Page 82 of The Ripple Effect

Sloane’s phone chimes. “Whoa. Brent hasnotlearned the art of the brief text. Hold please, reading… McHuge and the dog are at the vet; looks like she’ll stay the night for monitoring. Lori and Mitch are safe at the hotel. Brent, Willow, and Petra are heading over to the Mountie detachment to give statements. Is there anyone else I should call?”

I check the five-dollar IKEA clock above the cubicle door: ten minutes to midnight. Tobin and Liz need their rest, but it’s past time I called Sharon.

Maybe the only bright spot in this whole disaster is watching my sister get flustered at being fangirled over by Sharon’s husband.

“Hi, is this Sharon Keller-Yakub? Sloane Summers, I’m a guest at the Love B—yes, you can put it on speaker. Who amI talking to? Yes, good evening Mr. Yakub, it’s nice to meet you too. I… um, I really can’t reveal how faithful the movie is to the books, but I hope you enjoy it. I’m calling because… oh, aren’t you sweet. I have limited power to cast extras, but I’ll see what I can do if there’s a sequel. Sharon, could we talk business for a minute? A few things happened tonight. To put it mildly.”

There’s a light knock at the door. “Hi, it’s Dr. Winters.”

My heart trips wildly in my chest. I don’t know Evan Winters that well; he joined the department after me and promptly took a two-year leave of absence to work at the World Health Organization in Geneva. He was still away when I left. But there’s no possibility he hasn’t heard gossip about me.

Sloane holds the phone away from her ear, mouthing,Should I hang up?

I gesture around like,Seriously? This is my wheelhouse, and wave her out of the room. She ducks through the door, her voice fading as Evan closes it.

“I hear you found yourself on the wrong end of a dog bite, Doctor.”

The hunch in my shoulders unwinds somewhat at his friendly “Doctor.” I could have drawn a much shorter straw than Evan.

“Scratch, not a bite.”

“Let’s take a look.” He makes doctor noises as he presses gloved fingers to the ragged edges of skin left by Babe’s claws. “Hmm. I might want a few stitches. Hang tight, I’ll get a suture tray.”

He’s back in under a minute with a sealed sterile tray piled with disposable supplies. He rolls an equipment stand over to the bedside and adjusts the height. It’s all so familiar, yet strange.

“Freezing first, then irrigation, then closure. Sound good?I’ll do my best to get your ink to line up, but there might be some spots where it’s not perfect.”

I was good at suturing once. Good at setting bones and reducing dislocations. Putting things back together so you couldn’t tell one side had ever been separated from the other. Putting myself back together and pretending I was fine, too.

But maybe it’s time to stop hiding the evidence of my own hurts.

“I don’t mind if the tats get edited. And you don’t need to clear your plans with me. I’m the patient.”

“You’re still one of our own,” he says. “Or you could be, if you wanted to. Which I guess you don’t. Kat says you never replied to her emails.”

You could be, if you wanted to…?

“I blocked the hospital domain,” I say bluntly, wanting not to reveal too much. Asking for my job back, accidentally or on purpose, ranks somewhere below “self-administer random electric shocks” on my list of priorities.

“Then this will be an exciting conversation. Hold still now.”

I close my eyes, letting Evan’s one-sided conversation wash over me.

“Last September, someone forwarded your dataset to the hospital CEO and the dean of the medical school. Both launched investigations. Turn your head to the right. Here comes the freezing—little poke. In December, the emergency department got sanctioned by the hospital for failing to meet our mandated gender diversity targets. We’ll get sanctioned again this year; no women will even apply here since you left. It’s a hard sell for genderqueer folks, too. Last little poke. You hanging in there?”

“I’m good.” The rhythm of his patter reminds me of falling asleep as a child with the sounds of adult conversation and television banter filtering through my bedroom walls. I workedat Grey Tusk General longer than I’ve lived at any single address in my life. The language of this place is the language of home, in a very real way.

“The university pulled the residents back to Vancouver pending a review of the learning environment. Without them, our workload increased by 20 percent overnight. People started leaving for greener pastures,” he says, listing a handful of men I used to know, pausing meaningfully when he gets to my old department chief’s name. “Throw in the postpandemic labor shortages, and we’re on the verge of closing the ER some nights and diverting patients to Squamish.”

I thought I’d feel triumphant hearing about the downfall of the place I spent so much time hating. Vindicated, at least.

But I don’t. It feels good to know I left a mark here, but mostly, it’s sad to see the damage done.

“It must be hard for the people who are left.”

“Yeah. There’s not enough of us to go around. Patients are angry. I’ve been working my ass off since six; haven’t made a dent in the waitlist. And I probably shouldn’t have told you any of this, because Kat was asking you to come back.”

My chest snags on an inhale.

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