(Like a sad puppy I’d kicked.)
—with those big blue eyes, and walked on past. In her mind, as she went about her day, his eyes floated in front of her. Like that book she’d read in high school, The Great Gatsby, and his eyes were like that billboard near the road where the lady got hit by the car. The eyes of God, their English teacher had told them.
When she’d gotten home that night, Rita had kept seeing his eyes. She couldn’t get them out of her head. So she’d poured herself a glass. Then a second. She’d been reaching for the third when the ER called: an appendix in need of emergency removal.
She’d panicked because she’d definitely had a slight buzz on. Frantic, she’d brushed her teeth hard enough to make her gums bleed, then driven, carefully, to the hospital, well within the speed limit, hands at ten and two on the wheel the whole way. Dismissed the chief resident who would have otherwise assisted in the OR. Loaded up on enough coffee and Red Bull to keep her jacked up for a week.
I was stone-cold sober by the time I operated on her, Rita thought. Insisted to herself. It had been a rare complication that had killed her. Even if I hadn’t been drinking earlier, it wouldn’t have made a difference. Jenny Finney would still have died.
And that was that.
Was it, though?
It had been one tough case. One of the worst Rita had ever seen, the woman’s abdomen a mess: appendix ruptured, pus everywhere. Rita had to all but chisel the appendix out, so inflamed were it and the surrounding organs.
So had the drinks mattered? Slowed her reaction time during the operation, if only a little? Messed with her judgment? Dulled her perception just enough to allow her to miss the hole lurking in Jenny Finney’s intestine? The one that would leak poison into her abdomen for the next three days, before Rita diagnosed it, and rushed her back to the operating room?
By then it had been too late. After the second operation (the take-back, in surgeon-speak), Jenny Finney had lasted another week, the longest of Rita’s life, dying in the ICU, her life ebbing with each failed organ, and with each additional plastic tube inserted into her body by the ICU doctors.
An unusual complication. But not unheard of. And, as an expert panel of Rita’s surgical colleagues had determined, an unavoidable one. Had Chase had a hand in that? Rigged the composition of the committee, perhaps, and its exhaustive report? Maybe. If so, he’d never let on. In any case, they’d exonerated her completely. Jenny Finney’s death, in their official opinion, had been the worst kind of luck. Or, in the dry verbiage of the report: an unforeseen, catastrophic complication occurring within the standard of care.
And yet.
How many sleepless nights since? How many hours spent marking the headlights of passing cars that tracked across the ceiling of her darkened bedroom? Wondering what she could have done, should have done, differently. The woman had haunted her for the last year, her own personal ghost.
Rita hadn’t touched a drop of alcohol since.
She considered telling Finney (or, rather, the twin version of herself sitting in the chair talking in Finney’s voice) all of this.
Instead, she said, “I wanted to come to her funeral. You wouldn’t let me.”
In her left ear, a new edge crept into Finney’s voice. “Your presence there would have made a mockery of it. You were DRINKING, Dr. Wu.”
Rita winced. “I tried. I tried so hard to save her—”
“LIAR!” Finney screamed.
The word was pain. It lanced through the substance of her brain.
And again: “LIAR!”
Agony.
There was nothing else.
Rita clutched her head, rolled over, shrieking, and fell off of the edge of the bed.
Again into darkness.
SEBASTIAN
“Liar!” Finny screamed a second time.
Jesus! He’s going to kill her!
“Mr. Finney,” Sebastian said. “Stop.”
“What?”
“Stop. Now. You need to get out of her brain for a while, boss. She can’t take much more of this. You’re going to kill her.” The display on his phone, and the sounds over the audio feed—crashing noises, and people rushing into the room—indicated she was seizing again.
“Sebastian.” Finney regained his normal, calm self. “She was drinking. The night of Jenny’s death.”
“I know, boss. We’ve talked about this. But you need to stop. She’s going to die.”
“What does it matter? She’s as good as dead already.”
“What?”
Silence.
“What do you mean she’s as good as dead? We’re done. It’s over. I’m due my back end, Mr. Finney. I’m ready for my payment.”
Sebastian didn’t like how much time elapsed before Finney responded. “You and I need to talk, Sebastian.”
Something, then, caught Sebastian’s eye.
A new icon had appeared on his phone, displaying a signal from the device inside Wu’s sister’s head. The one he’d implanted shortly after implanting Wu’s. The device they’d meant to use only as a backup—leverage against Wu in the event Wu’s device malfunctioned.
The new icon was a timer, running backward.