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I hold up my hands in surrender. “She’s going to be fine.”


She shoots me a skeptical stare. “Who? The baby? The mother?”

I stare at her back. “Both, I presume.”

Her voice escalates in a mix of sadness and irritation. “You can’t just presume that.”

I nod. “Yes. I can. It’s part of the job.”

She shakes her head and knits her brow. “I don’t get it. How can you separate everything so easily? How can you say she’ll be fine when you don’t actually know?”

I take a breath and call upon my best cool demeanor. Josie’s getting emotional. She’s becoming attached to patients that aren’t even hers. I need to talk down the Florence Nightingale in her. “Hey,” I say calmly, setting a hand on her arm. “We have people at the hospital who can help. We have a great social worker. We’ll do everything we can. The only way I could assist her medically was to focus on the physical. Now there are others who will help her, okay?”

She draws a huge breath, like she’s gulping up oxygen after being deprived. When she nods as if she’s settled, I’m ready to write this off as done, but then she slides past me. “Excuse me,” she mumbles, her voice hitching, then she’s off and seconds later the bathroom door slams closed.

“Fuck,” I mutter.

And I wait. And I wait. And I wait.

When the timer beeps on the oven, I half figure that Josie’s internal baker clock will ding and summon her from the bathroom. But after sixty seconds, she’s still MIA, so I grab a potholder, pull out the lasagna, and set it on a cooling rack. Staring at it for a minute, I decide on a game plan. I don’t know what Josie’s upset about, but I can only fix what I can fix.

The rest of dinner.

I hunt around for a bottle of wine, grab a merlot, and unscrew the cork. When I find two glasses, I set them on the coffee table in the living room that doubles as our dining room table. I add cloth napkins—the only kind we use, since Josie’s taught me that paper ones are wasteful to the environment. When I return to the kitchen, I grab two sunshine-yellow plates, then a spatula. I serve a chunk of lasagna for her, then one for me.

As I set the plates on the table along with forks, she rounds the corner, a wad of tissue in her hands. “I’m so sorry,” she says, her voice thin with tears. Her expression is soft now and apologetic. “I didn’t mean to push so hard about a patient of yours.”

“Don’t think twice about it. But . . . are you okay?” I step closer to her.

“It’s not you. I just . . .” She swipes at her cheeks with the tissues. “I just had a long day, and we ran out of seven-layer bars earlier than we’d advertised for the Tuesday special, and this customer came in and threw a complete fit that we were out, and said she was going to”—she stops to adopt a bitchy voice—“‘rip us a new one’ on Yelp. And I know it’s a little thing in the scheme of all the big things, but I’ve worked so hard to build a good business after I took over for my mom, and sometimes all it takes is one bad review to shred you. So I’ve been waiting all day for the other shoe to drop, and on top of that my friend Lily’s boyfriend is acting like a total dick, and I feel bad for her because she still likes him, but he’s so not worth her time and I want her to realize it. And so I was making lasagna to try to get my mind off it all.” Her words are tumbling out like she’s in a confessional. “And then you come home, and you’re so good at separating everything, and I just can’t do that. I’m terrible at that.” Another tear slips down her cheek.

I take a tissue and wipe it away. “You don’t have to deal with things the way I deal with things. You’re you, and you should deal with them as you need to.”

She takes a deep breath and nods. “I wish I could just shut things off. Like you can.”

“It’s a blessing and a curse,” I joke.

“It’s a gift,” she says emphatically.

“Well, look. I have to separate myself to some degree. I can’t react to things the way a patient would, because if I did then I wouldn’t be very good at taking care of them, right?”

She nods as I wrap an arm around her and guide her to the couch.

“I’m sorry I gave you a hard time,” she whispers.

I shake my head. “Ha. That was hardly a hard time. And if you do decide to give me a hard time, I can handle it.” I puff out my chest and hit it. “Steel, baby. I’m steel. I can take it.”

She smiles, a rueful little grin.

“But look. Don’t get frustrated that emotions spill over for you. It’s who you are, and it’s part of what makes you . . .”—I pause, looking for the right words—“one of the most amazing people I know.”

She swats my shoulder. “Oh stop.”

“Hey, you are,” I say. Then I take a beat and quirk up my lips. “Honestly, though, I thought you were just having your period.”

“You ass,” she says.

“I totally am an ass. But this ass served dinner.” I gesture to the meal. “Dine with me?”