Page 46 of Broken Dream

Chapter Fourteen

Jason

Angie opens the door. God, she looks beautiful. Her cheeks are rosy, and her dark hair is bouncing in waves around her shoulders.

I’m holding a bottle of red wine. I don’t know a lot about wine, and I think someone must’ve brought it to me. I’m more of a bourbon guy.

The problem is, I don’t really have any friends to celebrate with. I have colleagues, of course. But friends?

I kind of let my friendships go after I lost Lindsay and Julia.

All they did was remind me of everything I no longer had.

So I’m coming to see my neighbor.

My neighbor who is also my student.

Who I’m also wildly attracted to and have kissed.

And who’s probably no more than twenty-three years old.

But I don’t care.

I’m feeling hope for the first time in years, and it feels…

I want to say good, but I’m afraid to.

Louisa and Gita didn’t offer me any guarantees. Everything could go up in smoke, and I’ll be relegated to teaching for the rest of my life. I could end up losing the use of my hand entirely.

I enjoy teaching. Well, maybe enjoy is too strong of a word. I haven’t hated teaching. I can still hold a scalpel. I can still cut into nonliving flesh, now that I’m teaching anatomy lab. I had to wait for an opening, and this year, I got it. For the last couple of years, I’ve taught surgery techniques to older students.

My hand is steady as I hold the bottle of wine. I hardly feel the tremor, and it’s invisible to the naked eye. But if I tried to make a cut on a living person, I’d make a mistake.

Every millimeter—every fraction of a millimeter—matters.

Everything matters when you’re cutting into a human being.

When I was doing my surgical residency, the attendings treated themselves like gods. I thought it was ridiculous. I would never have a God complex, I told myself. Never in a million years.

But when I began to cut…

I realized it wasn’t a God complex that they had. It wasn’t even arrogance. It was simply confidence. Because without confidence, you can’t slice open a human being.

You absolutely can’t, unless you’re a psychopath.

I’ve met a few surgeons along the way who might be psychopaths. But the best surgeons—and I was on track to become one of the best—don’t consider themselves gods and are certainly not psychopaths.

No.

They’re healers. Healers who are confident in their abilities, confident in their steady hands, confident in their knowledge of the human body, and confident in their ability to fix what is wrong in any patient.

God, I miss that.

But for the first time, I feel a sliver of hope.

“Dr. Lansing,” she says. “I mean…Jason.”

“Hi, Angie. I hope I’m not interrupting you.”