Page 62 of Secret Baby for Dr. Billionaire

Chapter twenty

Ben

“Timeofdeath,”Wilsoncalled, “nineteen-twenty-eight.”

Fuck!

I stormed out of the operation room, my face heating up from frustration as I tossed my surgical cap in the bin before removing my gown and gloves.

This week was not it for me. I had lost five patients on the operating table since Monday. And today, I lost two. That made seven.Seven.

It was a losing streak, and no surgeon would be happy about it.

Scrubbing my hands, I heard Wilson come out of the OR to discard her gown, taking the sink next to me to wash her hands.

“We’re not rolling well this week, Hayes,” she pointed. It wasn’t because she wanted to mock me. It was because she, too, had lost so many patients. “Must be the mercury retrograde.”

“It’s more like a curse, really,” I jested, but none of us laughed. There was nothing to laugh about when a dead body was in the other room. “The hospital reeks of death, Wilson.”

“Mitchell lost a patient yesterday, too,” she said as I turned off the running water from my side of the scrub sink. “It’s The Surge.”

“The what?”

“The Surge. The last time it happened, it was 1982.” Lola Wilson was a wise and good surgeon, and she was obsessed with everything morbid. Sometimes, I thought that one of the reasons why she chose to be a surgeon was that she could smell the blood and touch people’s organs. She was weird like that.

“The Surge is not real.” Fine, I was a skeptic. I just found it hard to believe that the lives of our patients depended on some weird phenomenon instead of relying on how good the surgeons were.

“It’s happening right now, Hayes. You cannot ignore the signs.”

“We’re trained, certified, and award-winning surgeons, Wilson.”

I watched her wipe her hands dry with a clean towel. We were in our olive-green scrubs that showed the color-coded scrub hierarchy in the hospitals. Chiefs wore dark green, while the rest wore a lighter, emerald shade of scrubs.

“Besides, they died for reasons we couldn’t control.”

“Exactly.” We left the OR, letting the other surgeons deal with our now-deceased patient as we got ready to tell the family. “Supernaturalthings we can’t control. The Surge is back.”

Would it be horrible if I told her that I wasn’t on my A-game since the week started? Maybe that was what was causing our bad luck in the OR. Maybe that was why I was having a hard time concentrating and was so easy to piss off. Perhaps it was because Chloe was giving me the cold shoulder.

And I was usually unbothered by such petty things, but right now, after a week of us not speaking, she might as well just bury me alive. I couldn’t stand it. At night, it kept me awake.

In the morning, it made me grumpy, and when I was at work, all I could think about was her. God, if only she knew the effect she had on me.

I checked my watch and saw that it was barely eight. And I was fucking spent.

My frustration with the whole Chloe thing was really taking a toll on me. Thankfully, Billy Anne was at Maggie’s again following one of many weekends when she had stayed at my place to play with Sofi.

Maggie had gotten suspicious about why her niece suddenly didn’t want to spend time with her anymore. But she was good. She bribed my daughter one weekend after telling her they would be having a bonfire by the beach.

Billy Anne was a sucker for the beach, and if I’d let her, she’d spend her entire life in the water. But being a doctor and all, it wasn’t a good idea to let them go in the sun for too long without risking sunburn and skin cancer.

She wanted to bring Sofi with her and had cried a good amount on Friday night when I told her she couldn’t because it was our secret. She had said to me that her cousins would love her and that they’d have more girls than boys. To compromise, I told her she could take Charlie instead, which my sister didn’t like. The last thing she needed was a dog making messes on her expensive carpets.

“You should probably get ready to leave, Hayes,” Wilson said as we were getting closer to the waiting room where the family of our late patient was waiting. “You shouldn’t even be working today.”

“A patient is a patient.” Although I was usually off and was only on-call for the weekends because of PharmaCorp, I would still set aside other work if I was called in for surgery. It was always my daughters, then my patients, then my clients. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that my priorities had shifted and Chloe was there somewhere.

“I appreciate you coming nonetheless.” We paused before we exited the ward, and Wilson added, “I got it from here. Now get some rest, have a drink, or go home to your girlfriend.”

---