for a Chloe Darcy—D-A-R-C-Y. Date of birth: March twentieth, 1983. Blood bank number: 4089213.”
“Perfect. You can leave it there and I’ll take it back to the room.”
Tate’s body had frozen at the sound of her name and his eyes landed on the box, confirming everything he had heard. The box was labeled just as the porter had read—for Chloe. He replayed the exchange. This was the second four units, which meant Chloe was in serious trouble.
“I’m already changed. I’ll take it in,” he told the unit clerk as he picked up the box and made his way toward Theater Seven without waiting for her response. It was ironic that for the first time in the operating room he felt fear. Never had he felt that when working, but right now he was helpless. It was a novel and terrifying feeling all at once.
He fastened a mask across his face and paused at the window in the door. There were two anesthetists at the head of the bed and the patient was surrounded, but he couldn’t tell by whom. On the operating room floor a collection of bloody sponges lay soaked through and counted off. He could see the suction canisters that were filled with over two liters of blood. Was it Chloe’s blood? It looked like a scene from a trauma case, and he couldn’t comprehend that Chloe lay in the center of it.
He walked into the room, his confusion growing as he identified members of the gynecology team as the operating surgeons. At the same time his eyes glimpsed the trademark red hair that flowed from the top of the operating table. It was definitely her.
He handed the box to the circulating nurse. “Do you need help?” He directed the question toward the team, needing to do something.
“You need to leave, Dr. Reed.”
The voice came from the gowned surgeon in the hibiscus-blue cloth scrub hat. He narrowed his focus on her and through the confusion surrounding the case was able to identify Erin Madden, chief gynecology resident. Her voice and hat identified her without her needing to look away from the operative field. He had known Erin casually for years, and more so in the past two through her friendship with Kate and Chloe, but even so he wasn’t in the mood to be told what to do. He normally encouraged resident autonomy, but not today—not when it involved Chloe.
“Dr. Thomas?” He addressed the staff surgeon whose back was to him.
“Dr. Madden is right. This is not a vascular case, Tate. We are going to have to ask you to leave.”
He looked around the room once more, noticing the discomfort of the nursing and other teams. It felt like a betrayal from the people he worked with day in and day out, but on the other hand he knew enough to know that he had become a distraction—one that Chloe couldn’t afford.
“Okay.” And he left, going as far away from her as he could handle being, which was right outside the operating theater doors.
His mind raced with possibilities? What the hell had happened to Chloe? How did a healthy young woman end up in a critical condition without warning? And why the hell was gynecology in there?
A previously unimaginable explanation filled and settled into his mind. He watched, his eyes oscillating between the anesthesia monitors tracking Chloe’s vitals and the actions of the surgical team.
“Tate.” He heard Kate’s familiar voice and felt a hand on his shoulder.
“I think she is stabilizing. They kicked me out of the room, so I can’t tell for sure. But they have stopped calling for blood and I can see the anesthesia monitors. Her heart-rate has come down and her blood pressure is back up.”
“What happened?” Kate asked.
“I don’t know. They won’t tell me anything. The usual patient confidentiality. I only got here about fifteen minutes ago. I was checking the operating room slate to see how many cases were lined up for tonight at the front desk when the porter from the blood bank came to drop off blood. I overheard him verifying her name and blood bank number with the unit clerk.”
“Who is in with her?”
“Gynecology.” His resentment was coming through clearly.
“Oh.”
“Is it a hemorrhagic ovarian cyst?” Kate asked.
“I don’t know, Kate. Like I said, they won’t tell me anything.”
She stopped asking questions and he wondered if she had come up with the same diagnosis he had. Either way he was grateful for the silence. He needed to keep his entire focus on Chloe.
Twenty minutes later Kate gently pushed Tate to the side and went through the operating room door. He watched the interaction, unable to hear the exchange between her and Erin Madden, but noting that she was getting further than he had. She pushed through the doors again, returning.
“She’s okay. They won’t tell me what happened, but they opened her up, stopped whatever was bleeding, and she’s stabilized. She is going to go to the Intensive Care Unit overnight because of the large amount of blood products she received.”
“Thank you, Kate,” Tate replied, his eyes still trained on the window, not budging from his spot outside the door.
“Tate, they have asked us to leave and I think we should. She is stable and there is nothing we can do except get in the way and distract the team.”
“I’m not leaving her.”
“We’re not leaving her, Tate. We’re helping her by getting out of the way and letting them do their job. The same thing we ask other people to do for us.” She grabbed his arm and pulled him a little, to ease him away from his spot. “Tate, we need to go. You know Chloe would never want us to see her like this.”
His mind replayed all the ways he had seen Chloe and he knew she was right. Staying away from her had been the hardest thing he had ever done, but it was for her he’d done it. God knew that every time she had tried to talk to him there’d been nothing he wanted more than to take her in his arms and kiss her, to see if everything they had done together had been real and not just a memory that had reached fantastical proportions in his mind.
Who was he kidding? In truth he was terrified of the feelings she’d brought out in him and what it would cost him to have and then lose her.
He looked back at Kate, feeling nothing for her. How could he have been such a fool? He respected Kate, and intellectually she made perfect sense, but he had never been in love with her and she had never sparked the intensity of emotion that Chloe did in him. He had asked her to marry him because it had seemed like the next logical step, just like the series of steps he had taken in his training. He was tired of the single life, needed a wife, wanted a family and Kate met the criteria he was looking for. His use of logic had failed him for the first time in his life. Kate’s rejection had angered him and wounded his pride at the time. Now he was grateful for the near miss.
“Are you in love with Matt McKayne?” he asked, without emotion.
She seemed surprised by the question, whether it was at his directness or his reference to the man he knew she was in love with, he didn’t care.
“Yes. I think I always have been—even when I hated him.”
“Then you should be with him. Forget everything that has gone wrong between
