I Lost Our Baby While He Danced With Her Chapter 06

I Lost Our Baby While He Danced With Her Chapter 06

The moment I answered, Grant’s voice tore through the speaker.

“Have you had enough of this nonsense? When are you coming back?”

I held the phone away from my ear. “I resigned. Why would I come back?”

“I never approved your resignation.”

“You told me to get out of your hospital. On the spot. With witnesses.”

Silence-the strangled kind, like a man being waterboarded by his own words.

In the end, all he could do was bark orders. “I don’t care. Bree’s father is crashing. The cardiac team is short-handed. You

have to come back.”

So that was it. I’d wondered what miracle made Grant Caldwell remember my number. It was her. It was always going to

be her.

He hung up without waiting for an answer-command issued, obedience assumed.

I stared at the dead screen, baffled by my own past. For five years, that tone had worked on me.

I tossed the phone aside. “Don’t worry about it,” I told Nolan. “I’m fully committed to this hospital, body and soul. Messages from my ex are background noise.”

I reached for the case file. Nolan pulled it out of my hands

“Go. Why wouldn’t you go?”

“Excuse me?”

“Pack a bag.” His grin was pure malice. “And I’m coming with you.”

The entire train ride, I tried to figure out his angle and failed. Nolan Pierce did not do favors. He did chess.

The story, as I pieced it together from the news, was a catastrophe in three acts.

Bree’s father owned Vance Industrial-old-money heavy manufacturing. Six months ago, a containment failure had

poisoned half a factory floor. Workers hospitalized. Two dead. Grant had taken the elder Vance on as his personal patient: a toxic cardiomyopathy case requiring a procedure so rare that only a handful of surgeons in the country had ever

completed it.

I was one of them. Grant knew that better than anyone-he’d watched me do it during my fellowship, back when he still

retended to be proud of me.

Then came act two. Bree-the influencer with a livestream and no filter-had gone online to defend her daddy. Instead f selling a sob story, she’d whipped her rich little followers into doxxing the sick workers’ families. Names, addresses. hildren’s schools. The internet detonated. Advertisers fled. Prosecutors circled And Caldwell Memorial’s name was titched into every headline, because its owner kept being photographed with the girt who lit the match.

Act three: the elder Vance’s heart began to fail on a schedule no PR team could spin. The only surgeon Grant trusted with he procedure was the one he’d banned from his own building.

After Bree cried in his office twice, he’d picked up the phone and called me-without a second’s hesitation. Not to pologize. To summon.

When we walked up to Caldwell Memorial, Grant saw me through the glass and came out fast-then stopped dead.

Because behind me, hands in his pockets, smiling like a shark at a christening, stood Nolan Pierce.

‘Sienna.” Grant’s voice could have frosted the windows. “Are you deliberately trying to provoke me? Why did you bring

im?”

Nolan stepped forward half a pace, neatly inserting himself between us. “Caldwell. Mind your tone. This is my surgeon. /ho exactly are you to raise your voice at her on a public sidewalk?”

Grant looked from me to Nolan, and let out a cold laugh. “So this is what you quit for? You ran to him? Do you enjoy being bused, or are you just shameless?”

“Hey, hey.” Nolan reached out and physically redirected Grant’s pointing finger back toward its owner. “Let’s be precise. When she was with you-that was asking to be abused. This is called a salary.”

‘This doesn’t concern you.”

Nolan solemnly straightened his jacket. “My newest hire is taking her first major consult. As her employer, out of basic umanitarian concern, I’m supervising. Any objections?” His tone added silently. Doesn’t your hospital provide this kind of

are?

I rolled my eyes at both of them.

Children. Brilliant, board-certified children.

But Grant didn’t have time to brawl. Somewhere above us, a heart was failing, a scandal was metastasizing, and the only >erson who could fix either one was the wife he’d thrown away.

He swallowed his pride like broken glass. “Come up. Review the file.”

I didn’t move.

‘ll review the file,” I said. “After you sign the divorce papers.”