They walked down the long corridor toward the cafeteria.
Andy’s heels clicked on the industrial tile underfoot as they maneuvered through the crowded hallway.
Both of them knew exactly where the several cafeterias were and that they both preferred the atrium cafe on the eighth floor to the larger cafeteria on the second. Theoretically, the atrium cafe was supposed to be a staff-only area, but no one checked for IDs.
The coffee was better, he said.
The view was better, she thought, and the pastries were fresher.
At the cafeteria, they went through the line.
Andy ordered a small apple fritter and a cup of chai. Cadell pointed at four different pastries and ordered a large latte with extra sugar and syrup shots in it, as usual.
If Andy had eaten that much, she would have needed three chairs to sit on, and her mother and aunts and cousins prodded her enough about her chubby butt and thighs as it was.
Goondoo, they called her, fat girl.
Andy’s aunts and cousins and future sisters-in-law were all rail thin, and each compared themselves and each other to their own pinky fingers to demonstrate how perfectly slender they were. They complained about how little they ate, and it seemed like each time they ate fewer and fewer spoons of rice or pieces of naan than the last time they had all gotten together to humble-brag about how little they were able to eat.
When Andy had had enough of their sniping, she faked a phone call from the hospital and went back to saving children’s lives. She had an app especially for it.
Andy told the girl who was taking their order, “I changed my mind. I will have the nonfat hummus and veggie pack instead of the fritter.”
When they got to the register, Cadell insisted on paying.
“Oh, no,” she said. “That would be unethical. We’re not allowed to accept gifts of any kind.”
“It’s not like I’m a pharmaceutical industry salesman.” He took his credit card back from the girl at the register.
“It might influence me somehow. It might cloud my judgment about Emily’s treatment.”
He glanced at her tray. “Hummus with veggies and a nonfat cup of tea don’t seem like much of a bribe. I could do a lot better than that.”
Andy followed him between the rickety tables of the atrium cafeteria. The undersized tables were packed into the wide area, even though the atrium was never crowded. The table they chose abutted the wide window, and no one else sat near them for a three-table radius.
One wall and all of the ceiling were glass, and the sky above the hospital was an unrelenting blue, devoid of clouds. Treetops fluttered outside, below the level of the floor, like they were flying.
Andy told him, “I don’t have any influence on who is offered a transplant. That’s up to UNOS.” The United Network for Organ Sharing.
Cadell laughed and set his tray on a table. “I’m not trying to bribe you. I’m just saying that if I did, it would be a lot better than that.”
She allowed herself a small smile as she sat down and arranged her snack and chai. Of course he wasn’t trying to influence her. Most parents looked forward to and dreaded their child’s transplant. If anything, Cadell seemed to be dreading it more than most.
Andy stirred a packet of no-calorie sweetener into her chai. “All right, so you aren’t trying to influence me.”
“Of course not. I’m trying to date you.”
Her hands went cold, and she scooted her chair back from the table slightly. “I beg your pardon.”
“I’m just kidding. I know you’re engaged. I won’t tease you.”
“I should hope not.” She was still hanging onto the edge of the table. She unclasped her hands from the sharp edge and adjusted her chair so that she could resume stirring her tea.
“Look, I’m not a lech like that,” he said. “I’m glad you came to keep me company while I eat.” He gestured with his enormous, calloused hand at the pile of pastries on his plate and the sugar-spiked drink.
All of those pastries had icing drizzled on them.
Every single one of them.
Andy wanted to lick all of those pastries that he had on his plate, just reach right across the table and take them away from him and chew the tops off of them, letting the sugary icing and flakey, buttery crust slide into her mouth, but she didn’t want pudge sticking out of the sides of her wedding clothes, either.
She dipped a celery stick in her hummus and chewed on it.
Damn, but those Danishes were beautiful. Someone had taken care to carefully pipet the icing evenly in lacy patterns.
Cadell nudged his plate toward her. “Would you like one?”
“No. Thank you.” Andy snapped off a carrot stick between her teeth.
“Because you haven’t stopped staring at them since we sat down.”
“No. Thank you.” She poked another celery stick into her mouth and chomped down on it. A ropey fiber stuck between her molars.
Cadell picked up one of the pastries. His long fingers wrapped around the edges. Thick lemon curd swirled in the middle of it. Bits of pastry had flaked off and were sticking to his fingertips.
He offered it to her, his dark eyes sparkling. “Take it.”
Andy wanted to fall upon the Danish and gobble it down like the Cookie Monster attacking a pile of Oreos. Lemon was her favorite. After chocolate. But lemon was very, very good, too.
She stole a glance at his plate. The pastries were all the fruit-jam kind, not chocolate.
It was just as well that he had no chocolate, just that lovely, delicious lemon curd.
She cleared her throat and picked up another carrot stick. “That’s very kind of you, but—”
“Reach out and take it,” he said.
The pastry was just inches from her lips.
She opened her mouth to tell him no again, but she found herself leaning forward instead. Inside, she was screaming for herself to stop just as she bit down.
The pastry all but fell apart as her teeth closed around it, shattered crumbs clinging to her lips and falling down her chin like snow. Butter and crispy flakes filled her mouth, and the bright acid of the lemon curd covered her tongue.
She closed her eyes and moaned, chewing.
When she opened her eyes again, Cadell was still holding the pastry right in front of her. He was staring at her, and his lips parted.
She leaned back in her chair, still chewing the mouthful of pastry and creamy lemon filling. The crumbs stuck together in her mouth, and the filling coated her tongue, sweet and sour at the same time. Somehow, she managed to swallow it all down.
He was still holding out the rest of the pastry to her, and a huge bite was missing. About a third of it was gone.
Cadell was still watching her eyes. He said, “More.”
She raised her hands, palms out, like she was pushing the puff pastry delicacy away. “Oh, no. I couldn’t—”
“Take another bite.”
Cadell always looked serious when he spoke, but just then, the intensity in his brown eyes had sharpened, narrowed their focus, looking at her. The rest of the atrium cafeteria melted away from her mind.
The lemon curd pastry was only about two inches from her lips.
She leaned toward it and opened her mouth.
He didn’t shove the tart at her, just held it where she could have it if she wanted it.
She leaned farther, and the pastry slid between her lips. She bit down on it but didn’t take as large a bite as last time. That greedy first bite had been too big and almost choked her.
The layers crumbled in her mouth. She chewed it up and swallowed it, watching Cadell the whole time.
Again, he didn’t move. He didn’t push it at her or withdraw it as if she really shouldn’t be eating it. His hand didn’t shake. A large flake of crisp pastry hung from the side of the Danish, waiting for her tongue.
He said, “Eat the rest.”
Andy ate another bite from his hand, chewing a piece off the side this time. That part was all layers of buttery puff pastry. She closed her eyes, and her throat made another sound of satisfaction around the crisp and tender layers falling apart in her mouth.
When she opened her eyes, Cadell still held what was left of the pastry right in front of her. Her eyes felt a little big on her face, like she was pleading with him to either take it away or to let her eat it.
He nodded, just one slow dip of his chin that told her that he wasn’t going to remove the temptation. His dark eyes never left hers.
She ate the next bite that was topped with tangy lemon curd, and the next one was mostly crisp pastry.
There was only one bite left, a corner that was all pastry and white icing, and he held it pinched between his long finger and thumb. “Eat it.”
She opened her mouth, and he slipped the last bite onto her tongue.
Andy closed her eyes to savor it.
Cadell hadn’t gotten his hand out of the way fast enough, and her lips closed around his thumb. A few flakes of pastry and sugary grains of icing clung to his skin and the hard calluses on his fingertips, and she sucked on the pad of his thumb for just a second before she realized what was happening.
She jumped back and chewed fast. Her heart fluttered with what she had done.
Good Lord, she could have bitten him, hard, considering the rabid way that she had been going after that sweet. He was a musician, a guitarist, and she could have hurt his fingers.
Andy swallowed the last bite and said, “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to. Did I bite you?”
That dark light in his eyes didn’t look like he was sorry. Cadell leaned back in his chair and picked up the next pastry on the stack. The scarlet, dotted filling in the center appeared to be raspberry. “You didn’t bite me.”
His voice sounded a little strangled.
“Oh, good. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”
“It’s all right.” He bit into the next pastry, his white teeth cutting off the corner.
“I shouldn’t have eaten that. I don’t know why I ate it. I’m going to balloon up and not fit in my wedding clothes.”
He examined the raspberry pastry like he was deciding which part to put his mouth on next. “One donut is not going to make a difference in whether you can fit into a dress or not.”
“But I shouldn’t have eaten it.”
“I don’t know whether you should have or not, but you obviously wanted to.”
“You shouldn’t have told me to eat it.”
“I didn’t shove it in your mouth. You could’ve said that you didn’t want to eat it. I offered you what you wanted and told you to take it so that you wouldn’t feel guilty about wanting it.”
She looked down at the nonfat hummus and vegetable sticks on her Styrofoam plate, a far more sensible snack than a donut-like object. Her food had protein, fiber, and vitamins, a responsible snack. “I feel guilty about it now.”
He smiled at her, a smile that seemed a little more direct, a little darker, than any of his smiles when Emily was around. “Then it wasn’t your fault. I wanted you to eat it, so you ate it to please me.”
Andy blinked, trying to think about that. “There’s something wrong with that line of reasoning.”
“There’s nothing wrong with it at all.”
If he held that raspberry tart out to her, she would have wrapped her mouth around it, too.
“Anyway,” she said, “I think I owe you a lemon Danish.”
He laughed. “No, you don’t.”
Even when he laughed, his dark eyes always looked a little sad.
She wanted to reach over to him and take his hand, to tell him that Emily was going to be all right even if he couldn’t donate part of his liver to her, but they would both know that it wasn’t true.
That was part of the problem with this little coffee break: any other parent of one of her patients would have been subtly digging for information, wanting the inside scoop that their child was going to be all right.
Cadell never did that. He obviously wanted his daughter to recover, deeply, which was particularly impressive considering that he hadn’t known the child even existed just about eight months ago. It seemed like he would do anything he could to help Emily, even something nearly impossible like breaking a heroin addiction, but he never pimped Andy for false assurances.
It was both refreshing and disturbing.
So she brought up the subject. “About Emily—”
“Yes?” He met her eyes. He was interested, attentive, but not probing.
And now she had nothing to tell him. “I’m impressed by her fortitude. She’s a little trooper.”
He smiled. “She is. I don’t know where she gets that from.”
“What, you don’t think that you’re a strong man? I’ve read a little bit about you. You were on the late shows, playing your guitar, when you were a very young child. You had to have been very diligent to practice so much.”
Oh, lovely. She had just admitted to stalking him.
Not that her bit of “research” rose to the level of true stalking. It wasn’t really stalking unless there was a restraining order.
This was just a little harmless Googling that had turned up mentions of his childhood as a guitar prodigy, his dash to run away from home at eighteen, and his heroin use. There was a lot about his heroin use, but most of the posts were under the impression that he had beaten it years ago.
And she had indulged in some YouTubing. Not a lot. Just the ten or twenty videos that tracked his progress over the years.
Maybe thirty.
And the occasional Zillow search to check out his address and see pictures of the inside of his home just outside the city where Emily stayed with nannies or with him between hospitalizations. Andy never worried about Emily when Cadell was home with her. When he was home, Emily practically danced even when she was in the hospital, and she giggled a lot more.
His house was rather closer to her parents’ home than Andy had imagined. She had only driven by it once, staring up at the black gates set into the stone wall around the property.
A real stalker would have scaled the wall and peeped in the windows.
Andy had just kept driving.
Ergo, she was not a real stalker.
Cadell nodded and swallowed a bite of pastry. “Yes, but practicing the guitar is nothing compared to a two-year-old fighting for her life against liver failure and being so frighteningly calm while doctors poke her arms with needles.”
Andy said, “I saw some of the videos of you when you were probably six or seven. You must have been very young when you started playing the guitar.”
“Two,” he said.
“Did your parents decide that you would study it?”
“Of course.”
“My parents decided that I should play the piano. My younger sister plays the violin. I imagine that the guitar was a lot easier on the ears than the first few years of the violin.
Cadell smiled. “I imagine that’s true.”
“So you were a prodigy, a guitar prodigy. My parents kept hoping that Umamaheshwari or I would be a musical prodigy, but we both disappointed them.” In so many ways.
“I don’t know about being a prodigy. I was scheduled to perform while pretty young. Some of those first performances were too early. I cringe when I hear them.”
“Your parents must have pushed you.”
“They were strict about practicing. Lots of scales.”
Andy said, “We had to practice for an hour a day on weekdays and two on weekends.”
Cadell nodded. “I’ve heard that’s pretty standard.”
“How much did you practice?”
He stared at the crumbs on his plate. “I don’t really know.”
“You must have some idea.”
He shook his head. “It kind of blurs together. I don’t remember much about anything until I ran away to New York. It was all just practicing.”
He was being very shy about it, so she gave him something to compete against. “I was eighteen when I graduated from college.”
He looked up and raised one eyebrow. “I was eighteen when I started college.”
“I started college when I was fifteen and graduated in three years so I could start medical school when I was eighteen. I am Doogie Houser.”
He closed his eyes and shook his head. His black hair swished around his chin. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what a doogie howser is.”
“It was a television show. Didn’t you watch television?”
“Not really.”
“So what did you do as a child?”
“Practiced the guitar.”
“Well, I didn’t watch TV either once I got to high school, when I was twelve.”
His dark eyebrows rose.
“But I had seen the show a few times before that. Doogie Howser was a television character who had started medical school when he was far too young and somehow also completed his internship and residency when he was still a child because he wore the long coat.” She lifted the side of her own long, white coat that fell to her knees when she was standing up. “But they don’t let you start medical school until you’re at least twenty as a policy, but I was eighteen. They don’t want a bunch of teenagers running around with the authority to prescribe drugs.”
He laughed. “No good could come of that.”
“I don’t talk much about this. No one likes a show-off who is many years younger than they are. I graduated from medical school when I was twenty-two.”
Cadell pushed his plate to the side and leaned on his elbows on the table. “How old are you now?”
“I’m twenty-six.”
“That’s about what I thought. It didn’t occur to me that it was unusual.”
“Good. Most people give me the side-eye for being too young. I turn twenty-seven in December.”
He said, “I won’t be twenty-seven until next summer.”
Andy responded, such a knee-jerk response that she didn’t even think before it came out of her mouth, “Oh, we could never get married, then.”
Cadell’s eyes widened, his dark lashes flaring out against his light skin, and his grin widened in shock or disbelief. “I wasn’t aware that we were going to get married. I thought you were marrying someone else in a few months.”
“Oh, I am. But I’m older than you are. So we could never get married.”
“Okay.” His brows pinched together, and he looked out the tall atrium window beside their table for a moment before he looked back at her. “Lots of people get married when the woman is older than the man. Lots of them.”
“Indians never do that. It’s just not done.”
“How come?”
“It has something to do with astrology,” she said.
“Like Aquariuses and Tauruses and stuff?”
“Indian astrology. If the girl is older than the boy, it’s bad astrology or something. I don’t understand it. I don’t like it. I don’t believe in it. But it’s bad astrology.”
“In any case, I guess it’s good that I only asked you out on a date.”
“We could never date. It’s just not done.”
“We’re on a date right now,” Cadell said.
“No, we’re not. We’re having coffee.”
“It’s a coffee date.”
She pushed her restless hands into her lap. “It’s not a date. I don’t date.”
“I’m just kidding you.” He smiled gently, and his head tilted to the side.
“Did you think it was a date?” she asked, picking up a carrot and dunking it repeatedly in hummus.
He shrugged and sipped his latte, but she could see him still smiling behind the lid of the cup.
“Because it’s not a date. It can’t be a date.”
“Andy.” He reached across the table and took her fingers in his. “I was kidding. It’s not a date if you don’t want it to be. I just needed a cup of coffee and a snack.”
His feeding her that Danish took on all sorts of sexual connotations, and she had sucked his thumb. “It can’t be a date.”
Hysterical soprano notes tinged her voice, and she swallowed hard to tamp them down.
“It’s okay. It’s not a date.” He was still holding her fingers, and the thick calluses on his fingertips felt like stones. “It was never a date.”
“Okay.” She held onto his fingers for far too long before she could make herself let go, and a note in her voice sounded disappointed.
“You wouldn’t want to date a grungy musician, anyway,” Cadell said.
“You’re never grungy.”
He chuckled. “Performing is hard, physical work. I get grungy.”
“But you come to see Emily anyway, sometimes right off the stage.”
“Of course, I do.”
She was still thinking about him performing—holding his guitar while the lights flashed around him—and she was staring out the window at the top of a tree just outside. Even though the hospital was in the middle of Manhattan, a small courtyard had been designed into the middle of it. The tree’s leaves were swaying in the breeze. “That must be why you have such stunning shoulders and arms.”
Oh, God. She had remarked on his body. She wanted to crawl under the table before he called HR. Oh, God.
Her hands flew up, nearly covering her mouth. “I apologize. I didn’t mean to say that. I’m so sorry.”
He leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms over his chest, looking at her. What should have been a defensive movement, covering his body against her gaze, instead seemed to flex his bulging biceps and muscular chest and drew her attention. Tattoos crawled down his arms, black Pacific tribal-style tatts, mostly.
Not that she was still looking or anything.
And he was still smiling at her. His dark eyes held that sexy glitter again.
She lowered her hands to the table.
He asked, “You wouldn’t want to date a grungy rock star, would you?”
“It doesn’t matter what I want.” Her hands, braced on the table, curled into fists.
“What you want does matter.”
She glanced back at the tree, waving outside the blue-tinted glass, and repeated, “It doesn’t matter what I want.”
“Do you want this to be a date?”
Andy didn’t even shrug. A breeze rippled over the tree’s late-summer leaves like it was shrugging for her.
He said, “You said that this can’t be a date, but you never said that you didn’t want to go out on a date.”
“It can’t be a date,” she confirmed.
“Why not?”
“It would be unethical. I’m Emily’s doctor and hopefully her surgeon, when she is offered an organ. Any personal relationship with a family member might cloud my judgment.”
“And you’re engaged to someone else.”
Her engagement ring flashed on her finger. “That, too.”
He leaned forward and, with one finger, opened her right fist that was on the table, peeling back her fingers one at a time. “We could pretend that this is a date.”
“A pretend date?” Andy couldn’t believe that she was complying with this. This was not like her. She was a rigorous, fact-based person who did not deceive herself or others. In her line of work, deception was cruel. “Just pretend?”
“Just pretend.”
“What would we do differently on this pretend date?”
His fingers curled around hers, and she held onto his strong hand. Deep calluses ridged his fingertips. “Not a lot.”
“It must be a pretend date. A musician like yourself,” a hot, muscular musician who was evidently quite successful if the hospital rumors were to be believed, “wouldn’t want to date a woman like me, anyway.”
His thumb brushed her knuckles, and some sort of a tremor ran through her. He asked, “What do you mean by that?”
“I’m not like all the beautiful women who must hang around after your concerts.” The thin, attractive, half-naked girls without a care in the world, the kind who went to concerts and drank alcohol and didn’t have responsibilities.
He said, “You’re a beautiful woman.”
“Oh, stop.”
Out of the corner of her eye, she caught him looking down at where his thumb was caressing her hand. “Andy, you’re a beautiful woman. If we weren’t in public, I would shove you up against a wall right here and kiss you. I might do it anyway, since we’re on a pretend date.”
She kept watching him out of the corner of her eye. “This is a pretend date. You’re just pretending.”
He looked up at her. “I’m not.”
“You shouldn’t tease me like that.”
“I’m not teasing you.” His low voice seemed too gentle for teasing.
She stared at the lid of her chai. Her dark lipstick stained the spout where she had been drinking. “What else do we do on a pretend date?”
“You could tell me more about yourself. Where were you born?”
“New Jersey. I know, I sound like I’m from India. It’s a cultural thing.”
“It’s a pretty light accent. I’ve been listening to accents pretty closely lately. A friend of mine changes his all the time, and it’s weird. He just picked up an entirely new one a few weeks ago, French. You must have spent a lot of time in India,” he said.
“Oh, yes. We visited my grandparents and cousins on every vacation. I have been many times.”
“Where else have you been?”
“I went to Kerala, and Mumbai, and the Punjab, too, in addition to Chennai, of course. My family lives in Chennai.”
“You must have traveled to other places, too, other than India.”
“No. I only went to India.”
His eyebrows twitched, a hint of a frown. “How about during college?”
“I did my undergraduate and medical school at Columbia.”
“So we went to school less than three miles away from each other for three years?”
“Only three years?” she asked. “I thought Juilliard was a full course of study. I thought it was four or five years for an advanced degree.”
“Xan convinced me to drop out and start a band after junior year.”
“You didn’t finish your degree?” She actually slapped her hand over her mouth in horror.
Cadell shrugged. “Seems to have worked out all right for me.”
Yes, he did own that large, gated house in an exclusive enclave in New Jersey, and he owned it outright with no mortgage. Andy could find many things on the internet. Those shifts of nannies that cared for Emily while Cadell was traveling must be costing him dearly, also.
Her hand dropped away from her mouth. A dark plum lipstick mark stained her palm.
“I can’t imagine not finishing my degree,” she said.
“In music, the degree itself means nothing unless you want to be a music professor in a college somewhere. The time spent in college is mostly just that, time, time to study for a few years, and it’s the opportunity to meet peers and industry professionals until you’re ready to launch. If you’re ready earlier, then you go when you’re ready, not when the semester is over and you’ve checked all the boxes. It’s more of a meritocracy, but it also depends on contacts instead of transcripts.”
All of Andy’s Indian Brahmin ancestors collectively rolled over in their ashes in the Ganges River. Being a priest was dependent upon learning. Being a good priest was dependent on memorizing many slokas and reading the Vedas under the tutelage of a guru. Study, verification of learning, and certification by a teacher were everything to a Brahmin, and the imperative had persisted through thousands of generations. The emphasis on study and academic achievement hadn’t petered out with one birth away from Indian soil.
“You might as well be an alien from another planet,” Andy told him.
“So, are you still considered to be in school?” Cadell asked. “Is your fellowship like a degree program?”
“Sort of,” she said, her head bobbling. “I am a fully licensed physician. I finished my internship and my residency in gastrointestinal and hepatic medicine. If I wanted to go into private practice right now, I could. This is a fellowship in liver transplant surgery. In another seven months of residency and after I pass my exams, I will be considered a fully qualified transplant surgeon.”
“Are you paying tuition?”
“No one pays tuition during a residency, and I actually hold a very prestigious fellowship, so they are paying me a fellowship stipend. The fellowship pays my malpractice insurance, too. That’s actually more than my stipend.” It was a lot of money, a whole lot for a hospital that had just lost its Medicare funding.
“So this is more of on-the-job training than it is like going to school?”
“That is fair.”
“So will you do Emily’s surgery?”
“I should be in the OR, and I may very well perform the procedure. A more experienced transplant surgeon will also be in the OR to oversee the surgery. I have performed over a hundred transplants.”
“That’s a lot, right?”
“Oh, yes. If this were a less complex surgery with more margin of error, like an appendectomy or a tonsillectomy, I would have been performing them on my own for a long time. I have performed many transplants from beginning to end, and I feel quite confident.”
“That’s good to hear from the person who is going to be cutting open my daughter at some point.”
She smiled at him. “High-stakes surgeries like liver transplants always have a team of surgeons, all of whom are highly qualified.”
Cadell laid both his hands flat on the table around his empty latte cup and Styrofoam plate. His long fingers spread across the thin plastic. He would have been an excellent orthopedic surgeon, with those strong hands and arms, but becoming a pediatric surgeon of any kind would have been difficult for him. His hands were just too big.
He said, “I wish there were any other way.”
He was talking about Emily, of course. “Everyone does, including us.”
“I feel like I’ve only just met her. I don’t know what she was like as a baby, and no one can even tell me. I miss so much of her life now, weeks at a time, because I’m touring. If she weren’t sick, I would take her with me. I’m pretty sure there’s going to be at least one baby on the tour soon.”
Andy reached across the table and touched his fingers. “It must be difficult.”
“You must get this kind of thing all the time.”
“Not quite like this.”
He huffed a bitter-sounding chuckle. “Yeah, I’ll bet.”
“I’m listening.”
“Is she okay when I’m not around? When I’m here, she’s so clingy, and she wants me to play for her all the time. What does she do when I’m not around?”
Andy had decided long ago to tell the truth, even when it was hard. “She plays your music a lot and watches your videos on the Internet. She also plays with toys and, when she feels up to it, the other children on the floor. She is kind to them for one so young, and so she is very popular. She likes to look at picture books, too.”
“But are the nannies being okay with her?” His dark eyes were practically haunted, like he feared her answer.
“By and large, yes. Most of them are very kind and read to her or play with her for hours at a time. The problem is, of course, that they quit.”
“I don’t know what to do about that. I have a team of at least two of them per shift when she’s at home and one if she’s in the hospital. A management company oversees them, so they should be able to send someone to take care of her if one of the nannies doesn’t show up for work. I pay them well above the going rate. I just don’t know what to do to keep them from quitting. Thank you, so much, for being there for Emily yet again.”
Andy dug under his fingers to hold his hand, and his fingers tightened around hers. “I was glad that I could be there.”
“I can’t stop thinking about her. I have nanny cams all over my house, hanging from the ceilings and hidden in stuffed animals and tucked underneath tables. When I’m playing online poker, I have a second window open, and I watch her all the time. I watch them to make sure that they are not hurting her, to make sure that she’s not alone, and to make sure that she’s not getting sicker and they haven’t noticed.”
“This seems like a great deal of stress for you.” A great deal of stress indeed, for a recovering heroin addict. It must be jeopardizing his recovery, and the fact that he hadn’t relapsed said more about him than about the stress.
His fingers tightened around hers, not painfully, just like he was hanging on for dear life. “And most of the time, I’m so far away that I would be helpless even if I did see something. I would just be sitting there, staring at what was happening on my tablet and desperately trying to call someone to intervene.”
“Don’t you have family or a friend who lives near you?”
He shook his head and dragged his hair back from his face with his fingers. “I don’t have any family left, and most of my friends are either in Killer Valentine and on the road with me or live somewhere else now.”
“You can put me down as an emergency contact,” Andy said, somewhat surprised at what was coming out of her mouth. “I live just a few miles away from you. I can get to your house to take care of her if there’s a problem.”
Cadell closed his eyes, creases appearing at the corners. “I would appreciate that, having someone that I know who could be there in case of an emergency, especially if I’m in Europe or California or something. I’ll give you the nanny management company’s contact information. Surely they could have someone there in an hour or so, if you had to come to the hospital or something.”
“Oh, I would just take her to my parents’ house. My mother and aunt would dress her up in little silk baby saris. They would have her eating dahl and dosas, assuming that they didn’t just start with gulab jamun.” Yes, come to think of it, they would definitely give the child gulab jamun. “If it were longer than two hours, she would be insufferably spoiled.”
He smiled at her and then glanced up at the clock on the wall. “I had better be getting back to her. It was nice pretending to date you.”
Even though the window wall beside Andy allowed her to see the sky and the treetops, the hard glass kept her locked inside. “It was nice pretending to date you, too.”
They picked up their trash and threw it away, and Andy found herself walking with Cadell through the hallways and back toward Emily’s room. The corridors were crowded with visitors wearing normal clothes, patients wearing pajamas or gowns, and doctors wearing scrubs or professional clothes and white coats. It was always a zoo in the early afternoon, when people tried to beat the rush to visit patients and when doctors tried to finish up so that they could go home before rush hour traffic peaked.
Andy grabbed Cadell’s wrist and tugged him down a different hallway. “This way is less crowded.”
It wasn’t shorter, but many fewer people walked down in this hallway. This particular corridor was lined with storage closets for radiology equipment.
The door to the residents’ on-call room was right up ahead.
They were going to walk right past it, a conveniently empty room with soft couches and beds and all sorts of things that one might need for whatever. It was probably empty again.
Andy passed a storage closet full of lead aprons.
The on-call room was the next door, and every step took them closer to it.
She glanced up at Cadell, but he was just looking down the corridor, oblivious to what they were walking past.
She paused outside the door and couldn’t hear anything inside. It had been days since the Medicare fraud announcement. Everyone had probably left.
Andy grabbed his wrist again. “Come on.”
She twisted the knob on the door and shoved it open, dodging inside and dragging Cadell inside with her.