Page 45 of Time for You
It had been a long time since Daphne had taken her one music appreciation course to fulfill her arts requirement in college, but she flipped through a mental list of the records they owned and tossed out a suggestion while he pushed the coffee table off to the side. There wasn’t a ton of space in their living room, but Henry didn’t seem deterred. He slipped her suggested record out of the sleeve and placed the needle on the correct track.
“C’mere,” he said, andshit, she wished Ellie were home. Her stomach wouldn’t stay put, tumbling over and over, and it was so much easier when she was around to act as a buffer.
Daphne took his hand and let him pull her off the couch. The touch of his palm to hers sent a frisson down her spine and suddenly her lungs felt too small, like there wasn’t enough oxygen in the universe for her to breathe properly.
“One hand here,” he said, placing her hand on his shoulder. “Like this.” He took her other hand and there went the tingles again, setting off another round of stomach gymnastics. His hand went to her waist, and Daphne had never quite felt like this, like there was an intimacy between them she’d never experienced. It was silly, considering she was hardly a virgin, but it felt new and unexpected.
Quietly, Henry began counting through the music, explaining the steps and then leading her through them. She wasn’t the best dancer, but she caught on quickly enough. The song ended and Henry went and found another one she suggested, and together they waltzed around her living room to a slow ballad she’d once listened to over and over again on her bedroom floor as a middle schooler, pretending she’d felt real heartache and feeling unimaginably grown up.
The seconds blurred together and the rest of the room faded away, until it was just Henry and the way his hand flexed on her waist, the way his eyes kept dipping toward her lips. The way they kept getting closer and closer, despite his initial explanation of the importance of a separation between them.
“This is nice,” she said, sounding dazed. She felt dizzy, even though they hadn’t really been spinning much. But the world felt strange and unreal, like lights had been extinguished all around them.
“Daphne, I—” Henry looked dazed too, his eyes saying words she couldn’t interpret.
They had stopped. Daphne didn’t know when that had happened, but now they were standing in each other’s arms, frozen in place while Norah Jones sang mournfully in the background. He let go of her waistand cupped her cheek in his hand, cradling her face gently. “This is—I can’t—” he stammered.
A key slid into the doorknob, bumpy and metallic, and the handle twisted. Daphne and Henry jumped apart just as Ellie walked in, launching into a story about her shift without preamble. “And then the nurse said—wait, what’s up? Were you guys dancing?” she said, interrupting herself.
Henry recovered first. “Daphne didn’t know how. I offered to teach her. How was your day? You were saying someone had something stuck? Somewhere?” he said solicitously, but Ellie was looking between them with narrowed eyes.
“Everything okay? You guys seem ... weird.”
“Everything’s fine. Keep going,” Daphne said.
“Okay, well, Henry, like I said at the start, I’m sorry that this will probably be shocking for you to hear, but a guy came in, claiming he ‘fell’ on a carrot, and—”
Ellie continued her story, and yes, Henry blushed as she talked, but Daphne had the distinct impression that blush had been building before Ellie walked in.
Even worse, she felt her own ears burning, and it had nothing to do with a carrot up someone’s butt.
Chapter Eighteen
“Dr. Griffin?” Hannah prompted. “What do you want us to do?”
Adrenaline flooded Daphne’s veins as she tried to breathe through the panic, the beeping of the machines reminding her of the incredibly high stakes. She wished there were someone else around—Ellie, the chief resident, literally anyone else—but it was just her.
Her, the nurses, and a coding patient. She made her choice and sprang into action, forcing aside the second-guessing clawing at her gut. The room turned into a hurricane of activity, with Daphne standing in the center of it. It was, theoretically, the sort of moment she was supposed to want. This is what people in Emergency Medicine liked to do, what they went into it for. It was whatshewent into it for.
But an hour later, with the patient sent up to surgery but still unlikely to make it much longer, Daphne sank to the floor. She didn’t even have the energy to go hide in the closet like she usually did. She just slid down the wall and hid her face in her hands, trying to keep from sobbing. Telling the patient’s family that they were “doing what they could” in the most comforting way possible had felt like swallowing knives, because she could tell the wife knew. She knew her wife wasn’t going to make it, but she was going to cling to the gossamer thread of hope Daphne was dangling, because in the end it was all they had.
That woman’s face, drawn and grey, kept hovering behind Daphne’s eyes. No amount of digging the heels of her palms into her eye sockets could get rid of it. It was there, along with the pained cries she knewwould follow when the surgeons came down to give her the news Daphne knew was coming. A car crash, with those injuries—you didn’t come back from that. They could keep her going, maybe for an hour, maybe long enough that the wife could get upstairs to say goodbye, but the finality of all of it threatened to swamp Daphne.
It wasn’t that she wasn’t prepared for this. It was something everyone going into medicine knew, because the entire reason people became doctors was to fight against the inevitability of death. Daphne couldn’t have gotten through med school without knowing that part of her job would be delivering hard news, sometimes devastating news, and she’d lost patients before. But for some reason this patient, on this day, was just too much.
Daphne gave herself five minutes to drown in self-pity, then dragged herself upright. She had a shift to finish, after all.
Daphne made it through the rest of her shift, but how, she couldn’t say. She could have sworn she heard the anguished cries when the surgeons told her patient’s family she didn’t make it, even though that wasn’t really possible. The waiting room was upstairs and the emergency room was its usual cacophony of noise, but she knew when it happened all the same.
Henry was sitting on their couch, reading a book, when she came home. “How was work?” he asked conversationally. “Ellie’s out for the night. She said not to expect her back until tomorrow.”
Daphne nodded, her throat suddenly thick. Henry had turned back to his book, but when she didn’t reply, he looked up. “Is everything okay?”
Is. Everything. Okay.Daphne shook her head, the tears burning her eyes. She blinked rapidly. “It’s nothing.”
“Doesn’t look like nothing,” Henry said softly. “What happened?”
What happened.Two words, and she shattered. That was when the sobs came. They started in her chest, clawing their way to the surface with serrated, tearing gulps.
