Page 42 of Time for You
Daphne hadn’t thought about it like that, or at least not in-depth. She believed in medicine and knew that the twenty-first century was able to save people who would have died even sixty years earlier. But she’d never really thought about the way things had changed since the nineteenth century. She cleared her throat, suddenly tight.
“But you miss it, don’t you?”
There was a long, long silence. The air between them thickened, and Daphne found she was holding her breath. “Some of it,” he said finally.
Do you still want to go back?The words were on the tip of her tongue, but she couldn’t bring herself to ask them. Suddenly, the thought of hearing him sayyes, I can’t waitfelt painful. “That must be hard,” she said instead, falling back on one of her Doctorsona’s favorite phrases. It felt cheap, like a cop-out.
“It is. Not as hard as it was at first, though,” he said, with a look that felt meaningful.
But what it meant, exactly, she didn’t want to consider.
It was the night that Daphne always dreaded—her turn to be the resident on call. All the residents were scared of it, since it meant way more responsibility than any of them felt capable of handling, but most of them came out of that shift exhilarated. Uncle Pete’s Tavern was having another special, but this time there weren’t quite as many college kids stumbling in for astomach pump and IV of fluids. It was probably getting close to finals, so Daphne guessed they had a week or two of respite while kids tried to study, before the onslaught of graduation.
At least Hannah was the charge nurse for the shift. She had been working in the ER for years and wasn’t fazed by anything. If Daphne was frozen with indecision, she could usually count on Hannah to rescue her with a gentle suggestion. The rest of the residents were always assuring Daphne that her anxiety about on-call shifts was normal, that they all felt the same way, and it must be just impostor syndrome. But as Daphne stood in front of a nurse who needed orders for a patient (thirty-seven-year-old female, high fever and dehydration), she couldn’t help but feel like it was different for her.
“Influenza test was negative?” Daphne said, frowning. “And no signs of appendicitis. Um, let’s do—a broad-spectrum antibiotic and ... wait, hang on.” They were way behind, as usual, and the current wait in the ER was three hours, minimum. But something was humming quietly in the back of Daphne’s brain, and she needed to figure it out.
Daphne knocked on the glass door that separated the room from the rest of the ER. The woman inside looked wan, and her brown skin had a sickly, grey cast. She had the look of someone who had lost a lot of weight fairly quickly, and immediately, Daphne’s antennae went up.
She pumped the hand sanitizer on and sat down on the stool. “Hi there, I’m Dr. Griffin. Can I ask you a few questions?”
Her patient, Melissa, nodded weakly, and Daphne began the exam. With every answer Melissa gave, Daphne’s heart sank further.No appetite, bloating, family history of cancer.Everything pointed to ovarian cancer, but she didn’t want to scare her before she was sure. She kept a professional mask on and grimly ordered the proper tests, but with how long she had left on her shift—four hours—and how long it would take for Melissa to get up to CT and have a radiologist read the scans, there was almost no chance Daphne would be there to break the news to her patient.
And that, more than anything, was what made her duck into the supply closet for a quick cry. Daphne wanted to be therewithpatients, notjust breeze in and out. And she wasn’t naive—she understood that this was, for better or worse (and usually worse), the state of health care in the US.
But right then, in that moment, she hated it.
There weren’t any cases that hard for the rest of her shift, although that didn’t mean it was easy. The patient she’d been thinking about on her awful date with Anders was back, still with the persistent cough. She was an elderly woman, and Daphne couldn’t help but smile a little at her name when she saw she was her next patient. The ER had a lot of frequent fliers, some because of conditions that were hard to manage, and some because they had nowhere else to go for help. Mrs. Green was a little bit of both—chronic health problems and crappy insurance that meant she couldn’t see a specialist. “In a few years I’ll get Medicare and it will be easier,” she had told Daphne many times.
“Hey there,” Daphne said as she walked in. “What brings you in today, Mrs. Green?”
She coughed again. “Same as always, dear. How was that date of yours?”
For one confusing second, she wondered how Mrs. Green knew about Henry, and then for one more confusing second, she wondered what they had done that could be considered a date. Then she remembered—Anders.
“Not great,” she said ruefully. “He was more interested in himself than me.”
“That’s too bad. But I’m sure there’s someone else out there,” Mrs. Green said between coughs. Unbidden, Daphne’s mind went to Henry. “Oh, so thereissomeone,” Mrs. Green continued. “I saw that little smile.”
Daphne shook her head. “It’s complicated.”
“How complicated?”
“He’s not from here,” Daphne said, pulling out her stethoscope and listening to her lungs. “Okay, another breath,” she coached, and listened intently.
“So? They’ve had airplanes for a long time, dear.”
Daphne’s lips tugged up slightly. “Like I said, it’s complicated,” she said, and then realized exactly what she was implying.
That maybe, if things were different, she could find herself falling for Henry.
Chapter Seventeen
“I’ve got it,” Ellie announced, coming out of her bedroom. She looked like she’d just won a battle with a vicious foe, her hair all unkempt and her eyes slightly wild. “I know how to get Henry back.”
Daphne’s stomach jolted unpleasantly. It was what they had all been working toward for the past few weeks, but now she felt vaguely ill, like it was something she was dreading, not anticipating. Sure, she liked him a lot more now, but she still wanted him to get back to his family.
Henry, on the other hand, seemed ecstatic. “Truly?”
