Page 61 of Careless Whisper

She looked pleased. “Excellent. Calling and textingnowis cowardly. If he wanted to support you, he should’ve done it when it counted.”

Amen!

So, I turned my phone off without looking at who was sending me messages. I didn’t care. I wasdone.

CHAPTER 22

Elias

No one could reach Reggie. Cindy had tried. Luther had tried. I had tried. I had also nagged the fuck out of everyone I could find to try. Everyone had failed to elicit a response from her. At this point, I’d take the middle finger emoji from her, for God’s sake.

I’d come clean to Dr. Cabrera about everything that I legally could talk about—including what happened at Stratford in Boston. He listened without interrupting, just watching me over the top of his glasses like a disappointed owl.

Dr. Cabrera looked like a retired physicist someone had lured back into medicine just for the chaos—white hair in constant rebellion, a bowtie that never matched his shirt, and thick gray brows that practically formed quotation marks around every expression. He was sharp as hell, maddeningly direct, and I liked him.Which, frankly, was one of the only reasons I’d taken the job.

He tapped a pen against his desk once, twice, as if pondering a heavy thought. “So let me get this straight. You got Nurse Sanchez fired from Stratford for a mistake that Dr. Loring made?”

I let out a long breath. “I didn’t know it was Maren?—”

“But it was?” he insisted, cutting me off.

My head moved in a slow, solemn nod. “Yeah. That’s what happened.”

He stared at me for a beat. “So, your defense is that you were too dumb to figure it out?”

My lips curled into a smirk, but my eyes, I knew, blazed with irritation. “Not myfavoritephrasing, but?—”

Dr. Cabrera lifted a hand, pausing dramatically like he was holding court. “To be fair, I’ve heard worse.” He leaned back, fingers steepled beneath his chin. “Now, I’m not one to tell a man where to dip hispen, Dr. Graham—especially not in a hospital this size. You work a hundred hours a week, so where the hell else are you supposed to meet someone romantically, right?”

My jaw locked. I knew there was no good answer to that question, so I shut the fuck up.

“But dating one colleague while you’re unofficially engaged to another?” His brows waggled, eyes twinkling. “My friend, just because we’re in Seattle doesn’tmean we need to cosplayGrey’s Anatomy. No matter how many of the nurses call you Dr. McDreamy.”

I sent him a flat, unimpressed stare. The old bastard was enjoying this far too much.

He eased forward, elbows braced on his desk. “Tell me this—have you had one of those charming elevator moments where your girlfriend, your maybe-fiancée, and your ex are all in the same car, staring at each other like it’s a scene from a bad rom-com?”

“No, Dr. Cabrera,” I growled. “And, for the record, I’m not engaged to Dr. Loring, and I don’t have a girlfriend…right now.”

He raised a single snowy brow. “Hmm. The way you’re going, I doubt you’ll have a girlfriend later on, either. And you might want to tell Dr. Loring that you and she are not going to be married soon. She seems…lessconvinced of that.”

I sighed. “I already have, but I will again.”

“Right!” He waved a hand. “Look, I don’t care who you’re dating. But I do care when it affects this department. And right now, it is.”

I gave a tense shrug, jaw clenched. “You’re right, it is.”

“So, Dr. Graham, where did we go wrong?”

Bywe,he meantme.

I huffed out a sharp breath. “I should’ve told you I didn’t want to hire Maren. That, I had… history with her. I let it slide because I didn’t want to deal with the fallout.”

He gave a sage little nod as if that was the answer he’d been expecting. “Ah, yes. The eternal Elias Graham coping strategy—avoid, deflect, and hope for the best. What else?”

“Maybe I should’ve been less of an ass to Reggie when I started,” I admitted.

Dr. Cabrera narrowed his eyes. “Maybe?”

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