Page 110 of Clara Knows Best

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Jesse ran his tongue over his new molar and stared at Clara’s text for about five minutes.

I’ll share my location with you. Come find us after work!

I don’t get excited about things the way you do, he’d told her. Yet here he sat with an accelerated heart rate and no appetite for his long-awaited dinner.

Every time his screen started to go dark, he tapped it.

Margo appeared in the doorway, looking like a grandmotherly Tinkerbell in her bleached pixie cut. He’d noticed since his return that she alternated between light blue and dark blue scrubs and always wore the same shoes. It was weirdly disappointing.

“Did you talk to the skull fracture’s wife?” she asked.

“Yeah, just now. Sent her home to get some sleep.”

“I’m glad. She seemed like a nice woman.”

The conversation seemed over to Jesse, but she didn’t go away. He looked up from his phone again, eyebrows lifted in question.

“Why aren’t you eating?” she asked.

“Not hungry.”

“I heard your stomach growling in the OR,” she said flatly.

“I’ll eat in a minute.”

She looked skeptical. “You’ve been weird ever since you came back. You’ve lost weight, too.”

“No, I haven’t.”

“That woman really did a number on you, didn’t she?”

He looked up again, startled. “Dr. Wilder? No, not at all.”

“Clara. I knew, as soon as she said you were going to operate on a collie.”

“Border collie,” he corrected automatically. “You knew what?”

“That she’d done a number on you,” she said enigmatically.

“No one did any numbers on me and I haven’t lost weight.”

“What are you looking at on your phone?” she asked.

“An article.”

“About what?”

“Torticollis,” he said coolly.

“You haven’t been scrolling.”

“You have to tap to turn the page.”

She squinted at him for a moment, and then gave up. “Fine. But this isn’t sustainable.”

“It often resolves in six months with treatment.”

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