Page 11 of Just One Look

“Yes,” he said. “You’ll find a job.” And sighed. “I just wish you’d stick with the job you’ve got. You know—you almost never find what you’re looking for by going someplace else. That’s why Dorothy tapped her heels together and said, ‘There’s no place like home,’ right? Because everything she’d been looking for was within her all along, or something like that.”

“Sorry,” she said. “Dorothy?”

“The Wizard of Oz.”

“Oh. A movie. I never saw that.”

Now, he was staring at her with the astonishment with which people so oftendidstare at her. “You never sawThe Wizard of Oz?Everybody’s seenThe Wizard of Oz.Surgeons fromoverseashave seenThe Wizard of Oz.”

“My father didn’t believe in children watching unrealistic movies. It was more nature and history programs, if anything. Documentaries. That’s how I know about, uh … Australian animals.” Her skin was hot and prickly with embarrassment. This was why she didn’t go in for casual socializing. The “well-rounded” thing again. She was like one of those wolf children people found in the forest, sitting naked on her haunches and cramming food into her mouth while talking in grunts.

“Well,” Darrell said, “he probably has a point there. Baxter’s a fine surgeon. He raised a fine surgeon, too, so he did something right.” He clicked his pen and sighed once more. “You sure about this?”

“Yes. I already told them yes. I start March seventh.”

His gaze sharpened. “Your last day here is March fourth. That’s what’s on the letter, anyway.”

“That’s right. It takes two days to get to New Zealand, is why. International dateline.”

“No,” he said, “I mean—don’t you need some time to sell your house? Rent it? Settle in?”

“Oh,” she said. “No. I’m doing a swap with a professor who’s coming to Georgia Tech on a visiting-scholar thing. We just box up our clothes and toiletries and so forth to make room, then move into each other’s places, drive each other’s cars, the works. Very efficient.”

“Sounds like an easy thing to scam,” he said. “What if he cleans out your place?”

“I checked with the university. He’s legit. We sent valuations—appraisals—and so forth. Credit checks, that sort of thing. We’re each paying for weekly housekeeping, and he’s even paying for somebody to mow the lawn, so it couldn’t be easier, really. His place is a little smaller, but it’s worth about the same as mine, because Auckland’s pricey. It’s in a very good neighborhood.”

“Uh-huh,” Darrell said. “If you say so. Well …” He stood up. “I guess that’s it, then. March fourth. Giving you exactly … one day there before you start work. Well, it’s your funeral.”

“No,” she said. “It’s my reboot.”

She wasn’t going to think about what her father had said. She didn’t need that information in her brain, or the sound of him saying, “If you do this, if you throw your career away, I wash my hands of you. Too much like your mother. You think you’ve convinced her to be rational, and there she goes, letting the emotion run away with her. Making the wrong choice, every time.”

The memory made her shoulders tense, and she relaxed them with an effort. Her father wasn’t here, and for better or worse, she’d made her choice. Her reboot was starting now. On an Uber trip through Auckland, with old names coming back to her through the years.Cabbage tree. Silver fern. Villa. Extinct volcano called Mount … Mount Something, that has a Maori name you’re supposed to call it instead.

She’d been so inwardly charmed, at eighteen, by the idea of a city built around fifty extinct volcanoes, the cones jutting up in the middle of the cityscape, little circles of green space. The city was so much bigger, though, sixteen years later. They were on a freeway now, and then going through a tunnel. Neither one had been here before, had they?

“You on holiday, then?” the driver, a tidy, spare man in his fifties, asked.

“No,” she said. “Here to work for a year.”

“Working holiday visa?” A glance in the rearview mirror at her T-shirt and jeans and somewhat rumpled state. “Nah, that’s not it,” he decided. “You don’t look the type to pack kiwifruit or milk cows.”

Also,she thought,I don’t look under thirty. Not remotely.Which was fine, because she wasn’t. She said, “I’m a surgeon.”

“A surgeon, eh.” Another rearview-mirror look, possibly because shewasrumpled, and her hair was in a ponytail. She wanted to tell him that when you were in a surgical cap for most of the day, fashionable hair wasn’t necessarily at the top of your list. She also wanted to tell him to keep his eyes on the road. This tunnel was narrow.

“That’s something,” he said. “If I get in a smash, I could ask for you, that the idea?”

“Hopefully not,” she said. “Bad news for you if you have to do that. I’m a neurosurgeon. Brains and spines.”

“Oh.” He digested that a minute. “First time in New Zealand?”

“No. I spent Christmas here once. It was a long time ago, though.” She answered absently, looking out the window, because they were off the freeway—motorway—at last, driving through a commercial area.

This would be the start of Ponsonby, the fashionable inner suburb rising above the downtown area—the CBD. This would be home.

He said, “Nearly there. Got somebody to meet you?”