Page 46 of The Maine Event (Romancing the Workplace #2)

LILY

“BP’s crashing, Dr. Harper,” Patty states with all the urgency of someone reciting a grocery list.

My pulse is the only thing in this room that’s not flatlining. Blood pools on the table. Monitors screech like they’re mocking us. The only thing louder is the buzzing in my skull.

“Then let’s stop wasting time,” I reply, my voice firm. A clamp waits in my outstretched hand. There’s a splash of scarlet, a tremble, and a surgical resident ready to crumble like stale cake. “If you hesitate again, you’re out. Focus.” If I say it enough, maybe one of us will actually do it.

The resident falters. My instincts kick in before he has a chance to fumble anything else. I snatch the instrument and take control. Methodical. Unforgiving.

“Suction,” I snap, shifting my focus to the next step. Hours blur in my mind. Minutes turn into blood-soaked seconds. The patient’s chest is open wide—I stare into the wound and wonder which will kill me first, the pressure or the sleep deprivation.

“Clamp, clamp, clamp,” I repeat. My vision tunnels as I ignore the chaos around me. The monitors, the blood, the failure, all fade into the background. I locate the source of the bleed, pinpoint its weakness. Hands steady. Mind sharp. Five more seconds and it’s over.

The patient’s vitals crash lower.

“This should have been done ten minutes ago.” Patty, again, as if I’m not aware.

As if I haven’t been hyper-aware since I walked into this room. The buzzing in my head is a chainsaw now, drowning out everything but my pulse. No anesthesia needed; I’ve gone entirely numb on my own.

“We’re losing him.” A voice, a tremor, a doubt in my ability.

No.

“We are not losing him!”

Focus. Clamp. Focus. Clamp.

My hands blur through a dozen instruments.

Scalpel. Forceps. Suture. I don’t stop to figure out which.

No time for a blood transfusion. No time for their second guessing.

I can’t lose another patient this week. Not like this.

Not because of a surgical resident who can’t keep up.

I feel my exhaustion taunting me, daring me to fail, and I silence it with precision.

“BP’s coming back,” Patty says, softer this time.

I stitch a closure, count out three steady breaths, wait for the chest to rise on its own. It does.

“Nice work, Doc.”

The silence should be comforting, but it’s a reminder of how loud my failures were a minute ago. I survey the bloody battlefield around me, noting the carnage on the operating table and especially on the floor.

“Lucky he didn’t bleed out,” Patty adds, handing me the chart, calling it like she sees it. “That was a hell of a mess.”

“We controlled it,” I reply. Her eyes say we both know what “it” is. The word hovers between us like a question.

One crisis down, a hundred more to go. I strip off my gloves and toss them in the trash. “It won’t happen again.”

“More patients coming in from the same accident. It’s gonna be a long one,” Patty warns. “You planning to take a break, or you gonna keep working like you’ve got a death wish?”

I ignore the comment, the concern, the past twenty hours. “If you see an open OR, let me know.” I catch the surgical resident’s eye. Let him know with a single look that his card is marked. “Don’t hesitate again,” I remind him as we scrub out.

The hallway is cold and bright, which makes it easier to pretend I’m awake. I can’t remember the last time I slept. My feet take me in two directions, toward the family waiting area and toward another twelve-hour shift.

The family sits in a cluster of panic, half-collapsed into chairs with soggy tissues and tear-stained faces.

I know the type. The hysterics. The over-thankers.

The ones who take and take and take until there’s nothing left but sleep deprivation and regret.

The patient’s wife clutches her daughter’s arm, using it as a handkerchief.

Her sobs fill the entire room. Her breathing labored.

“He’s going to be okay, Mom,” the daughter says. She looks sixteen, and not at all convinced by her own words. “They’ve got this. Right?”

I’m five feet away and they’re already fishing for hope.

“Mrs. Martin?” I ask, glancing down at the chart like I didn’t memorize it hours ago. Like I don’t have every detail tattooed behind my eyes.

The woman lifts her head, puffy and raw, eyes leaking relief. “Oh, God,” she says, clutching the daughter harder, searching my face for answers. For more than answers. For reassurance and things I don’t have. “Is he okay?”

“The surgery went well,” I say instead, falling into a chair across from them. Mrs. Martin scoots closer, ignoring my attempt to keep this clinical. “We found the source of the bleeding and stabilized him.” My voice is even. “He’s stable in the ICU.”

Tears form anew, pooling at the corners of the wife’s eyes like the blood on my OR table. “Thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you.” Each word sounds like a sob. Like she’s used to disappointment. Like she expected me to fail.

They start to tumble, a dam bursting, a river of relief. The woman throws herself at me with the reckless desperation of a patient in V-fib.

I’m quick to suture. I’m slow to react.

My limbs stiffen. Breathing tightens. I stand like an idiot with her arms squeezing me.

My heart knows exactly how many beats per minute this discomfort is. I don’t move. I don’t breathe. I don’t acknowledge the tightness in my chest. She holds me as if I’m saving her life, but all I feel is failure creeping up my spine.

This is the worst I’ve done since the appendix incident of 2018. I could never have anticipated how hard the hit would be.

I swallow thickly, run through an emotional checklist and come up blank. I need to say something. Anything. A whole sentence. But all that comes out is, “It’s my job.”

I’m the least-human human they’ve ever seen.

Mrs. Martin releases me and collapses into the daughter’s arms, where the gratitude feels a little more earned. I retreat instead, rubbing my neck where I still feel the contact. The warmth. The failure.

“You’re sure he’s okay?” The daughter this time, hopeful and sad and two seconds away from finding out I have nothing to give but medical updates.

“We controlled the bleeding,” I repeat, turning clinical on autopilot. “You can check in with the ICU.” The words fill the silence.

“He’s stable,” I assure them. The subtext: I’m not.

Mrs. Martin cries into the daughter’s hair. It’s a tender, quiet scene that makes my stomach flip like I’ve swallowed a virus. It’s the kind of connection I can’t process, so I dissect it instead. Break it into tiny, manageable parts. I know how close I came to failing them. They don’t.

“Thank you,” the daughter says. “So much.”

I rise and back away, stiff, aware of the mess I’ve left behind. My spine has more rigor than a cadaver. The family is a blur as I make my exit. Their relief is too loud. It makes me uncomfortable. It makes me feel.

I pretend not to hear.

I pause in the stairwell and let the cold wall bite into my spine, let it remind me that I’m a surgeon, not a failure.

There’s a small voice in my head that sounds suspiciously like my father, telling me that the difference between the two is paper thin.

I shut him out, shut everything out. Echoes from the past twenty-four hours bounce off the walls, wrap around my neck.

The uncertainty of everything except my exhaustion.

My body aches like an overworked muscle.

My mind is worse, churning with static and blood loss.

The adrenaline is gone and I feel every single second of the last shift, twenty hours stacked on top of one another.

I let myself slide down the wall, as far as my pride allows, until I’m sitting on the stairs with my head in my hands and the exhaustion catches up with me.

Laughter echoes down the stairwell, muffled and distant and meant for people with lives outside these walls.

It’s a conversation I’ll never be a part of, voices from another world.

My mind is heavy, but it never shuts off.

It whirs and hums and tells me that rest is for people who don’t have anything to prove.

If my parents could see me now, collapsed on the stairs, they’d say I was a disappointment. They’d say I didn’t have the grit or the drive. And they’d be right. I don’t. Not today. Not like this.

The chill of the concrete floor seeps through my scrubs and into my bones. I close my eyes, but it’s a mistake, because all I see are the images I’ve tried to bury deep: the car accident, the blood, the kid who nearly lost his dad because I’d hesitated.

It won’t happen again.

My eyes snap open. The sterile white walls close in. My pulse thuds in my ears.

The wife. The hug. The awkward, strangled words that made me feel more helpless than a failed procedure. Why do people have to make things so damn messy? My chest tightens and I want to bolt, but the fatigue has other plans.

This is why I don’t let myself think.

When you hold yourself together with stitches, you start to unravel the moment you stop moving.

The stairwell door creaks open and lets in two junior residents, chipper and laughing like the last shift was a walk in the park.

Maybe for them it was. Maybe it always will be.

They breeze past me without noticing I’m there.

I should be thankful. If they saw me slouched on the stairs, they’d know how close I came to cracking.

I lean my head back and stare at the ceiling, ignoring the throbbing in my skull and the tiny, persistent part of me that says this isn’t sustainable.

“Pancakes and waffles?” one of them says, as if he can’t believe such things exist.

“Breakfast of champions,” the other replies. “Count me in.”

I try not to be bitter. I try to convince myself that I don’t want that kind of freedom, that kind of detachment. That I’ve chosen this, and I’d choose it again.

“You coming, Dr. Harper?” One of the residents stops and peers down at me. He must not know me very well. He must not know I’m a ghost, haunting this place without even knowing why anymore.

I’m tempted to snap. I’m tempted to say something cruel, like, “If you have time for breakfast, you’re not a real doctor.”

But I surprise myself. The hesitation is a foreign feeling, an unfamiliar twinge in my chest.

“Maybe next time,” I say. I’m not sure who I am for a moment.

The residents leave and I listen to their footsteps fade, listen to their easy laughter as they push open the stairwell door on a lower floor and disappear into the world. Their happiness is an echo, a hollow sound that rings in my ears and makes me more tired than ever.

I catch my breath, my pulse, my composure. I square my shoulders, push myself to my feet, and shove the fatigue away. This is the way it has to be. This is what it takes.

It’s not pretty, but it’s stable.

I push open the door and let it close with a decisive clang.