Lexi appeared in front of them. “Iain and I are leaving early,” she said to Grace.
From the way the couple had had their hands all over each other, Grace didn’t need to be told the reason why they wanted to leave early. She smiled.
“Can we drop you off?” Iain asked.
Grace waited for Mitchell to offer to take her home, but after half a beat, when he hadn’t volunteered, she stood.
“Thanks, I’d love that,” she said. “Good night, everybody. It was great to meet all of you.”
“You’ll see everyone else at Friday’s staff meeting,” someone called out, but she was so distracted by Mitch and now her leaving that she wasn’t even sure who’d said it.
“See you in surgery tomorrow, Mitchell.”
He nodded.
Everyone else smiled and cheered her off, while Mitchell still chomped on his mouthful of mixed nuts, watching, looking clueless and disinterested, and nothing like the adventurous pod person she’d met last night. At least he’d kept his word—from now on theirs would be a strictly business relationship.
The next morning, at a quarter to six, Grace scrubbed in. It was a process she preferred to do by herself, since the short-sleeved scrub top revealed a large portion of her scars. But gowning was different. She needed help to do it properly. Grace caught the quick, surprised glimpse in the scrub nurse’s eyes as she helped her don the sterile gown and gloves, and tried to act as if nothing was unusual.
Once her mask was in place, she used her shoulder to push the plate for the automatic door opener to the surgical suite. Happy to make eye contact with Ron right off, she saw him nod, and from the squint of his dark eyes above the mask, she knew he smiled beneath.
She assessed her O.R. A quick check of the instruments satisfied her strict stipulations. The anesthesiologist began to put the mildly sedated patient completely under right after Grace had introduced herself. Two nurses were on hand to assist with the operation, and once she’d done the lion’s share of the surgery, Mitchell would step in to create the actual lips for the young woman. She hadn’t seen him this morning, but had been told he was on the premises and would wait to enter the O.R. until needed. It relieved Grace, knowing he wouldn’t be looking over her shoulder. She couldn’t allow a single distraction in her O.R.
Cancer had claimed most of the patient’s face, and after the dermatologist had made wide resections of the mass, very little was left of her nose or upper lip. It broke Grace’s heart, suspecting the twenty-five-year-old patient felt more like a monster than human with a hole for her nose, and gums showing where her upper lip should have been. When Grace had first been burned, before the multiple skin grafts, she’d felt like a monster, too. Her job today was to put the woman back together again. The young woman’s face would never look as it once had, but at least she’d have a face she wouldn’t be ashamed to show in public.
Grace would have to borrow cartilage from her ears to rebuild portions of the bridge and nose tip, and take bilateral transpositional flaps from her cheeks to cover the nose, reconstruct the natural curvature of the nasal rim, and create the missing upper lip. After she’d finished the general rebuilding, Mitchell would make a more natural-looking mouth by using treated fat transfer from the patient’s abdomen.
“Let’s give Julie Treadwell a beautiful new face, shall we?” she said. Everyone present nodded. “Scalpel,” she said, then made her first incision.
An hour and a half later, up to her elbows in blood, cartilage and skin flaps, one lone straggler entered the O.R. She knew it wasn’t the circulating nurse, because she hadn’t requested anything. She’d just made two small labial folds on either side of the nose flap, and had asked for the small curved needle and sutures to stitch everything in place.
She glanced up. It was him.
Knowing Mitch Cooper was there made her hand tense slightly, but only for a brief second. The patient deserved one hundred percent of her attention. She waited until she’d recovered her concentration to put the finishing touches on her portion of this two-stage surgery.
When she’d finished, she handed the patient over to Mitch then prepared to step outside to watch him work his wonders.
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