Page 24 of Careless Whisper (Modern Vintage Romances #11)
Elias
N o one could reach Reggie. Cindy had tried. Luther had tried. I had tried. I had also nagged the fuck out of everyone I could find to try. Everyone had failed to elicit a response from her. At this point, I’d take the middle finger emoji from her, for God’s sake.
I’d come clean to Dr. Cabrera about everything that I legally could talk about—including what happened at Stratford in Boston. He listened without interrupting, just watching me over the top of his glasses like a disappointed owl.
Dr. Cabrera looked like a retired physicist someone had lured back into medicine just for the chaos—white hair in constant rebellion, a bowtie that never matched his shirt, and thick gray brows that practically formed quotation marks around every expression.
He was sharp as hell, maddeningly direct, and I liked him.
Which, frankly, was one of the only reasons I’d taken the job.
He tapped a pen against his desk once, twice, as if pondering a heavy thought. “So let me get this straight. You got Nurse Sanchez fired from Stratford for a mistake that Dr. Loring made?”
I let out a long breath. “I didn’t know it was Maren?—”
“But it was?” he insisted, cutting me off.
My head moved in a slow, solemn nod. “Yeah. That’s what happened.”
He stared at me for a beat. “So, your defense is that you were too dumb to figure it out?”
My lips curled into a smirk, but my eyes, I knew, blazed with irritation. “Not my favorite phrasing, but?—”
Dr. Cabrera lifted a hand, pausing dramatically like he was holding court.
“To be fair, I’ve heard worse.” He leaned back, fingers steepled beneath his chin.
“Now, I’m not one to tell a man where to dip his pen , Dr. Graham—especially not in a hospital this size.
You work a hundred hours a week, so where the hell else are you supposed to meet someone romantically, right? ”
My jaw locked. I knew there was no good answer to that question, so I shut the fuck up.
“But dating one colleague while you’re unofficially engaged to another?” His brows waggled, eyes twinkling. “My friend, just because we’re in Seattle doesn’t mean we need to cosplay Grey’s Anatomy . No matter how many of the nurses call you Dr. McDreamy.”
I sent him a flat, unimpressed stare. The old bastard was enjoying this far too much.
He eased forward, elbows braced on his desk. “Tell me this—have you had one of those charming elevator moments where your girlfriend, your maybe-fiancée, and your ex are all in the same car, staring at each other like it’s a scene from a bad rom-com?”
“ No , Dr. Cabrera,” I growled. “And, for the record, I’m not engaged to Dr. Loring, and I don’t have a girlfriend…right now.”
He raised a single snowy brow. “Hmm. The way you’re going, I doubt you’ll have a girlfriend later on, either. And you might want to tell Dr. Loring that you and she are not going to be married soon. She seems… less convinced of that.”
I sighed. “I already have, but I will again.”
“Right!” He waved a hand. “Look, I don’t care who you’re dating. But I do care when it affects this department. And right now, it is.”
I gave a tense shrug, jaw clenched. “You’re right, it is.”
“So, Dr. Graham, where did we go wrong?”
By we, he meant me .
I huffed out a sharp breath. “I should’ve told you I didn’t want to hire Maren. That, I had… history with her. I let it slide because I didn’t want to deal with the fallout. ”
He gave a sage little nod as if that was the answer he’d been expecting. “Ah, yes. The eternal Elias Graham coping strategy—avoid, deflect, and hope for the best. What else?”
“Maybe I should’ve been less of an ass to Reggie when I started,” I admitted.
Dr. Cabrera narrowed his eyes. “Maybe?”
“Okay, fine.” I flung my hands up in exasperation. “I should’ve listened to Cindy and everyone else and not fucked up like I did with Reggie.”
“Good.” He smiled at me like I was a toddler who’d finally managed to walk straight without tripping. “We talked about this when I hired you. You avoid conflict like it’s airborne. And this”—he gestured between us—“is what that avoidance costs.”
I didn’t say anything—saying, yes, I know I fucked up every five seconds was getting a bit repetitive.
“You let the best surgical nurse in this hospital get pushed out. The woman you’re in love with, by the way—don’t bother denying it.”
My mouth twitched.
He kept going. “Now, the woman you don’t love is telling everyone you’re picking out rings, and your boss hasn’t had this much entertainment in months, so yes—I’m fucking with you a little. You earned it.”
I let out a slow breath. “That’s fair.”
“Damn right, it is.” He rubbed his hands together and slouched back in his chair. “ So , what are you going to do about it? ”
“I’m going to investigate Dr. Loring.”
“That's a good step one,” Dr. Cabrera agreed. “Now, don’t forget to read in Mrs. D. You know how she loves investigating us.”
Mrs. Erin Doherty was a badass administrator who ran Harper Memorial with the efficiency of a five-star general and the charm of someone who didn’t need it. People said she knew where all the bodies were buried—mainly because she put them there.
Less than a week after I first met with her about Maren, Mrs. D summoned me to her office— the hospital's control tower—which was three floors above mine.
“Dr. Graham,” she greeted without looking up from her tablet. “Join us.”
She waved a hand to her left. To her right, as she sat at the head of the conference table in her office, was Dr. Kirk Agar—junior cardiology attending and author of the third official complaint against Reggie. He sat stiffly, hands folded like a med student about to flunk an oral exam.
“Alright, Dr. Agar, tell us why we’re here,” she ordered.
The poor man looked like he was about to go into cardiac arrest. He cleared his throat, face flushing. “I…I think I need to withdraw my complaint against Nurse Sanchez.”
Mrs. D arched an elegantly curved eyebrow. “You think? ”
Dr. Agar looked at me and then Mrs. D like a deer caught in several headlights. “I…don’t think?”
“You know,” she suggested sharply.
He released a shaky breath. “Yes, Mrs. D, I know.”
“What do you know?” she demanded with the ferocity of a schoolteacher addressing a wayward student.
“I…I shouldn’t have filed it. It wasn’t based on anything concrete. Nurse Sanchez… she didn’t do anything wrong,” he babbled, his words vomiting out of him like he’d just downed a whole bottle of Ipecac.
Mrs. D’s eyes flicked toward me. “Dr. Graham, you have thoughts?”
I tipped back slightly in my chair and steepled my fingers. “Why’d you file the complaint in the first place, Dr. Agar?”
“I…I…made a mistake?” he repeated, looking at Mrs. D like she held a lifeline for him.
“Come on, Kirk, grow a spine and tell us what you did,” Mrs. D admonished.
He glanced at Mrs. D, then me, and then crumbled . “Maren—Dr. Loring—suggested it. She said she was concerned about Nurse Sanchez’s behavior and that if I backed her up, she’d help me get named on the upcoming paper…for her trial.”
Mrs. D tapped her stylus on her tablet once, her face bored, as if this kind of thing happened all the time.
“She offered you co-authorship in exchange for filing a complaint?” I couldn’t believe that Maren could be so reckless.
“She didn’t put it like that,” Agar hedged. “She just said that if I…supported her, she would help…you know mentor me and recommend me…that sort of thing.”
“You’re not that naive,” Mrs. D interjected, irritated. “And you’re not a child . You knew what you were doing. You were ruining a colleague’s career to curry favor from a superior.”
Agar swallowed hard. “I’m sorry.”
“You will be,” Mrs. D assured him with a smile sharp enough to suture without thread. “Do you have any other questions, Dr. Graham?”
I half shrugged, not knowing what to ask.
I had known what Maren had done, but having it laid out in black and white hurt my heart.
A friend had betrayed me, and I had betrayed a friend—the former made me feel foolish and gullible, even dumb as Dr. Cabrera accused me of being, and the latter enraged me because I’d hurt someone who didn’t deserve it.
“Then, thank you for your time.” Mrs. D inclined her head to her door. “We’ll handle it from here.”
“Undoubtedly,” I remarked before leaving her office.