He looked at the table. “I may have said something like that. It was a private conversation.”
“It was a department dinner,” I said. “There were fourteen people there.”
Dr. Marsh closed the file and set both hands flat on the table. “Dr. Harlow, I’d like you to step out while we discuss this.”
Julian stood up slowly. He looked at me once, and I couldn’t read his face. Then he walked out and closed the door behind him.
I sat there with my hands in my lap and realized my eyes were dry. I hadn’t cried once. Not through any of it. For ten years I had cried at movies, at weddings, at commercials with dogs in them. Now I was sitting in a room where my husband had just been asked to leave, and I felt nothing but steady.
That scared me a little. Not because I missed the crying. Because I understood that something in me had closed a door I might not be able to open again.
Chapter 8 – What I Did With the Badge
The review board met the following Monday and took less than an hour to reach a decision. Nadia called me that afternoon.
“The transfer is void,” she said. “Your original reviews are reinstated. Dr. Harlow is on administrative leave pending the forgery investigation, and the board is referring the signature issue to the state credentialing board.”
I sat down on the edge of my bed. “He’s not fired?”
“Not yet. But he’s not your medical director anymore, either. And he’s not going to be anyone’s for a while.”
I thanked her and hung up. Then I sat there for a long time and looked at the wall.
The next morning I went back to work. The badge I had placed on the staff counter the night I caught them was waiting for me in an envelope with my name on it. I clipped it to my scrubs and walked onto the floor.
Rosa saw me first. She didn’t say anything, just nodded, and I nodded back. That was enough for both of us.
Paige came to see me two days later. She stood in the doorway of my office with a folder under her arm and her resignation letter already signed.
“I pulled my name from the transfer,” she said. “And I told the board I’d testify if it comes to that.”
I looked at her for a long moment. “Why?”
“Because I should have asked you,” she said. “I should have talked to you before I accepted anything. I believed him, and I shouldn’t have.”
“No,” I said. “You shouldn’t have.”
She nodded and started to turn away.
“Paige.”
She stopped.
“I don’t hate you,” I said. “But I’m not going to pretend this didn’t happen. I’m not there yet, and I don’t know if I ever will be.”
“I know,” she said. “I wouldn’t be either.”
She left, and I went back to my schedule.
The divorce papers came three weeks later. Julian signed them without fighting, which was its own kind of insult, and he moved his things to his brother’s place. I came home on a Friday afternoon in October and found the last of his boxes stacked on the porch. He was standing in the driveway by his car.
“Can we just talk, Merry?”
I set my bag down on the steps. “I did all the talking for a year,” I said. “You weren’t listening.”
He looked at the ground. “I’m sorry.”
“I know you are,” I said. “But sorry doesn’t fix what you did. And I’m not going to spend the next ten years waiting for you to understand that.”
He got in his car and drove away. I stood on the porch and watched the taillights disappear around the corner, the same way I’d watched them disappear from my driveway months earlier.
This time I didn’t lock the door behind me. I didn’t need to.
I walked into my house, put the kettle on, and sat down at the kitchen table with a cup of tea and the schedule for the week.
I was running the night shift again, with a new hire I’d trained myself, and a staff who had watched me hold my ground.
That was the part I kept coming back to. Not the forged signature. Not the recording. Not the fact that Julian had lost his directorship and would probably lose more than that before the credentialing board was done with him.
The part I kept coming back to was the badge. I had taken it off and set it on the counter because I thought I was done being humiliated. It turned out I was just getting started.
