Chapter 2

Audrey

Pressing two fingers to my cheek, I turn.

Rhys is standing three feet from me, wearing an expression I have never seen.

"You were with someone last night," he grits out.

I stare at him.

My cheek is throbbing, my files are on the floor, and the handprint of his palm is still singing across my face.

"You hit me.”

"Audrey—"

"You hit me." I say it again because I want to be very clear about what just happened in this room. "You stood in my office and you hit me."

"I can still smell him on you." His nostrils flare. "Don't stand there and act innocent."

"Smell—" I almost laugh. Almost. "I bumped into someone in the corridor five minutes ago. A stranger. He caught me when I nearly fell. That is what you're smelling."

"That's a lie."

"It is not—"

"Lucille said you weren't here last night." He takes a step forward. "You weren't home either, and now you're standing here telling me you bumped into someone—"

"Because that is what happened!"

"You were late for her surgery this morning!" His voice cracks on it — something closer to desperation, which would almost make me feel something if his palm wasn't still radiating heat across my cheekbone. "Lucille called me. She said you ran in thirty minutes late looking like you hadn't slept—"

"I hadn't slept." I keep my voice level. I am very good at keeping my voice level. "I had a patient. A private case—"

"At four in the morning?"

"Yes!"

"In what world does that sound reasonable?"

"In the world," I say, very carefully, "where you trust your mate."

The word lands between us, enough for him to meet my eyes, albeit briefly.

Rhys runs a hand through his hair — light brown, perpetually slightly overgrown — and lets out a breath. "I do trust you. I just—"

"You just hit me over something my half sister said."

He flinches. It is small and quick and he covers it with the forward momentum of someone who has decided not to stop moving. "That was—" He stops. "I shouldn't have done that."

"No," I say. "You shouldn't have."

His eyes stay on my cheek that I'm sure already has a very visible handprint.

"I'll get you some ice," he says.

"I don't want ice."

"Audrey—"

The knock at the door is Hana's — two quick raps, the way she always knocks when she's reminding me of something I already know.

"Dr. Calloway?" Her voice comes through the door, bright and professionally oblivious to the atmosphere on the other side. "Your rounds start in ten. Mr. Osei in bay four is asking for you specifically."

I do not take my eyes off Rhys. "I'll be right there."

A beat of silence. Then Hana's footsteps retreat down the corridor.

I grab my coat and walk past him. “You’d better be out of my office by the time I return.”

♦♦♦

The house smells like Nadia's candles when I get home.

Amber and sandalwood, which she burns in the sitting room every evening like a territorial marker. What I need is a steaming hot bath.

I close the front door quietly, but the devil has already appeared.

"You're late," Nadia says, from the sitting room doorway.

She is a well-assembled woman, my stepmother. Forty-nine, but you wouldn't put her there without knowing — she carries herself with composed elegance, her dark hair worn back in a low bun. A cashmere wrap in a shade of ivory that she would never wear near anyone she thought might compete with it.

"I had rounds," I say, already moving toward the corridor.

"Lucille said you were late this morning."

"Lucille says a lot of things."

"She said you kept her waiting in the OR for forty minutes."

I stop. I turn around. Why does the amount of minutes I was late grow with every person that confronts me?

Lucille is behind Nadia — she came from the sitting room, which means she has been here a while, which means this conversation was planned before I walked through the door. 

Lucille is twenty-six, same as me — three months younger, born of a timeline that tells you everything you need to know about our father's decisions. She is fair-skinned where I am more tanned, softer-featured.

She is also a mediocre surgeon who would be unemployable without my hands. We both know this. We have simply never said it aloud.

"Lucille," I look at her. "Good evening."

"You made me look incompetent," she says. "The governor's team was there. Do you understand how that looked?"

"I understand that the surgery went well," I say. "Which is the relevant outcome."

"The relevant outcome," Nadia says, stepping in with the smooth interjection of a woman who has been running this particular relay for years, "is that this family's reputation depends on Lucille's position at that hospital, and your behaviour this morning put that at risk."

"My behaviour," I say slowly, "was performing a successful craniotomy after twenty-six hours without sleep. You're welcome."

"Audrey." Nadia's voice has the particular patient-teacher quality that she uses when she wants to sound reasonable. "We understand you work hard. But Lucille's career—"

"Is built on my work."

"That's not—" Lucille starts.

"I have been in that OR since I was a resident," I say. "I have scrubbed in on every significant case this hospital has seen in the last four years. I have done it without complaint, without credit, and without a salary, because—" I glance at Nadia. "Because apparently room and board is considered adequate compensation for a fully booked neurosurgeon."

Nadia's chin goes up a fraction. "Your father and I decided—"

"My father decided," I say, "that I didn't need paying because you convinced him I didn't." I look at her steadily. "I'm not doing this tonight. I'm tired and my face hurts and I have worked a twenty-six hour day. If this is the conversation we're having—" I look at Lucille, "—then going forward, why don't you do the surgeries yourself?"

Lucille opens her mouth.

"Goodnight," I throw over my shoulder as I walk down the corridor, go into my room, and lock the door.

♦♦♦

“Very soon.” My words are barely audible as I stare at the numbers in my secret bank account.

The cervical fracture client paid well, bringing the total to a number I look at for a long moment in the blue light of the screen, doing the arithmetic I have done approximately four hundred times in the past eighteen months.

Spain is not cheap. Renting somewhere decent in Valencia, setting up a small private practice, the cost of getting my credentials transferred through the right channels — I have priced all of it, multiple times, with the meticulous attention I apply to surgical prep.

I am close.

Not this month. Possibly not next. But close enough that the distance has stopped feeling theoretical and started feeling like a thing I can actually reach, which is different.

I have never told anyone about Spain. Not Hana, not the circuit contacts, not Rhys.

Especially not Rhys.

Because the version of this plan that works requires leaving cleanly — no arguments, no negotiations, no conversations where someone else tries to make my decision for me. Just a morning where I put my mother's urn in a bag and my three cacti in the back seat and drive to an airport, and the life in this house closes behind me like a door I don't have to open again.

I close the app and check the circuit messages — one inquiry, a new contact, nothing urgent. I flag it for the morning and close that too.

No sooner had I pulled my blanket over my head did three measured raps bounce off my door.

Daddy dearest.

"Audrey." His voice through the door is calm. "I need you in my study. Now."

I pull on a robe over my oversized shirt, unlock the door, and follow him down the hall.

Nadia, and Lucille are waiting for us already but they're not the ones looking out of place.

“What are you doing here?” I ask.

“Sit down, Audrey,” my father lowers himself into his chair. “Rhys is here to make things official.”

“Official? What do—”

“Ohh, shut up!” Lucille snaps. “He's not here for you.”

“Hush now,” Nadia places a hand on Lucille's. “You don't want to startle the pups.”

Pups? What in the madhouse is going—

“Rhys?” My voice comes out quiet. “What's going on?”

“I—”

Lily answers for him. “We're having a baby.”

"What do you mean, a baby?"

My voice comes out very even. That is the thing about shock — the real kind, the kind that lands before your body knows what to do with it — it doesn't sound like anything. It sounds like a question about the weather.

Rhys keeps staring at the floor.

"Audrey." My father's voice is measured. “Sit down."

"I don't want to sit down." I look at him. "Explain what she just said."

"Don't yell."

"I'm not yelling." I pause. "Am I yelling?"

"Your tone—"

"Dad." I say it quietly. "Are you being serious with me right now? Are you genuinely sitting there and telling me to watch my tone?"

He presses his lips together.

I turn to Rhys.

He feels it — feels me turn, feels the weight of it — and he brings his eyes up from the floor slowly, the way a man looks up when he already knows what he's going to find.

One look into his eyes and it confirms everything.

I let out a breath then I laugh.

It comes out of me before I can stop it — a single, short, complete bark of laughter that bounces off the dark wood walls of my father's study and surprises everyone in the room, including me.

Nadia looks at me like I've lost my mind.

Maybe I have.

"Right," I say.

"Audrey—" Rhys starts.

"Don't." I hold up one hand and he stops. "Not yet."

My father shifts in his chair. "There is a way through this," he says. "That's why I called this meeting. Lucille is—" he pauses "—she cannot wait long. Things need to be formalised before she starts to show, which means we need to act quickly."

I look at him. “What does quickly mean?" 

"It means," he says, carefully, "that Rhys needs to be free to wed."

The room is very quiet.

"Free," I repeat.

"The bond needs to be dissolved. Voluntarily. Before—"

"You're asking me," I say, "to accept his rejection."

My father says nothing.

"So that he can marry Lucille."

He says nothing.

"In your study. Tonight." I look around the room — at Nadia's careful hands, at Lucille's winning expression, at Rhys's floor-seeking gaze, at my father's space-above-my-head diplomacy. "This is the family meeting you called."

"Audrey, I understand this is difficult—"

"Did you know?" My eyes are on Rhys. He looks up. "When you came to my office this morning, and put your hand across my face." My voice is still even. It is astonishing, how even it is. "Did you already know about the baby?"