Compromised, p.13
Compromised, page 13
part #1 of MetroGen Forbidden Love Duets Series
It took another ten seconds of frantic kissing to lose the other half of their clothes. Her pants ended up somewhere and his were around his knees. He picked up her and slid into her with no friction whatsoever.
Their eyes caught, and Angela could have burned in the flames behind his eyes. She sighed in completion because there was no denying this fire. It could consume them, burn the world to pieces.
Michael braced her on the top of the chair and started banging her with fast, merciless strokes.
She didn’t care about the bruises he was giving her. Angela urged him faster, communicating in gasps and hushed screams. This wasn’t desire, it was a fevered frenzy, an elemental visceral mix of something deeper. He ignored her scratches and bites, responding only to her begging for more.
And he gave it, pounding into her with such wild abandon his features were near unrecognizable. Nothing existed except them, and the heat, and the pleasure of him inside her.
After a particularly deep thrust into her slick wetness, her inner muscles tightened, and he clamped his mouth on hers, drinking her scream. She dug her fingers into his back and felt them break the skin as he poured his release into her that same instant.
As quickly as it had started, the fury had passed. They sat there, resting their heads on each other’s shoulders, spent. The ferocity of their coupling—or blood-letting was a better term—had drained the pain.
Eventually, her three remaining brain cells started working again. The world righted itself, and she recognized the enormity of her actions.
She’d had sex with Michael, her forbidden ex-lover-medical student in a family conference room at the hospital.
In the immediate aftermath of a shared patient's death.
She’d given herself to him, in every way that mattered, here in the hospital, damning every consequence. They needed to separate now, before they were seen. Their sudden absence in the emotional aftermath was excusable. Getting caught like this would not be.
“Oh, God.” She scrambled off him and started searching for her clothes.
He seemed to understand and helped her regain her balance. “Angela. I’m…”
In her hunt for her bra, she winced from the bruises forming on her hips and chest. Her panties were on the chair blocking the door. “We have to… we have to…”
His clothing was far easier to put to rights than hers, and he handed her the missing bra. His eyes were now surprisingly vulnerable. “Angela, please. Can’t we…”
“We’re going to be missed soon.” She tucked her breasts back into the bra and said, “You have to go. I have to go. We have to go.”
“I got that,” he tried to grab her hand. He successfully turned her, his face unreadable. “Angela, look at me. We have to talk.”
They did not have to talk. This was out of control. They were out of control.
Instead, she said, “I have to go to call pathology.”
“Why are you calling pathology?” an new edge was in his voice, and he dropped her hand.
She remembered it from their breakup. Anger.
Lying would have been easy. Too easy. She could protect him by lying, which would do him no favors. “Tiffany asked me. She asked me to go to the autopsy.”
“She’s getting an autopsy?!” Betrayal came to the surface.
Wishing his glare wasn’t burning through her skin, she kept her voice low and without emotion. “She wanted one. To find out what happened. It might be able to help the baby.”
“Her body isn’t even cold, and you’re going to cut her apart for a second time.” He was able to come to the next logical conclusion. “She’s a one in a billion case. Her death, her tissue, her cardiac pathology could make your career.”
“Are you about to accuse me of letting her die?”
“If the shoe fits, wear it.”
“Michael, it’s what she wanted.” Angela wished he could understand.
“She didn’t want any of this.”
“Please listen to me. We’re both hurting.” Angela got her shirt over her head and put her arms around him. She could sense him trying to rebuild his walls as fast as they crumbled.
Michael carried so much pain from his brother to the bank shooting and now Tiffany. He’d respond by blocking it out and cutting off anything which caused him more anguish.
He stroked her mussed hair. “I can’t.”
“You can. Please, Michael. I love you,” she admitted out loud, hoping she could pull him back from the dark place.
“Don’t do to the autopsy. Please, Angela.”
Sometimes love isn’t enough to comprehend her other duties. “I have to. It’s my job, and she’s my responsibility.”
He stiffened, every line of his body transforming as he slammed the door on her. He took a long step away from her, his eyes laser points of ice. “Sure you do.“
“You have to understand,” she pleaded. Doctors had to be able to get past their own blue screen of death and do what they had to do, even if it was killing them.
“I understand perfectly, Dr. Perkins.” He strode out the door without a backward glance, closing it behind him.
On a different day at a different time, Angela would have crumbled. Every part of her wanted to scream and cry.
She couldn’t afford the loss of control. Not today. Later, perhaps. Now she had to page pathology for an autopsy.
Chapter 22
She retreated to her office to await pathology. The door to the cardiac clinic opened, and she heard someone walk down the hall to her office.
“Why are you here?” Angela asked Pegg when he entered her office.
“Isn’t it obvious? You were supposed to be on call this morning, but they’re making me come in because you’re supposed to be in pathology instead.”
“Oh, my other consults. Umm. I’m not on service yet. I already signed out to third year last night. Just take his sign out at the normal time.”
“You do realize it’s almost five am now.”
She tilted her head and confirmed the clock read about four-thirty-seven. “Oh, so it is.”
“If I had to come in early and missed my real rotation, then I better do my actual work now,” he huffed.
“I’m sorry the tragic death of my patient is putting you out,” Angela said.
He pointed at her. “This is your fault, not mine. You brought this on yourself. Don’t act like it just happened.”
“I knew her chances were bad.”
“Don’t play the victim here. You were told by our chief this wasn’t going to end well. And critical care, and anesthesia, and cardiothoracic, and OB. Was there anyone who thought this was a good idea?” Pegg pointed out.
“It was what the patient wanted. Since we didn’t deliver her immediately, it didn’t matter when we did afterwards,” Angela said.
“Then spare me this crap. Don’t lie and act like this wasn’t a calculated attempt to get sympathy and glory,” Pegg sneered.
“What are you talking about?”
“Poor sad drab, boring Angela. ‘I’ve created this ethical dilemma we all must agonize over. Her case is so interesting, and it’ll be even better when I can show how long I could keep her alive as an incubator. The academic papers and poster presentations will love this.’”
“Are you kidding me? This wasn’t fun or for papers!” Angela protested.
“It wasn’t? You are going to get a ton of mileage from her corpse. You got her to sign the autopsy consent. Who does the autopsy benefit? You, not her. Not the baby either, because math says this is such a rare event it’ll never happen again.”
“We can’t be sure. The baby has lost her mother. Shouldn’t we be as certain as we can?”
“Repeating it more often won’t make it more true. Lie to yourself if you have to think you’re a hero. Just because you need to make up for your lack of clinical skills by undercutting me.”
“Undercut you? You undercut me, always following Marshall and Collier around, fawning over them like they’re gods on earth. I logged twice as many procedure hours as you do.”
“Because you’re too fat and stupid to see this is how the game is played. You want their recommendations? Then play their game. Don’t do this attention grabbing shit where you force them to stick their necks out and make them look bad. You didn’t get their support because you put them in an impossible position,” Pegg sneered. “And now your patient is dead. How’s it feel? Was it worth it?”
“Get out of my office. None of this was fun. It was all hell, every second. And don’t tell me we don’t make shitty choices like this every day. We cath people who weigh five hundred pounds with out of control diabetes. We fix them temporarily so they can ignore our advice. It’s okay because they die where we can’t see them. I had a patient who wanted to fight, so I let her fight. She fought for her life and her baby’s. So go to hell.”
“Maybe if you showed some fucking spirit like this, people wouldn’t treat you like crap.” He walked out and slammed her door for good measure.
Angela ground her teeth. Pegg was wrong. He had to be. His words were an echo of Michael’s. Had she traded her humanity for this? Should she have changed course, delivered sooner, regardless of what Tiffany wanted?
Her phone rang on her desk. Pathology was on the other line, instructing her to meet them in the under tunnels of the hospital.
Fifteen minutes later, Angela was wandering the hospital tunnels, carrying the paperwork with autopsy specifications. She’d been here before. It was where the laundry robots kept the laundry out of sight. She and Michael used to schedule their secret rendezvous down here at about this time.
No one was ever down here. Too late for the on-call team and too early for the new team. It was the perfect time to leave a coded ‘meet me for sex in the tunnels’ post-it note.
Not anymore.
She passed the spot they usually met and walked deeper into a section she’d never visited. The walls subtly changed from yellowish to gray, and the lighting improved. New signs read Department of Pathology, and a different set of rolling carts waited in the hallway.
Eventually, she came to a door with a sign on it.
Morgue.
A man in blue-grey scrubs approached her. He had the oddest set of glasses on his face, making his eyes appear gigantic.
He was taller than she was and unexpectedly tan and fit for a man who dwelt in the pathology lab basement.
“You’re the pathologist?”
He removed his large glasses, making him look less like a bug. “Yes. Why?”
“You’re tan,” Angela ventured.
“Do you think I live in this basement?”
Rather than answering in the affirmative, Angela said, “Nevermind. Long call night.”
“No kidding. I usually don’t get paged to come in. Must be something special. If they truly think this was murder, they should get the medical examiner’s office involved. Or give me a list of specific poisons we’re checking for.”
“No. She died during delivery.”
“Oh,” he said. “Sucks to be her. OB worried they’re about to be sued?”
“Nothing like that. I’m the cardiology fellow. She had an extremely rare heart condition.”
The pathologist nodded and changed the sign on the door into ‘in progress.’ “I see now. My name on another paper.”
Of course he did. Cardiology didn’t send a doctor down to observe any random death from heart attack. This was an academic coup, the rare case everyone dreamed of getting published. They’d need every sample, every photo, every observation they could possibly get.
“I have a camera at the table, before you ask,” he said, walking her through the door.
“Camera?”
“Yes. Generally, in special cases, we take photos. It’s probably in the packet.”
Angela fumbled for her list as she followed him into the cold fluorescent-lighted room. Buried in the long list of requests, there was a request for photos of the patient. Not the organs. The patient.
A sheet covered the body, and Angela found she couldn’t breathe. Tiffany was under that, and they wanted pictures of her. As a specimen, to let surrender her last piece of humanity.
“Can you give me a moment? Give me a moment with Tiffany?” Angela asked.
The pathologist inclined his head, undoubtedly checking the name of the patient. He took the packet of instructions from her. "I can come back in ten minutes. It’ll give me time to make sure I have the media we need for tissue collection."
When he was gone, Angela dragged a chair next to the table and tried to dredge up the will to move the sheet. It was one thing to have cut Tiffany open in an attempt to save her life. It was another to view the brutality of their choices for science.
Eventually, Angela folded back the sheet, revealing first Tiffany’s brown hair and then her face.
She was so still and silent. Angela could have mistaken her for sleeping if she wasn’t completely motionless.
Now that they were alone, Angela allowed herself to feel. Most days she was surrounded by illness and death, slowly making her immune to the pain. Like most doctors, she’d learned to show compassion and empathy but never let the pain truly touch her. Michael believed it was callous, others would call it self-preservation.
If she absorbed the death of every patient, even if it were a single pin prick, soon she’d have enough wounds to bleed to death.
This wasn’t fair. Tiffany had lost so much. Her parents. Her husband. And how her life. She’d sacrificed everything for the baby, and Angela guessed she’d done everything to make sure whoever took the baby was extraordinary.
None of this was a substitute.
Medicine and, ultimately, Angela had failed her. This was not a happy ending. It was a hollow victory bought in Tiffany’s blood.
The universe had conspired against them. Tiffany had been perfectly healthy before the pregnancy. If the Wolf-Parkinson-White had revealed itself earlier, they’d have ablated it in the electrophysiology lab in under an hour.
She’d have lived to have more children. Without WPW, her chances of surviving the cardiomyopathy would have been higher.
The dream of delivering the baby and Tiffany rallying had been a moonshot. Their best chance to save her had been on Christmas after her collapse. She’d known it, Tiffany had known it.
Angela reached under the sheet, finding Tiffany’s chilly hand.
“I’m so sorry.”
Then she cried at last.
It went on for a while until someone cleared their throat.
Angela turned around and found the pathologist had been sitting quietly behind her.
“Are you staying? I don’t need an assistant,” he said. “Your division thinks they reinvented the wheel with their requests, but I do this for a job.”
“They told me I had to stay. So I’ll stay.” Angela stood up and found the same type of plastic dissection gown he was wearing. “We will not take pictures of her.”
“The list says pictures.”
“I don’t care what the list says. We can take pictures of her organs as needed. There will be no pictures of her body.” Angela forced her arms into the gown.
“Your boss, Dr. Collier, wrote—"
“She is my patient, and I’m seeing this to the end. I make the decisions, not him,” Angela snapped. “Besides, if we need a picture of her, we have a billion on L and D. She made her daughter an album to last a lifetime in these past two months.”
The pathologist nodded. “It doesn’t matter to me. Are you ready?”
“Yes. Let’s start.” Angela helped him remove the sheet and began her final examination of Tiffany Wickwire.
Chapter 23
Angela sat against the wall in the pathology hallway pretending to rest her eyes. She checked her phone for the first time and saw it was a blank screen. It must have died while searching for a signal.
She fumbled for her pager, which ran on its own battery. How long had this night lasted? Would it ever end?
“Ahh, there you are.”
Angela opened her eyes and saw Dr. Feldsher standing over her.
“Hey. I… autopsy.”
“So I gathered,” Feldsher said, since the sign next to Angela clearly read ‘autopsy in progress.’
“It’s done. I need to change it.” Angela placed her hand on the sign, tears threatening. She sniffled and brushed them away. “Sorry about this. Did you need something?”
“I heard what happened, so I hunted down everyone on the team to check on them. You’re the last of them. Michael Harper took most of the staff to the chapel.”
What an appropriate and human thing to do. Mourn together as a group rather than heartlessly go to an autopsy.
The tears came again, and Angela couldn’t fight them. Even though she’d prepared, she’d lost Tiffany and been rejected by Michael after they’d…
Feldsher handed her a Kleenex. “Why do you think I allowed this to go on?”
Angela flinched. Had Feldsher magically heard what she and Michael had done? “What go on?”
“The Tiffany Wickwire case. Why did I let us keep her alive? You believed it was for the learning experience at a teaching hospital? Or is it because I wanted my name to be listed next to yours when you get her case published?”
Questioning any department chair was never smart, so Angela shook her head. Unlike her fellow cardiologists, Feldsher had never discussed Tiffany as a means to an end.
“Tiffany Wickwire was doomed the day she collapsed on Christmas Eve. Did you really believe she’d have survived delivery back then?” Feldsher flipped the sign back over.
“It was possible,” Angela hedged.
“But unlikely. I am maternal fetal medicine, and I’ve seen more cases of peripartum cardiomyopathy than you have. If we had delivered the baby, its intact survival rate was less than ten percent.”
“I know.”
“Knowing is not the same as believing. In the worst and most likely scenario, we’d have lost the mom and the baby. In our best-case scenario, we’d have had two critically ill and possibly dying patients. Tiffany Wickwire was never going to make it to heart transplant.”
Their eyes caught, and Angela could have burned in the flames behind his eyes. She sighed in completion because there was no denying this fire. It could consume them, burn the world to pieces.
Michael braced her on the top of the chair and started banging her with fast, merciless strokes.
She didn’t care about the bruises he was giving her. Angela urged him faster, communicating in gasps and hushed screams. This wasn’t desire, it was a fevered frenzy, an elemental visceral mix of something deeper. He ignored her scratches and bites, responding only to her begging for more.
And he gave it, pounding into her with such wild abandon his features were near unrecognizable. Nothing existed except them, and the heat, and the pleasure of him inside her.
After a particularly deep thrust into her slick wetness, her inner muscles tightened, and he clamped his mouth on hers, drinking her scream. She dug her fingers into his back and felt them break the skin as he poured his release into her that same instant.
As quickly as it had started, the fury had passed. They sat there, resting their heads on each other’s shoulders, spent. The ferocity of their coupling—or blood-letting was a better term—had drained the pain.
Eventually, her three remaining brain cells started working again. The world righted itself, and she recognized the enormity of her actions.
She’d had sex with Michael, her forbidden ex-lover-medical student in a family conference room at the hospital.
In the immediate aftermath of a shared patient's death.
She’d given herself to him, in every way that mattered, here in the hospital, damning every consequence. They needed to separate now, before they were seen. Their sudden absence in the emotional aftermath was excusable. Getting caught like this would not be.
“Oh, God.” She scrambled off him and started searching for her clothes.
He seemed to understand and helped her regain her balance. “Angela. I’m…”
In her hunt for her bra, she winced from the bruises forming on her hips and chest. Her panties were on the chair blocking the door. “We have to… we have to…”
His clothing was far easier to put to rights than hers, and he handed her the missing bra. His eyes were now surprisingly vulnerable. “Angela, please. Can’t we…”
“We’re going to be missed soon.” She tucked her breasts back into the bra and said, “You have to go. I have to go. We have to go.”
“I got that,” he tried to grab her hand. He successfully turned her, his face unreadable. “Angela, look at me. We have to talk.”
They did not have to talk. This was out of control. They were out of control.
Instead, she said, “I have to go to call pathology.”
“Why are you calling pathology?” an new edge was in his voice, and he dropped her hand.
She remembered it from their breakup. Anger.
Lying would have been easy. Too easy. She could protect him by lying, which would do him no favors. “Tiffany asked me. She asked me to go to the autopsy.”
“She’s getting an autopsy?!” Betrayal came to the surface.
Wishing his glare wasn’t burning through her skin, she kept her voice low and without emotion. “She wanted one. To find out what happened. It might be able to help the baby.”
“Her body isn’t even cold, and you’re going to cut her apart for a second time.” He was able to come to the next logical conclusion. “She’s a one in a billion case. Her death, her tissue, her cardiac pathology could make your career.”
“Are you about to accuse me of letting her die?”
“If the shoe fits, wear it.”
“Michael, it’s what she wanted.” Angela wished he could understand.
“She didn’t want any of this.”
“Please listen to me. We’re both hurting.” Angela got her shirt over her head and put her arms around him. She could sense him trying to rebuild his walls as fast as they crumbled.
Michael carried so much pain from his brother to the bank shooting and now Tiffany. He’d respond by blocking it out and cutting off anything which caused him more anguish.
He stroked her mussed hair. “I can’t.”
“You can. Please, Michael. I love you,” she admitted out loud, hoping she could pull him back from the dark place.
“Don’t do to the autopsy. Please, Angela.”
Sometimes love isn’t enough to comprehend her other duties. “I have to. It’s my job, and she’s my responsibility.”
He stiffened, every line of his body transforming as he slammed the door on her. He took a long step away from her, his eyes laser points of ice. “Sure you do.“
“You have to understand,” she pleaded. Doctors had to be able to get past their own blue screen of death and do what they had to do, even if it was killing them.
“I understand perfectly, Dr. Perkins.” He strode out the door without a backward glance, closing it behind him.
On a different day at a different time, Angela would have crumbled. Every part of her wanted to scream and cry.
She couldn’t afford the loss of control. Not today. Later, perhaps. Now she had to page pathology for an autopsy.
Chapter 22
She retreated to her office to await pathology. The door to the cardiac clinic opened, and she heard someone walk down the hall to her office.
“Why are you here?” Angela asked Pegg when he entered her office.
“Isn’t it obvious? You were supposed to be on call this morning, but they’re making me come in because you’re supposed to be in pathology instead.”
“Oh, my other consults. Umm. I’m not on service yet. I already signed out to third year last night. Just take his sign out at the normal time.”
“You do realize it’s almost five am now.”
She tilted her head and confirmed the clock read about four-thirty-seven. “Oh, so it is.”
“If I had to come in early and missed my real rotation, then I better do my actual work now,” he huffed.
“I’m sorry the tragic death of my patient is putting you out,” Angela said.
He pointed at her. “This is your fault, not mine. You brought this on yourself. Don’t act like it just happened.”
“I knew her chances were bad.”
“Don’t play the victim here. You were told by our chief this wasn’t going to end well. And critical care, and anesthesia, and cardiothoracic, and OB. Was there anyone who thought this was a good idea?” Pegg pointed out.
“It was what the patient wanted. Since we didn’t deliver her immediately, it didn’t matter when we did afterwards,” Angela said.
“Then spare me this crap. Don’t lie and act like this wasn’t a calculated attempt to get sympathy and glory,” Pegg sneered.
“What are you talking about?”
“Poor sad drab, boring Angela. ‘I’ve created this ethical dilemma we all must agonize over. Her case is so interesting, and it’ll be even better when I can show how long I could keep her alive as an incubator. The academic papers and poster presentations will love this.’”
“Are you kidding me? This wasn’t fun or for papers!” Angela protested.
“It wasn’t? You are going to get a ton of mileage from her corpse. You got her to sign the autopsy consent. Who does the autopsy benefit? You, not her. Not the baby either, because math says this is such a rare event it’ll never happen again.”
“We can’t be sure. The baby has lost her mother. Shouldn’t we be as certain as we can?”
“Repeating it more often won’t make it more true. Lie to yourself if you have to think you’re a hero. Just because you need to make up for your lack of clinical skills by undercutting me.”
“Undercut you? You undercut me, always following Marshall and Collier around, fawning over them like they’re gods on earth. I logged twice as many procedure hours as you do.”
“Because you’re too fat and stupid to see this is how the game is played. You want their recommendations? Then play their game. Don’t do this attention grabbing shit where you force them to stick their necks out and make them look bad. You didn’t get their support because you put them in an impossible position,” Pegg sneered. “And now your patient is dead. How’s it feel? Was it worth it?”
“Get out of my office. None of this was fun. It was all hell, every second. And don’t tell me we don’t make shitty choices like this every day. We cath people who weigh five hundred pounds with out of control diabetes. We fix them temporarily so they can ignore our advice. It’s okay because they die where we can’t see them. I had a patient who wanted to fight, so I let her fight. She fought for her life and her baby’s. So go to hell.”
“Maybe if you showed some fucking spirit like this, people wouldn’t treat you like crap.” He walked out and slammed her door for good measure.
Angela ground her teeth. Pegg was wrong. He had to be. His words were an echo of Michael’s. Had she traded her humanity for this? Should she have changed course, delivered sooner, regardless of what Tiffany wanted?
Her phone rang on her desk. Pathology was on the other line, instructing her to meet them in the under tunnels of the hospital.
Fifteen minutes later, Angela was wandering the hospital tunnels, carrying the paperwork with autopsy specifications. She’d been here before. It was where the laundry robots kept the laundry out of sight. She and Michael used to schedule their secret rendezvous down here at about this time.
No one was ever down here. Too late for the on-call team and too early for the new team. It was the perfect time to leave a coded ‘meet me for sex in the tunnels’ post-it note.
Not anymore.
She passed the spot they usually met and walked deeper into a section she’d never visited. The walls subtly changed from yellowish to gray, and the lighting improved. New signs read Department of Pathology, and a different set of rolling carts waited in the hallway.
Eventually, she came to a door with a sign on it.
Morgue.
A man in blue-grey scrubs approached her. He had the oddest set of glasses on his face, making his eyes appear gigantic.
He was taller than she was and unexpectedly tan and fit for a man who dwelt in the pathology lab basement.
“You’re the pathologist?”
He removed his large glasses, making him look less like a bug. “Yes. Why?”
“You’re tan,” Angela ventured.
“Do you think I live in this basement?”
Rather than answering in the affirmative, Angela said, “Nevermind. Long call night.”
“No kidding. I usually don’t get paged to come in. Must be something special. If they truly think this was murder, they should get the medical examiner’s office involved. Or give me a list of specific poisons we’re checking for.”
“No. She died during delivery.”
“Oh,” he said. “Sucks to be her. OB worried they’re about to be sued?”
“Nothing like that. I’m the cardiology fellow. She had an extremely rare heart condition.”
The pathologist nodded and changed the sign on the door into ‘in progress.’ “I see now. My name on another paper.”
Of course he did. Cardiology didn’t send a doctor down to observe any random death from heart attack. This was an academic coup, the rare case everyone dreamed of getting published. They’d need every sample, every photo, every observation they could possibly get.
“I have a camera at the table, before you ask,” he said, walking her through the door.
“Camera?”
“Yes. Generally, in special cases, we take photos. It’s probably in the packet.”
Angela fumbled for her list as she followed him into the cold fluorescent-lighted room. Buried in the long list of requests, there was a request for photos of the patient. Not the organs. The patient.
A sheet covered the body, and Angela found she couldn’t breathe. Tiffany was under that, and they wanted pictures of her. As a specimen, to let surrender her last piece of humanity.
“Can you give me a moment? Give me a moment with Tiffany?” Angela asked.
The pathologist inclined his head, undoubtedly checking the name of the patient. He took the packet of instructions from her. "I can come back in ten minutes. It’ll give me time to make sure I have the media we need for tissue collection."
When he was gone, Angela dragged a chair next to the table and tried to dredge up the will to move the sheet. It was one thing to have cut Tiffany open in an attempt to save her life. It was another to view the brutality of their choices for science.
Eventually, Angela folded back the sheet, revealing first Tiffany’s brown hair and then her face.
She was so still and silent. Angela could have mistaken her for sleeping if she wasn’t completely motionless.
Now that they were alone, Angela allowed herself to feel. Most days she was surrounded by illness and death, slowly making her immune to the pain. Like most doctors, she’d learned to show compassion and empathy but never let the pain truly touch her. Michael believed it was callous, others would call it self-preservation.
If she absorbed the death of every patient, even if it were a single pin prick, soon she’d have enough wounds to bleed to death.
This wasn’t fair. Tiffany had lost so much. Her parents. Her husband. And how her life. She’d sacrificed everything for the baby, and Angela guessed she’d done everything to make sure whoever took the baby was extraordinary.
None of this was a substitute.
Medicine and, ultimately, Angela had failed her. This was not a happy ending. It was a hollow victory bought in Tiffany’s blood.
The universe had conspired against them. Tiffany had been perfectly healthy before the pregnancy. If the Wolf-Parkinson-White had revealed itself earlier, they’d have ablated it in the electrophysiology lab in under an hour.
She’d have lived to have more children. Without WPW, her chances of surviving the cardiomyopathy would have been higher.
The dream of delivering the baby and Tiffany rallying had been a moonshot. Their best chance to save her had been on Christmas after her collapse. She’d known it, Tiffany had known it.
Angela reached under the sheet, finding Tiffany’s chilly hand.
“I’m so sorry.”
Then she cried at last.
It went on for a while until someone cleared their throat.
Angela turned around and found the pathologist had been sitting quietly behind her.
“Are you staying? I don’t need an assistant,” he said. “Your division thinks they reinvented the wheel with their requests, but I do this for a job.”
“They told me I had to stay. So I’ll stay.” Angela stood up and found the same type of plastic dissection gown he was wearing. “We will not take pictures of her.”
“The list says pictures.”
“I don’t care what the list says. We can take pictures of her organs as needed. There will be no pictures of her body.” Angela forced her arms into the gown.
“Your boss, Dr. Collier, wrote—"
“She is my patient, and I’m seeing this to the end. I make the decisions, not him,” Angela snapped. “Besides, if we need a picture of her, we have a billion on L and D. She made her daughter an album to last a lifetime in these past two months.”
The pathologist nodded. “It doesn’t matter to me. Are you ready?”
“Yes. Let’s start.” Angela helped him remove the sheet and began her final examination of Tiffany Wickwire.
Chapter 23
Angela sat against the wall in the pathology hallway pretending to rest her eyes. She checked her phone for the first time and saw it was a blank screen. It must have died while searching for a signal.
She fumbled for her pager, which ran on its own battery. How long had this night lasted? Would it ever end?
“Ahh, there you are.”
Angela opened her eyes and saw Dr. Feldsher standing over her.
“Hey. I… autopsy.”
“So I gathered,” Feldsher said, since the sign next to Angela clearly read ‘autopsy in progress.’
“It’s done. I need to change it.” Angela placed her hand on the sign, tears threatening. She sniffled and brushed them away. “Sorry about this. Did you need something?”
“I heard what happened, so I hunted down everyone on the team to check on them. You’re the last of them. Michael Harper took most of the staff to the chapel.”
What an appropriate and human thing to do. Mourn together as a group rather than heartlessly go to an autopsy.
The tears came again, and Angela couldn’t fight them. Even though she’d prepared, she’d lost Tiffany and been rejected by Michael after they’d…
Feldsher handed her a Kleenex. “Why do you think I allowed this to go on?”
Angela flinched. Had Feldsher magically heard what she and Michael had done? “What go on?”
“The Tiffany Wickwire case. Why did I let us keep her alive? You believed it was for the learning experience at a teaching hospital? Or is it because I wanted my name to be listed next to yours when you get her case published?”
Questioning any department chair was never smart, so Angela shook her head. Unlike her fellow cardiologists, Feldsher had never discussed Tiffany as a means to an end.
“Tiffany Wickwire was doomed the day she collapsed on Christmas Eve. Did you really believe she’d have survived delivery back then?” Feldsher flipped the sign back over.
“It was possible,” Angela hedged.
“But unlikely. I am maternal fetal medicine, and I’ve seen more cases of peripartum cardiomyopathy than you have. If we had delivered the baby, its intact survival rate was less than ten percent.”
“I know.”
“Knowing is not the same as believing. In the worst and most likely scenario, we’d have lost the mom and the baby. In our best-case scenario, we’d have had two critically ill and possibly dying patients. Tiffany Wickwire was never going to make it to heart transplant.”
