by Ella James
“It’s not—” Landon begins.
“What are you doing down here?” Mom cries. “Evie! Landon—what on earth is going on! I needed wrapping paper from this closet. Landon—” her eyes widen on him, then fly back to me as her face crumples. “Please tell me it’s not— Evelyn, tell me you were not—”
“Mom, we love each other. Listen, I know that it’s—”
“What did you say?” Mom’s face tightens, and I feel the blood drain from my own. “Mom—”
My mother takes a few strides toward me, and then she turns to Landon. “In your bed?” Her eyes are huge as she whirls back to me. “You were in his bed, Evie—without your shirt! What do you think this is? Landon’s— Landon—” She turns back to him. “Is this how you— Is this what you think—” Her head shakes, so forceful that her cheeks quiver. “This is unacceptable,” my mother roars. “Evie, what the hell is wrong with you?”
She closes the space between herself and me with one fast stride. Her fingers close around my arm. “Get out. Evie, get out of this room RIGHT NOW.” Her voice thunders in fury. “Out of here, before I—” I do what she says, my numb legs moving me into the stairwell.
“Mom—”
“Catherine,” Landon starts, behind us.
“You be quiet!” She pushes me. I whirl around, and I see Landon’s helpless face behind her.
“Mom, just listen. If you listen, I can—”
“Get upstairs! You better get upstairs RIGHT NOW, young lady!” She sounds furious, so filled with rage that I turn and I go, my instinct urging me to lead the threat away from Landon.
As I reach the top of the stairwell, another light comes on, and I see my dad’s confused face.
“Dean, you won’t believe this! You will not believe—” My mother grabs my arm. “Evie—Dean, she’s— I found Evie in his bedroom! Landon’s bedroom!”
Dad’s jaw drops. I hear a clatter and look down to see a pile of glass and purple liquid. Dad was pouring wine, but now he’s staring at me, totally aghast.
“You’ve been lying to us!” Mom shouts. “Evie, how could you?”
“Listen, Mom—”
“It’s been months!” Her face is red; her words are shaking. “It’s been months of this! I just ignored it, didn’t think my daughter…Evie, I would never think that you would become such a liar!”
“What is this—” My dad is right in front of me. His face is bent in horror. “What’s this that she’s saying, Evie? Why were you downstairs in Landon’s room at this hour?”
“Because we’re friends,” I wail.
I start to sob, and then I’m so embarrassed—shamed, panicked—that I take off toward the family room.
I hear my parents’ frantic voices in the kitchen, and my mind whirls. Will they make him go? Where is my phone? Oh God, I left it down there! Landon!
I rush back into the kitchen, trying to get around my parents and go back downstairs.
“Out! Evelyn, get out while Mom and I discuss this!” My dad looks mad enough to spit.
My mother looks as if she hates me. “Get into the family room! And don’t you move!”
I do what I’m told, shaking and panting, little sobs hung in my upper chest. I clutch the pool table and start to sob again as their loud voices rise and fall, and then the house goes quiet.
I take two deep breaths and rush back down the hallway, sneak onto the basement stairs. I can hear Landon’s voice, but not his words. I think I hear him say, “Yes sir.”
Yes what, I wonder, terrified.
Then I hear movement and see my mom start up the stairs. I try to dash ahead of her and back into the family room so I can listen, but Mom catches me before I get out of the kitchen. “You are going upstairs, right now.”
“No! Where’s Landon?”
“Evie Rutherford, you get upstairs or—”
“Where is Landon?”
“Landon’s leaving.”
“No he’s not. It’s Christmas Eve!” I start to sob again.
“Oh, yes he is. He’s going to your aunt’s house right this second, packing his bags right now!”
“No! You can’t, it’s Christmas!”
Mom laughs bitterly. “Oh, I’m aware of that.”
I push around her. “Landon!”
Her hand catches my wrist. “Evie, what is wrong with you?”
“I have to see him! You can’t send him off! It’s nighttime! He’s upset!”
My mother’s face caves. “I’m upset!”
“Mom, I’m sorry. I didn’t— I just— We couldn’t help it! It’s not bad or something scandalous, it’s love. I would have told you but I didn’t— I just—”
“Evie,” her face hardens, “you have lost your ever-loving mind. Landon is leaving. For your aunt’s house. He’s leaving tonight, and you will say goodbye to him. He will not be living here. No more!”
“No… Mom, no, please… We can change and be different, I swear we can,” I sob. “We’re best friends first—”
“You’ve lost your mind, and I have let this happen to you.”
Dad appears, and behind him—Landon. I rush to him, and he hugs me so tight. “Evie, I’m so sorry.”
I sob, and Landon’s hands are on my face. I see his eyes, and they’re red-rimmed. His face is pale, his mouth unsteady.
“It’s okay,” he tries to tell me. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”
“No, tonight!”
“This is enough,” my father says behind us.
“Evie, that’s enough.” My mom sounds sterner now.
“Landon, grab that bag. You can get the rest of your things another time.”
Those words rip through me with so much force, I sob anew—for Landon, orphaned now again at Christmas. Dad attempts to usher Landon to the garage, and when I grab his arm and try to hold onto him, they change course, and Dad shoos Landon toward the front door.
My mom grabs me. “Say goodbye now, Evie.”
My fingers lose their grip on Landon’s flannel shirt. He looks back at me, and his face— I’ve never seen him look like that. Like someone broke him. Just as quickly as I see that look, it’s gone, replaced by something fierce and tender. “I’m cool, Ev. I’ll be okay. Just go to bed. We’ll talk soon.”
And that’s the last thing Landon says to me before he gives me a tight smile and he’s led out the door into the freezing night.
I’m marched upstairs by Mom, who is now weeping.
“This was not going to work, just not going to work,” she keeps murmuring.
“You could bring him back. You’re kicking him out at Christmas!” My voice breaks. “He needs to know that someone wants him.”
I’m sobbing again, and Mom squeezes my shoulder. “Evie, quiet! Your sister!”
“I don’t care,” I wail.
She leads me to my room, where she hugs me briefly with a dazed frown, then shuts the door. I listen as her footsteps fade, and then I follow her, peering out a front window in time to see the last pinch of red from Dad’s brake lights.
The next day, I get a phone call with Landon. His voice is quiet and tender, low and hoarse. “I love you, Evie. Hang in there. We’ll figure out a way to see each other.”
After we’re off the phone, my dad tells me that Landon isn’t at my aunt’s house. Last night, Dad took him back to DHS. When I talked to him just then, he was at a group home.
I go upstairs, and I don’t come down. I won’t talk to my family until I can see Landon again.
That is not to be.
Four days later, after non-stop throwing up and non-stop sobbing, I pass out in the bathroom that I share with Em. My sister finds me when she goes to wash blue marker from her doll’s hair. Several hours later, Mom presents me to our family doctor.
She tells him the story, the abbreviated version, and he judges me with one shake of his head.
“These are unwise choices,” he says sternly as my mother looks down at her lap. “Unbecoming for a nice young woman.”
/> I’m put in a gown and questioned like a criminal. And when he reads the verdict to me, I can’t say I’m unhappy.
I’m not a nice young woman anymore. I’ve been loved. I’ve given my heart up and gotten something in return.
I’m pregnant.
Part Two
One
Landon
Monday, June 12, 2017
Denver, Colorado
Beholding Evie up close burns. Her face…goddamn, her face is just the fucking same. Those blue eyes blink; her mouth draws up, and my head spins so hard, my hand flexes, searching automatically for something to latch onto.
I absorb every detail in a blink: how clear her freckled skin looks, how smooth and soft her lips appear, how shiny her blonde hair gleams. She looks well, I realize slowly, over several heartbeats.
That thought flips some switch in me; it settles me—so I’m able to give her the best smile I can muster. It’s tight, professional, reserved: a smile I’m trained to give. But it’s a smile and not a roar, which has to count for something.
Her mouth opens before her throat is ready, hanging there for just a second before her voice rings in my ears. “Landon.”
My name is velvet on her tongue.
If seeing her face struck a match, hearing her voice sets me ablaze. I feel my pulse and respiration pick up.
“How are you?” Her eyes widen, sharp and sudden, as if she’s just realized I’m me. They dash up and down my body, not just once but twice. “You— you look well. And…you’re a doctor.” She laughs. It’s not a real laugh, but some sort of fill-in, covering for her while her face bends into shock. “I can’t believe we’re both doctors.”
I see her right hand flutter, and her startled face makes it apparent that she wants to cover her mouth. She looks alarmed—that she referenced our shared past—but then she straightens her shoulders and schools her face. The look she gives me is all surgeon. Confident and caring, warm and distant.
Even as I nod and flash another polite smile, I’m searching Evie’s blue eyes for the girl I loved. I tell myself she’s not the same, just as I’m not. Evie is a stranger now—no matter how familiar she feels.
“We are,” I reply, to her comment about us being doctors. My voice sounds more curt than I intend.
In the wake of it, I can see her close a door I didn’t even know was open. Something changes in her eyes, and she’s on lockdown. She holds out her hand and says, “It’s really good to see you, Landon.”
I stand there in my clean, unblemished coat, and shake Evie’s cool hand.
“It’s nice to see you, too,” I tell her.
The charade begins.
Evie
Tuesday, June 13, 2017
Less than twenty-four hours after I see Landon Jones for the first time in ten years, I arrive at Alpine University Hospital for my first day as a neurosurgery resident.
It’s 4:00 a.m. The air is dewy damp but crisp, as only Colorado air can be in June. The sky is still an inky black, with thin clouds drifting past the glassy walls of the sprawling hospital complex.
My hair is in a ponytail, and I’m wearing sleek gray pants, a pink blouse, sneakers, and a small purse strapped diagonally under my coat. The purse holds a bottle of water, several protein bars, and hydrating lip gloss. Plus Advil. Dad told me I’ll need it for my feet.
I know from the steady stream of information to my phone’s AUH employee app that the chief resident working right now is Dr. Russell Kraft, a 32-year-old with thinning blond hair, brown eyes, and a soft Canadian accent. I don’t know him as well as I know Dorothy—my mentor, Dr. Eilert—but I know she says he’s good-natured. “Nicer than I am,” she told me when we met for brunch a few weeks back.
I feel less nervous than I thought I would as I walk in through the yawning lobby, down an obscure hall off the room’s right side, and up the staircase I prefer to the crowded elevators. Neurosurgery is on floor three.
I get into the unit with my ID tag, and as I step through the doors, I feel my first cold shot of nerves. Landon’s standing by the nurse’s desk, wearing his own white coat and holding a tablet as he talks to a short, curly-haired nurse in royal blue scrubs.
As my shoes smack the wax-shined floor, he turns and I stop breathing, even as I keep moving and give a smile. He doesn’t smile back, just blinks, and I’m thrown back through time, into another morning as he walks into my homeroom and I first see those sharp eyes.
By the time I reach him, he’s got his façade in place. He gives me a curt smile and resumes looking at his tablet, while the curly-haired nurse introduces herself as Cindy and hands me my own tablet.
“I’ve seen you when you were in school here,” she says, referencing the few times I stepped foot on this floor as an AU med student. “You’ve encountered one of these before, I’m thinking.”
“Yep.” I look down at the tablet’s screen and turn it on, and find myself already logged in. She points to it. “Everybody’s got a different colored case. Jones here is green. Yours is red. Kim is yellow. You’ll be seeing lots of Kim because she’s inpatient this round, and not as much of Prinz, Mr. Blue, because he’s NCCU and will spend most of his days over there.” She waves in the direction of the neurosurgery critical care unit, telling me things that I already know. “But you three, you’ll be crossing paths a lot. It’s Dr. Kraft for you this morning. He’s around here somewhere. Also Bettie and Stern.”
I recognize those names as older residents: a third year and a second year, if I’m correct.
“We’ve had a busy night, so I’ll just let you get on to your lists. You can do that in the donut room. That’s what we call your space up here on the floor. There’s almost always donuts. Do you need a tour? You know where the cots are, where everything else is?”
I laugh—“I do”—and, in my periphery, I see Landon nod.
After the brief re-introduction, in which Cindy tells me she’s the charge nurse, I head to the donut room, which is basically the doctors’ locker room. As I’m going through the door, I feel Landon on my heels.
Thank God, Kara Bettie is already in there, actually eating a donut. She and I say a quick hello, and I sit at one of two round tables as Landon comes in. I don’t look up, but I can hear her voice rise as she greets him animatedly, and in a tone I’d recognize anywhere.
Woman interested in man.
About the time she heads out the door, something buzzes, and still without looking at Landon, I get up and follow the sound to a basket on the other table. In the basket are six pagers. Two of them bear stickers with my name on them. In fact, one of mine is buzzing.
I murmur to myself as Landon takes his from the basket, “That was fast.”
He doesn’t reply—and I can’t look up at him. I look at my pager, and I fumble through my memory for the mental database I have of phone numbers and codes.
If I’m correct about the message I just got, someone wants me in an operating room? That can’t be right, though. Not on the first day, and definitely not before I work my way through my list and help the other residents round on our unit’s patients.
“What does it say?” Landon’s voice sends an electric charge through me; I have to look at him now, and I do, which makes me zing again.
I hold it out to him and watch him laugh. “You’re wanted in the OR, Evie. That’s some luck.” I blink, and he says, “You better run or I’ll go do it for you.”
As I hustle there, I feel the echo of his rich, low voice swim through my limbs.
You can’t, I tell myself, and I push it aside.
When I get to the OR, Dr. Kraft is scrubbing in. “You’ve been in on an external ventricular drain before,” he says, and I can’t tell if it’s a question, so I nod.
“Bettie was on with Dr. Saul and me, but she got called to ER. Six-car pile-up incoming. Saul and I are down two hands, I figured why not make your day?”
Dr. Kraft is awesome. Dr. Saul is awesome. This woman’s EVD is awesome. It’s a simple procedur
e, but still, I am elated. I spend the hours afterward catching up on the paperwork I missed before and during rounds, keeping track of the neurosurgery patients currently admitted to floor three, answering pages from ER doctors, and helping my primary attending for the day: a friendly woman named Dr. Juan.
I pass Landon twice in the hallways, once on my way into the bathroom—he was exiting the men’s room—and again in the ER. At no time do I have to spend more than half a second in his presence, which is wonderful.
I scrub in once more around 4:30 p.m. on a six-year-old’s tethered spinal cord release.
By 5 o’clock, I realize I haven’t eaten anything all day. I inhale two of my protein bars, step into and out of about six patient rooms for various tasks, and then return to the donut room at 7 to begin signing all my patients out to my night floater: a fourth-year resident, Dr. Tara Fairbanks.
In reality, I’m not finished passing her the torch until almost 10 p.m. I swing by the room of a teenager recovering from an aneurism, giving her a fidget spinner Dr. Juan wants her to play with, before I trudge to the stairwell, feeling elated and exhausted.
I survived my first day. Landon was here…and I survived.
I hear other footsteps in the stairwell, but my mind is elsewhere. I’m replaying the day, trying to absorb the fact that I’m really a neurosurgery resident. After all these years. The realization hits me full-force as I stride into the first-floor lobby. I’m a resident. I’m a resident. I did it.
I’m so emotional in that moment, I stop by a bench and blink a few times; I run a finger underneath my damp eyes.
You did it, Evie. You did the impossible.
And, God, so few will ever understand just how impossible it was. My sense of satisfaction, of unadulterated pride, is bigger than the building as I step outside—and find it’s raining.
Hmmm. Well, there’s a covered breezeway, plus a tunnel over the road to the far-flung employee parking lots. I find my car keys in my small purse, reminding myself as my fingers close around them to bring my briefcase tomorrow. There were papers that I could have taken home tonight, and maybe should have, but I didn’t have a bag to put them in, so I’ll have to access them remotely from my laptop.