either,” he said after a lengthy pause.
“Is it a Scottish thing?”
She was funny. Or dumb. Both of which appealed in entirely different ways. “Scotland’s a Christian country...”
“Yes, but don’t you do gifts on Boxing Day? I’m not entirely sure what that is, to be honest. But there’s also the chance that you all do something with kilts and flinging massive logs,” she offered, and, instead of turning the phone back on, gave the buttons a rest to flip the case open and closed, open and closed, open and closed.
“The only massive logs I like to fling are the ones that fit into my fireplace.” He was supposed to be the one being a dork tonight, but she was getting in the good zings. “How do they celebrate Christmas where you’re from?”
Such a simple question, he didn’t expect the color to drain from her cheeks, which only darkened the swath of freckles that were thickest at the apples and across her nose.
He knew enough about paling to know that it didn’t come lightly and guessed, “That is the face of someone who dislikes Christmas.”
“No, it’s not,” she argued, not a drop of passion in her voice. “I want to see the tree very much. I was going to go anyway. I just wasn’t going to stream it.”
“Why? It’s technically a different tree every year, but it’s the same as last year.”
“I didn’t see it last year.”
“Why not?”
“Because I arrived in January,” she answered after the slightest pause. With other topics, she spoke easily enough, but when it came to talking about herself? She paused long enough to draw attention to it, like the beat people took to come up with a story before telling a lie. Like every conversation with his parents, which no doubt colored his thinking. Why would she lie about that? Silly.
“For point of reference,” she explained, “Jenna was my first patient at Sutcliffe, and I diagnosed the initial mass on her kidney.”
And the truth, he was sure of it. Her careful choosing of words was for some other reason.
And he’d performed that first surgery to remove part of the one kidney, which had seemed to come out clean. Which the chemotherapy and radiation should have finished off. It hadn’t been a date that had been burned into his memory at the time, but with her relapse and second surgery, he’d become more familiar with it—January 17.
And it explained her connection to Jenna. Why she continued to visit her despite no longer being her physician. He didn’t know much about her, except that she was moving to Atlanta and that she needed to be friendlier at work, but being captive in the back of a cab gave him a moment and freedom to ask questions.
“Why are you leaving so soon? Not getting on with someone?”
Again, the small amount of color she’d regained drained away, except for her ears. Her ears went bright, fiery red. Man, he was on a roll with her.
“I just want to go now. But it’ll be nice to have some proper New York Christmas activities before I go.”
“To Atlanta,” he clarified. “I heard you were moving to Atlanta. Want to be closer to family?”
“Look.” She gestured out of the window and he followed the motion as the cab slowed.
They’d arrived at the cross street between towering buildings, the plaza a block in. The tree still sat unlit. “We made it in time, I see.”
“Thought the crowd and traffic would be worse.” She went with the subject change.
He fished cash from his wallet, despite her objection, and paid the cabbie. When he opened the door to get out, the sound of the busy city streets wiped away that strange sense of intimacy he’d been feeling, exchanging it for Christmas music from a jazz band on the corner of 49th and Rockefeller Plaza, doing their best to assure everyone that it was “the most wonderful time of the year.”
He didn’t buy it.
* * *
Angel climbed out of the back seat, trying to shrug off the little squabble that had gone down over who was going to pay the cabbie. It was a kind offer, she knew that. He was being gentlemanly. But all she really felt was an insinuation that she couldn’t afford to pay, just like all those times when she hadn’t been able to.
When she’d been in medical school, she’d really thought that once she’d begun making a very comfortable living, that fear, that feeling of inadequacy would fade away like so many bad memories.
And she’d run with the notion. She’d been in medical school, hundreds of miles from Knott County, Kentucky, and the local Conley stigma. It should’ve been safe to be open and share her past—the poverty, the criminal family, the unfortunate time she’d spent in juvenile detention—with the boyfriend she’d thought to love but had lost instead. That mistake had followed her to New York, taking her first job too after she’d had the misfortune to work for a man who knew Spencer, and noticed they shared the same medical school.
Thinking she could get past that here? Wishful thinking. That inadequacy stayed pinned to her, like an errant shadow she couldn’t shake off. Sometimes, after the fact, she could rationalize her way through why her first instinctive reactions to the things said to her were wrong-headed, but reason and emotion were different things. She’d been judged too harshly for too long, and, no matter how far she’d run, it had chased her. She expected it now. Sometimes she even thought she deserved it.
Knowing how unlikely it was that McKeag would think she couldn’t pay didn’t make it feel any less real, any less pointed. But making a scene over a cab fare would just draw a big circle around her insecurities.
So, she put up the mildest fuss, then moved on.
His small, kind contribution wasn’t the same as charity. She didn’t rely on charity for anything anymore.
Phone in hand, she stopped on the sidewalk and tried to flip through to the camera and juggle that with the social media account she was supposed to stream through. Not that she’d ever streamed before. But the words had come out of her mouth regardless. Everyone streamed, right? She’d looked up the instructions in the locker room while changing, but now could absolutely not remember the steps.
“Are you waiting for someone else to join us?” McKeag asked. Jenna might call them both by their first names, far too personal for her; he’d be McKeag. Wolfe sounded too...something. Primal.
“No, I’m just—” Just not wanting to admit she was having issues. She could figure it out. She didn’t need the help of the walking embodiment of gloriously scruffy, dimpled manliness. She tapped the icon that was supposed to initiate this nonsense again. Then twice more.
Nothing happened.
“Technological difficulties, please stand by,” he said, his voice like a surprisingly soothing narrator, but that damnable brogue played up.
“It’s not difficulties. I know how to do it. I read—”
“Never done it before?” he cut in.
She
