Page 58 of Gone Before Goodbye

Oleg Ragoravich turns so that his back is facing her again. “Will it be painful?”

“The recovery? You’ll be a little uncomfortable for a few days. No activity for two weeks. That includes sex.”

He says nothing.

“Anything else?” she asks.

“I see you’re getting close to Nadia.”

Maggie wonders what he means by that. She chooses to tread carefully. “She’s a patient. I need to make sure she’s cleared for this surgery.”

“Seems more than that to you,” he says. He points down to the ballroom. “I was watching.”

“It isn’t more. Why, is there a problem?”

“No, but you don’t speak Russian, do you?”

“No.”

“And of course, Nadia can’t speak a word of English.” His voice has some sarcasm in it, but his tone is closer to regret or even sorrow. “So I wonder—how do you two communicate?”

Oleg holds a hand up before Maggie can say anything. “I know. I’ve always known.”

“Know what exactly?”

“That Nadia tells a lot of stories about herself,” he says. Then he adds: “None of them are true.”

CHAPTER TEN

God, how Maggie has missed this.

In medical terms, the suffixplasty—as in rhinoplastyand blepharoplastyand genioplastyand mammoplasty—means “repair,” “restore,” “replace.” It comes from the Greek word “plastia,” which means “to mold”—and that is what it means to Maggie. Mold. Repair. Restore. It’s science. It’s art. The clay you create with is human flesh. There is no greater honor or responsibility than being a surgeon. For most of her career, Maggie dealt with soldiers and children with severe injuries and deformities. With her own two hands, she had the ability to mold, repair, restore them. Imagine that for a moment. Imagine what a privilege it is to do that kind of work, to make a living that way, to have people put that kind of trust in you and your abilities, to make them whole again.

How had she let herself betray that trust?

The obvious rationales—a butchered husband, a dead mother, whatever—none of that could ever excuse what she did. She had been given the greatest gift possible—the ability to heal through artistic creation—and she had squandered it.

Now she has been gifted this reprieve—for one day, at least.

Maggie goes through the same routine she’s gone through hundreds if not thousands of times before—wash the hands, don thescrubs, tie the mask over the nose and mouth, snap on the gloves—but there is nothing routine about it. Not today. When she enters the surgical theater, emotions fly toward her hard and fast, nearly overwhelming her. Tears come to her eyes. She holds steady. She stops and takes a few deep breaths before approaching the table where Oleg Ragoravich lies unconscious. Her support staff—that’s how she views them, ashers—are poised and ready.

This, Maggie knows, is where she belongs.

The operating room is her temple, her church, her sanctuary. Marc was home for her. She was home for Marc. But she and Marc both knew that here, in the cathedral they called an OR, was where they felt their most whole, their most complete.

She loved that about Marc. And he loved that about her.

They were the luckiest people in the world, weren’t they?

Once Maggie asks for a scalpel, once she makes the mid-columellar inverted-V incision to access the underlying cartilage, her heart rate slows down. The calm enters her bloodstream. She settles back into this state of blissful creation. She would curse herself for not appreciating this feeling, this reverence, this calling, but she’d always understood and appreciated how special and extraordinary it was to be a surgeon.

And she’d blown it anyway.

That’s what we stupid humans do. We carry the seeds of our own self-destruction.

She focuses now on the work to the point where she gets lost in it. Time passes. She has no idea how much. There are TV-like monitors so she can watch—they are in most operating rooms now—but she almost never needs them. It takes a little longer than she expects to clear away the nose cartilage so she can fit the marvel that is the artificial nose scaffold into place. She had hurried down three hours ago and geeked out when the technician showed the artificial scaffold to her. The material was, well, a nose—flimsy and stiff and malleable and brittle all at the same time.

She starts with this procedure because it is new and thus the most difficult. But it goes smoothly. She then moves on to the eyelids. She wants this feeling to last—to take her time, to remain in this state of pure contentment—but she knows it can’t. It doesn’t work that way. Surgery has its own organic, quasi-circadian rhythm. You can’t mess with it to please your own needs.