Page 34 of The Devil You Know
I never told Ben about Ryan. Not exactly. Not the whole story. I mentioned that there was a surgeon I usedto date sometimes in residency, but left out the fact that I was (sort of) in love with him. Ben wasn’t too interested in talking about his ex-girlfriends, which gave me an out when it came to discussing my own past. A few times I tried to press him for details about the girl he dated right before me.
“Did you love her?” I asked him.
“I guess,” he said. “But not the way I love you. Not even close.”
I felt the same way. As much as my previous relationships seemed significant at the time, they seemed so frivolous and unimportant after I met Ben. Even what I had with Ryan seemed to pale in comparison. So Ben was right—there was no point in talking about the past.
Ben is watching my face, expecting an answer. I’m the worst liar. My skin always gives me away—I blush like a madwoman when I’m lying. But there’s no reason to lie—there’s nothing worth lying about.
Yet the way Ben is looking at me is making me feel like maybe there is.
Ben has never been the jealous type. At all. I would say he definitely trusts me. And I’ve never given him anything to get jealous about. I’ve never even considered cheating on him. Since we’ve been together, there have never been any remotely significant men in my life aside from him.
Ben has been similarly loyal to me. He’s not the kind of guy who generally makes friends with women, so there haven’t been any women in his life for me to be jealous of. The one exception was several years ago, before Leah came along, when we were first married and living in Manhattan. It was before he joined the start-up company and he was going to work on a daily basis. At the time, he was working on a big project with some woman named Jen. And it just seemed like he was talking to her a lot and texting with her a lot, but I wasn’t really bothered by it until I went to a party at his company where Jen was present.
At Ben’s old company, a lot of the people who worked there were older, maybe middle-aged, and the ones who weren’t were the stereotypical computer geeks who lived in their parents’ basement. Jen wasn’t like that though. She was in her late twenties, had her black hair cut in an attractive bob, and she was rocking a pair of Tina Fey glasses. And her black dress was far too short.
Moreover, I couldn’t help but notice that Ben was one of the more attractive men in the room. He was young and clean-cut and looked really sharp in his shirt and tie. Not that Ben isn’t always cute, but he looked downright handsome that night. And it was obvious that Jen was aware of it.
She wouldn’t leave us alone all night. She followed us to the hors d’oeurvres table, she followed us to the bar—Iswear to God, I thought she was going to follow Ben to the bathroom at one point. And she was hanging on his every word. When Ben made a joke about their boss’s obviously crooked toupee, she slapped him in the biceps and cried, “Ben Ross, you’re sobad!”
That was pretty much it for me.
On the subway ride home, I read him the riot act about Jen. “It was disgusting the way she was flirting with you!”
He shrugged. “So?”
“So…” I shook my head at him. “It’s inappropriate. It could lead to something else.”
I remember the way he looked at me in utter amazement. “What do you think?” he said. “That I would actuallycheaton you? WithJen? Are you serious?”
The way he said it made me realize how much Ben took our marital vows for granted. He couldn’t conceive of ever cheating on me, and he believed the same of me.
Anyway, I should probably answer his question about Ryan. The longer I hesitate, the worse it sounds.
“He’s just some doctor at work,” I finally say. “I had to organize grand rounds for him recently and he was a huge diva about the whole thing.”
“Oh.” Ben looks down at my phone again, which has stayed blessedly silent. “Okay.”
He doesn’t press me further. He seems to accept my answer, although he doesn’t look thrilled. Ben trusts methough. Which is why my answer to Ryan’s question about lunch will be “no.” And yes, I’ve thought about it.
Chapter 12
It’s never good when you take a patient’s blood pressure and you gasp when you see the result.
We do have an automatic blood pressure cuff on Primary Care C. It’s our one luxury, in addition to, I guess, running water and electricity. I guard that cuff with my life. So when I’m taking eighty-two-year-old Joseph McAuliffe’s blood pressure and the result reads 238/115, I assume the damn machine must finally have broken on me.
Well, at least we still have electricity and running water.
“What’s wrong?” Mr. McAuliffe’s daughter asks me. “Is that high?”
Is that a real question? I mean, even if you don’t know the medical association’s recommendations for blood pressure control, you’ve got to recognize that a top number of 238 is not just high, butreallyfreaking high. Like, let’s get you to the ER before you have a stroke kind of high.
“I’m going to recheck it manually,” I tell them.
Except when I recheck it, the number is similar. This man is dangerously hypertensive.
I’m getting ready to tell the McAuliffes that I’m going to have to call the ER when I happen to notice a note from the last time Mr. McAuliffe was seen in clinic. His blood pressure then was 223/110. And it was similarly high the time before that.
