Leigh Michaels - The Husband Project

Logan Kavanaugh shrugged. “You shouldn’t be hanging around with that guy anyway, Sara.”

She ignored him and smiled at Alison. “I’m Sara Williams, and I’m a staff surgeon here. If I can just take a look...”

Logan’s ice cube had melted and the piece of gauze had been thrown away, but his index finger went as if by instinct to the swollen bump on his lip. “You might want to be careful doing that,” he said under his breath.

“Go away, Logan,” Dr. Williams said briskly.

He didn’t, exactly; Alison was dimly aware that he stopped in the doorway to talk to Kit. But she wasn’t paying attention to the low-voiced conversation; a moment later one of the nurses returned to give her a shot, and within a couple of minutes her tongue wouldn’t work right and nothing seemed to matter anymore.

Alison remembered only snatches of the hours that followed. The pain wasn’t gone, but it was different—no longer knife-sharp, but a sort of dull burn that haunted her whenever she broke through to consciousness. She tried to hang on to wakefulness, because the physical ache was better than the anesthesia-induced dreams; she didn’t remember them exactly, only the feelings they left behind, and that was bad enough. But despite her efforts, she kept sinking back into the twilight like a swimmer caught in an undertow.

Finally, though, she opened her eyes to see dim lights, the standard equipment of a regular hospital room, and Susannah bending over her, talking soothing nonsense.

“What are you doing here?” Alison managed to say. “It has to be the middle of the night.”

“Just about.” Susannah sounded cheerful. “I am the night shift, standing guard.”

Alison closed her eyes, but this time she didn’t sink like a rock into unconsciousness. “Why?”

“Because Kit and I were afraid you’d try your hand at nursing—and if you’re as bad at that as you are at diagnosis, you’d be gangrenous by morning.”

“Then...” Alison swallowed hard. “It was appendicitis?”

“Of course it was. Why were you so sure it wasn’t?”

“The pain was in the wrong place. And there were a whole lot of other reasons, too.” The knot inside her stomach—the leaden lump which had settled there the day she’d first looked up her symptoms in her layman’s medical guide—slowty loosened, and once more she sank into the depths. But this time her sleep was more natural, and she wasn’t haunted by the dreams.

By morning the whole thing felt like a nightmare, except for the lingering effects of anesthesia and the fact that she could barely shuffle across the room, even if she held on to an aide with one hand and the stand which held her intravenous drip with the other. But Alison gritted her teeth and refused to quit.

At midafternoon, she paused to take a rest in the marginally-comfortable chair in her hospital room, her back propped with pillows so she could get up by herself when she was ready for her next walk down the hall. From her window she could see little but a dusty courtyard surrounded by plain brick walls, but Alison wasn’t interested in the view. She was retracing her state of mind over the last few weeks, remembering how each occurrence of pain had increased her fear and each release had allowed her to pretend it couldn’t happen again.

For an intelligent woman, she told herself, you certainly have been acting like a fool.

She didn’t even look around when she heard the knock on her half-open door, just called, “Come in.”

A moment later Logan Kavanaugh pulled a straight chair up beside her. Today the green scrubs had given way to easy-fitting charcoal trousers and a white shirt with faint gray pinstripes. “I just stopped in to see how you’re doing.”

“I’d rather be at the football game.”

He grinned, and his dark green eyes sparkled. “Wouldn’t we all?”

Alison looked at him a little more closely. Under the humor in his face, she could see the marks of tiredness; there were lines around his mouth and faint shadows under his eyes. And, she noted with a tinge of guilt, there was not only still a tiny bump on his lip, but she could see the half-inch-long red line of the cut. “I suppose you’ve been delivering a baby?”

“Now and then,” he said. “I think the count stands at seventeen since my last day off—but it’s possible I’ve forgotten a couple. It’s been a very long week.”

“You’re on duty all the time?”

“In theory, no. But—for instance—a few months from now, when Kit goes into labor, can you imagine what she’d say if she called to tell me and I said, ‘Good luck, I’m sure you’ll like the guy who’s on call, and I’ll stop in tomorrow to check on you’?”

“Point taken.”

He leaned forward, elbows on knees and hands tented together. “I also came in to apologize for my unprofessional behavior yesterday.”

Alison frowned. “I don’t quite—”

“For one thing, making that crack about not wanting to be alone in a room with you and a scalpel. Though I was only your doctor for about three minutes, and I’d technically turned you over to Sara by then, I shouldn’t have said that.”

“You had reason to be provoked. I’m really sorry about your lip.” Alison took a deep breath. “Look, thanks for seeing me yesterday. You’re obviously very busy, and I know I wasn’t exactly an ideal patient.”

“You mean because you wanted to argue about the diagnosis? Just out of curiosity—what did you think it was?”

She looked out the window. “I’d eliminated everything except ovarian torsion.”

“Oh, that’s interesting. It’s not at all common for an ovary to twist, you know, and it’s just about as dangerous as an acute appendix.”

- “I know,” she said, and drew a deep breath so she could go on.

A hint of laughter crept into his voice. “That must be an extremely detailed medical guide you’ve got—or has the popular press made torsion the disease of the week?”

Alison was furious. “I am not a hypochondriac, Dr. Kavanaugh,” she said tightly. “I didn’t cast around for an interesting disease, I simply looked up my symptoms, and that’s what I found. I’m an - intelligent and informed woman—”

“—Who doesn’t know the difference between an appendix and an ovary, but thinks she’s an expert anyway.”

“What was it you were saying just now about unprofessional behavior?” Her voice dripped sweetness.

He ignored the interruption. “Do you have any idea how close you came to—” He shook his head, rubbed his hand across the back of his- neck, and stood up. “Never mind. I’ll let Sara jump on you about the risk you took by not seeing a doctor till it was almost too late. She’s getting paid to yell at you about taking proper care of yourself. I’m not. Goodbye.”

Forgetting her incision, Alison tried to leap up from her chair, and fell back, eyes wide, too startled even to swear. She sagged back against the pillows and tried deep breathing to ward off the stab of pain.

Logan had left the door standing wide open, so Kit didn’t knock. She burst in, dumped an overnight bag beside the bed, and leaned over Alison to give her a gentle hug. “Now this is more like it. You’ve even got some color back, I see. I met Logan in the hallway, but he seemed to be in a hurry. You didn’t slug him again, did you?”

“I didn’t slug him last time, either,” Alison pointed out. “It was an accident.” She eyed the overnight case—the last time she’d noticed, it had been on the top shelf of her bedroom closet—and raised an eyebrow at Kit.

“Your purse was still in Susannah’s car, so I stole your keys,” Kit said blithely. “I figured the cats needed feeding—”

Alison winced. “I can’t believe I forgot about my cats.”