CHAPTER SEVEN
WALKING BRISKLY THROUGH the waiting area of the Lauderlakes Family Medical Center, Nychelle Cory scanned the room, once more noting the contrast between the opulent surroundings and the rather squalid interior of the inner-city clinic she’d worked at up until just a couple of years before.
The marble flooring and the crystal chandelier, hung precisely beneath the domed skylight, wouldn’t be out of place in a grand home. Instead of the standard faux leather seating typical of medical clinics, comfortable upholstered chairs and love seats were arranged in small clusters around antique side tables. Every inch of the place was designed to give the illusion of being a luxurious hotel lobby, perhaps in the hope of helping people forget they were waiting to see a doctor.
Few people would understand but, oh, how she missed the hustle and near chaos of working at the low-cost clinic. So rewarding, helping those that others often forgot. But she’d known from the moment she took the job there that, financially, it wouldn’t be enough to advance The Plan.
Funny to realize that was how she always thought of it—not as Plan A, or as a prospective life plan. Just The Plan, with caps and italics, the way she’d written it in her diary when she was just thirteen years old. Below that she’d listed what she wanted, and the list was pretty short.
Children. Three or four.
A job that lets me spend lots of time with them.
A nice husband who wants to spend time with the kids too.
Looking back on it, number three had been tacked on at the end, as if she’d already made up her mind that the husband wasn’t exactly a necessary part of the process.
That thought made her suppress a little snort of laughter. The Plan definitely hadn’t come about the way she’d initially thought it would, but she wasn’t complaining. In fact she’d go so far as to claim she had the best of all worlds.
Getting a plum job at Fort Lauderdale’s premier general care clinic was helping bring her dreams to fruition, yet money alone wouldn’t have lured her to Lauderlakes. Her need to help the less fortunate was strong, and luckily Dr. Hamatty, Lauderlakes’ founder, believed in giving back too, working with local charities to put on free clinics three times a year.
Not the same as being in the trenches all the time, but it helped give her altruistic nature much-needed satisfaction.
There were a handful of people scattered around the waiting area. Sitting close together on a love seat, phones in hand, were a young couple who looked as though they’d just stepped out from between the pages of a high-end travel magazine. In the play area, just visible behind a floor-to-ceiling, glass-paneled waterfall, a toddler laughed, the sound muted by the tinkle of water.
Nodding hello to her next patient—a stylish older lady seated in a club chair—Nychelle paused for a moment in front of the intake desk and transferred her attention to Gina, the receptionist, who gave one of her usual tight-lipped smiles.
“Glad to see you back.” Gina raised one perfectly groomed brow as she spoke quietly, the way they were all instructed to, so as to maintain the atmosphere. “Did you have a good vacation?”
“I wouldn’t call it a vacation.” Nychelle gave a quick shrug, even as her heart did that trip-hammer thing it kept doing every time she thought about her days off and what they could mean. “Just took some time to get some things done.”
Like undergo intrauterine insemination and then keep quiet for a few days to give my body the best chance to make a baby.
Thankfully her complexion was too dark to show the blush as heat rushed up from the neck of her silk shirt and the stylish lab coat covering it into her face. Keeping her expression neutral was so hard, but imperative. Despite Gina’s chic, cool appearance, the receptionist was a Class A gossip, highly effective in ferreting out any and all information others tried to keep from her. With just the slightest hint of anything out of the ordinary going on Gina would be off and running.
“Boring.” Gina drew the softly spoken word out until it was half a mile long, flipping a long curl of black hair over her shoulder for emphasis. “I was at the very least hoping to hear you’d gone to Jamaica.” The smile was a little more relaxed, a little more interrogatory. “The stories I’ve heard about your homeland and the men there...”
Nychelle couldn’t hold back a little gurgle of laughter as she took another look at the information on the tablet in her hand.
Katalina Ivanenko.
Sixty-two years old.
Routine wellness check, including follow-up on previous bone density test.
History of arthritis...
“The rumors
