physician: Elmer Henson.

A residency trainee is already cleared to perform a laparoscopic appendectomy on her own?

I stared at that schedule for three seconds, then let it go and closed the page.

After the handover ended, the department chief, Fabian, called me over.

"Deidre, come here a second."

I went into the office and had just sat down.

Fabian said, "The hospital held a meeting yesterday. General Surgery is setting up a Pancreatic Subspecialty Group, and it needs a deputy director to lead it. I decided on Elmer, and then I put your name forward too. Your professional skills are strong, and the two of you are married, so working together would definitely be easier."

I was stunned for a moment.

Pancreatic surgery is one of the hardest directions in general surgery—complex operations, high risk, and plenty of complications.

Whoever lands this subspecialty group is the most promising of all the department's rising talents.

I held down the excitement in my chest, and before I could even thank him.

Fabian went on, "But first thing this morning Elmer put in a request to the Medical Affairs Office."

I froze. "What request?"

"He wants Sadie brought in too, to compete with you for the one spot. Whoever wins goes."

"Sadie?" I almost thought I'd misheard. "Someone who hasn't even earned her residency certificate yet?"

"Elmer says she has strong academic credentials, three high-impact peer-reviewed journal publications, and her supervisor is one of the top names in pancreatic surgery in the country. You, on the other hand, are just an ordinary graduate student, and your supervisor isn't well known."

Seeing the look on my face, Fabian quickly added, "Of course, you have a month to make your case. In the end it comes down to professional skill and surgical volume. You can definitely do this."

I didn't know what I was feeling.

After I left Fabian's office, I stood in the corridor for a while.

The General Surgery corridor is long, its walls lined on both sides with photos of past chiefs and the hospital's history.

The first time I walked into this corridor during my internship, I looked up at those photos and silently swore that one day my photo would hang here too.

Now I was just one step away from that goal.

But the person standing in the way of that step was the one closest to me.

Someone who isn't even qualified to be on the operating table, someone who can't even do the surgical scrub right.

This is how Elmer protects her?

My eyes stung.

In the end I took a deep breath, pushed all the tangled thoughts out of my head, and turned toward the operating room.

The third-slot appendectomy wasn't a major surgery, but I never take any surgery lightly.

When it was over, as I came around the corner in the corridor, I ran straight into Elmer.

When he saw me, his steps paused, his lips moved, as if he wanted to say something.

I didn't stop.

We passed each other like two strangers.

"Deidre," he called after me.