Chapter 27 I Am Not Engaged

At ten past seven on Thursday morning, every phone in the sixth-floor OR lounge was showing me the same diamond.

"'He asked,'" the scrub tech by the coffee machine read aloud, in a breathy little whisper that was meant to be Vivienne Sutter and was, unfortunately, quite good. "'I said yes.' Pause. 'Again.' Ring emoji." She held the phone up so the anesthesia fellow could see. "Look at the scarf. That's his company logo. That's the anchor."

"That's not a scarf," the fellow said. "That's a press release."

I was eating dry toast. I had a mitral repair at eight and a redo sternotomy after lunch, and dry toast was what my stomach would accept at seven in the morning before a long day. It was cold and slightly bent. I kept eating it.

The lounge at St. Ansel was a narrow room with blue vinyl couches, a fridge covered in passive-aggressive notes about yogurt, and a television bolted high in the corner, permanently tuned to a local news channel with the sound off. On the whiteboard someone had written the day's OR schedule in three colors of marker. My name was on it twice, in green. Room 6.

"Three million," the scrub tech said. "Overnight."

There were nine of us in the room. I knew, without looking up, the exact moment they all remembered I was one of them. A small silence went through the couches.

---

It took them about four minutes to work their way around to it. I timed it by the toast.

"I mean, which one's the story, though?" That was a circulating nurse from the general surgery side, a woman with a ponytail pulled so tight it lifted her eyebrows. She said it to the scrub tech, but in a carrying voice. "The actress, or the other thing?"

"What other thing?"

"You know." A small tilt of the ponytail toward my end of the couch. "The column. The ex-wife. With the tea."

"Oh, God. Right."

"I'm just saying, if I were him, I'd pick the one who hasn't been accused of poisoning anybody's grandfather."

"Allegedly."

"I said allegedly."

She hadn't said allegedly. I finished the toast and folded the paper napkin into a small square and then a smaller square.

The door opened and Trent Kemp came in for coffee, as he did every morning at quarter past seven, in scrubs that had been pressed. He was a tall man with a good haircut and a habit of standing in doorways a moment longer than necessary, to let a room notice him.

The room noticed him. He took in the phones, the silence, and me at the end of the couch with my folded napkin, and his face lit up.

"Ah," he said. He poured his coffee. He took his time with the milk. "I suppose congratulations are in order." He blew on the cup. "For someone."

A couple of people laughed, the short obliging laugh you give a department chief.

"For someone," I agreed, and went back to my napkin.

Kemp waited for something else. There wasn't anything else. The laugh went out of the room without him, and after a moment he took his coffee out, and the door closed behind him slowly on its hydraulic arm.

Rosa Ibarra had been sitting three seats down from me, reading a paperback with the cover folded back. She didn't look up. She stood, picked up her coffee and her book, and sat down again in the seat directly beside mine, close enough that our shoulders touched, and turned a page.

I did not trust myself to look at her. I read the whiteboard instead. Room 6, eight o'clock. Room 6, one o'clock. Green marker.

"You're on my left," I said, low.

"I'm always on your left," Rosa said, and kept reading.

---

The mitral repair went well. The leaflet was floppy and redundant, and I took a neat triangle out of it and closed it with a ring, and the valve shut clean on the first test. I came back to the lounge at ten to drink water and eat half a banana before the afternoon.

The room was fuller than it had been at seven, and every face in it was turned up toward the television.

Someone had found the remote and put the sound on.

On the screen, the Calloway container port stood in thin spring sunshine: blue cranes, stacked boxes in red and gray and rust, a podium on a temporary stage with the anchor logo on the front of it. A banner behind it announced the season's new shipping contract. A row of men in dark suits stood off to one side, and in front of them, at the microphones, was Rhys.

Navy suit, no tie, collar open. His hair was cut short for spring. He was reading figures off a card in that flat even voice that made tonnage sound like a verdict, and the corners of his mouth did not move once.

"It's the contract thing," someone said. "They do it every April."

"Shh."

He finished the figures. He looked up. "Questions."

There were a few, about cranes and berths and union hours. He answered them in one or two sentences each. Then the camera swung to the press pen, and I saw a face I knew from the photograph at the top of a column I had read on a bad Wednesday: dark hair, a narrow pleased mouth, a lanyard and a raised hand.

"Elliot Crane, *Bramport Courier* online. Mr. Calloway, three million people would like to know whether congratulations are in order. Can you confirm your engagement to Vivienne Sutter?"

The lounge stopped breathing. The scrub tech who had done the voice at seven held her phone against her chest.

On the screen, Rhys turned to Crane. Not to the men in suits, not to his notes. He held Crane's eyes until Crane's hand came down.

"I am not engaged to Ms. Sutter," Rhys said. "I'm not engaged to anyone." He turned his head a quarter-inch. "Next question."

"With respect, she posted a ring last night. Are you saying she's lying?"

"I'm saying I'm not engaged." The same voice. He might have been reading the tonnage. "Next question."

A man from a shipping paper asked something about dredging. Rhys answered it.

In the lounge, nobody said anything at all. The ponytailed nurse found something interesting on the floor. The scrub tech lowered her phone and turned it face down on the arm of the couch.

I ate the other half of the banana. I made it last.

Someone turned the sound off again. The room began to move: people remembering cases, pagers, coffee they had let go cold. The ponytailed nurse had to pass the end of my couch to reach the door. She did it sideways, with her eyes on the whiteboard, and she said, to the board, "Room 6 looks busy today."

"It is," I said. "Two hearts before dinner."

She nodded and kept moving.

"One more thing." I didn't raise my voice. I didn't need to; the room had gone quiet enough to hear the fridge. "Nobody has ever charged me with anything. Not in this state or any other. It's a matter of public record, if anyone in here would like to check before the next time they say *allegedly*."

The ponytail went red from the collar up. She said, "Of course, Doctor," to the whiteboard, and went out. The scrub tech coughed and began, with great concentration, to read the yogurt notes on the fridge.

When the door had closed, Rosa shut her paperback over one finger.

"In my house," she said, "my mother had a saying about people who talk at seven and go quiet at ten."

"What was it?"

"I don't remember. It was in Spanish and it was very rude." She opened the book again. "Your redo's patient had his pre-op labs back at nine. His potassium's fine. I checked."

"Thank you."

"I didn't do it for you. I did it because I don't like surprises in my room." She turned a page. "Eat something with protein before one. You get cranky on bananas."

---

My office was at the end of the sixth-floor corridor. It was small and had too many filing cabinets, but its window looked straight out at the harbor, and from my desk I could see the same blue cranes that had been on the television twenty minutes before.

If I squinted, I could see the temporary stage, a white square at the foot of the nearest crane, and tiny dark figures packing it away.

My phone rang while I was squinting.

"Did you see it?" Tamsin, talking with her mouth full. Something wrapped in foil crackled near the receiver. "Tell me you saw it."

"I saw it."

"I'm eating a burrito at my desk at ten-forty in the morning and I nearly inhaled a bean. I had to stand up. My paralegal thought I was having a stroke." Crackle. "Margot. Do you understand what that is? Legally?"

"It's a man answering a question."

"It's a gift. It's a gift with a bow on it. You remember the custody petition, before he withdrew it? Carrow had a whole section drafted about you as an unstable home, the poisoner thing, the move, the foreign country.

"If that ever came back, the first thing I'd have done is ask about *his* household. A father with a revolving actress. A fiancée on Tuesday, no fiancée on Thursday. And he just went on television and killed it himself. He made his house look boring. Boring is gorgeous. Judges love boring."

"The petition is withdrawn, Tamsin."

"I know. I'm saying." She took a bite. "I'm saying he publicly dumped a fake fiancée before lunch, on a Thursday, at his own port. That's not a man doing PR. That's a man drawing a line."

I turned my chair toward the cranes.

He could have done it anywhere. He could have issued a two-line statement through Owen. He could have said nothing at all, and let the picture sit there until it went stale, as most men in his position would have.

Instead he had stood on his own stage, at his own port, in front of his own board and his own city, with the anchor painted on the podium under his hands, and said it to a reporter's face. He had done it at the one podium in Bramport where it would cost him the most to look like a man with a mess at home.

Three years of marriage had taught me what that podium was worth to him. I had watched him rehearse in front of it.

"You've gone quiet," Tamsin said. "You're doing the thing."

"What thing?"

"The thing where you feel something and then put it under 'later' and lock the drawer."

"I don't feel anything about it."

"Liar." Crackle. "I'm not going to make you say it. I'm going to finish my burrito. But I want it on the record that I said, out loud, on a Thursday, that he picked a side, and it wasn't hers."

"So recorded."

"Don't lawyer me. That's my job. Call me after your redo." She hung up.

I turned the phone face down on the desk, exactly as the scrub tech had, and only noticed afterward.

On the wall beside the window was a small corkboard. Pippa had drawn me a picture of a shark eating a hospital, and Felix had drawn a heart, anatomically almost right, with four chambers labeled in his careful capitals and one arrow pointing the wrong way. I looked at the arrow. I thought about fixing it with a pen and knew I wouldn't.

I had forty minutes before I needed to scrub. I opened the redo patient's scans and made myself look at them.

I had been on the first slice for perhaps two minutes when someone knocked on my door. Not a resident's knock, which was quick and sorry. Not Rosa, who didn't knock. Three small taps, unhurried, with a gap between each one.

"Come in."

The door opened. The first thing I saw was lilacs: a great loose armful of them, white and pale purple, still wet from somebody's garden, wrapped in a cream paper envelope the size of a pillowcase. The smell came into the room ahead of her and filled it.

Then the silver bob. The cashmere, the color of oatmeal. A pair of folded gloves in one hand.

Delphine Calloway stood in my doorway and smiled at me as if we were old friends who had been meaning to have lunch.

"Margot, my dear," she said. "May I have a word?"