Sweet Romance13 min read
Exes, Evidence, and the Surgeon Who Stayed
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I never thought a single morning could hold so many small explosions.
"You're hurting me," he said, low and sudden.
I jerked back, my backside hitting the edge of the conference table hard enough to make the room swim. "What are you doing, Fabian?" I snapped. "Let go."
Fabian Abbott's fingers lingered at my forearm like an accusation. He blinked, and for a beat I saw the man I thought I had loved—the man who had been serious and distant and the reason I had learned to read silence like a book. Then his face folded into something sharper.
"Does it hurt to hear the truth?" he asked.
I didn't answer. Instead, I slapped him. The sound of skin against skin made the whole office feel thinner.
"Get out," I said. "Get out of my office. Get out of my life."
He stood frozen with blood at the corner of his mouth. He tasted it and laughed, a dry, incredulous sound. "You never hit me when we broke up, Fiona," he said. "You never—"
"Don't call me that!" I hissed. "Don't call me that anymore."
He stared at me a long time, as if searching for a reason to stay. Then he said, "Someone's been telling stories."
"Who?" I forced myself to ask. My eyes had slid toward the curtain behind which another man sat waiting. I prayed, absurdly, that he would not come out.
Fabian's mouth curled. "Someone told me you're dating a... a charity case."
I felt something hot and small burn inside me. "That's it?" I said. "You want me to leave him? You want me to—"
"I want you to stop making me look like the only respectable one left," Fabian finished. "You should be with someone better than him—than whatever he is."
"Fabian," I said, and the word came out too tired to hurt. "We are finished. Do not come here again."
He reached toward my collar, fingertips brushing the faint red marks at my throat. His voice lowered. "Don't throw your life away after you leave me. Don't make me... feel guilty."
His hand hovered; I flinched, and then the office door clicked shut. I sagged, every muscle unwinding in a rush, until something strong closed around me.
"Are you okay?" Dalton Garcia asked into my hair.
I let myself fold into him. Dalton's arms were steady and warm, a shelter built of patient habits and the soft certainty of someone who had chosen me, fully, without math or ledger. "I—yeah." My voice was a hollow thing. "I think so."
He held me until I could breathe without thinking. "Do you want me to go—"
"No," I said stubbornly. "Don't hurt him. Not yet." Then, absurdly: "But if you do, blame me for going to work at a hospital where men like that—"
"You're safe," Dalton said, and then, softer, "You are very brave."
He walked me down the hall like a man showing off a small, valuable thing. People noticed us. Nurses touched his sleeve as he passed. A young intern smiled at me with a trust I recognized from the way he watched me in the OR. For all the noise in my chest, Dalton's steady presence made me feel like a person again.
A week later the hospital nearly exploded.
"Doctor Richter! Emergency—appendectomy case, anesthetic reaction," the head nurse shouted when she banged on my office door.
I grabbed my jacket. "Tell me everything."
"It's the chairman's son," she said. "He spiked after induction. Temperature shot to forty-two. We can't intubate properly. The anesthetist says—"
"I'll be there," I cut in.
The OR was chaos in a way that would have been useless to describe to anyone who wasn't in it. Machines blinked, monitors screamed, and the chairman's wife—Virginia Johansson—was collapsed against a corridor wall, screaming into her hands.
"Who is the attending?" I asked.
"Kiera Branch," the nurse said. "But she couldn't—"
I didn't listen. I scrubbed, pulled on gloves, and walked in. The room turned toward me like a tide.
"What's the airway?" I asked, quickly, looking at the monitor.
"Rising CO2, temperature forty-two," someone shouted. "She's got malignant hyperthermia!"
I felt my heart jump the way it does when a patient goes critical and you can feel your hands steady themselves. "Start Dantrolene," I ordered. "Full cooling. ABG every five minutes. Call the blood bank for calcium and sodium bicarbonate. We need aggressive intravenous hydration and hyperventilation."
A small hand on my elbow guided a gloved pair into mine. Dalton had arrived without fanfare, carrying a calm I hadn't realized I'd been missing. "Temperature's rising," he said. "How can I help?"
"Stand guard at the door," I said. "Tell the family what's happening. Keep them quiet."
He saluted with one eyebrow and held the door like a sentinel. Around the table people moved; Kiera—nervous, makeup too perfect against the pale light—kept trying to speak over me. "No—I'm in charge here. This is my case," she hissed.
"Listen," I said without looking up. "The patient will live if we work clean. I want lines up front. You keep the field clean; don't talk to the press."
Kiera's jaw trembled. "I did the incision—"
"You kept the scalpel," I said, cold. "Now do what you're told."
People rallied. Dantrolene arrived in time. We cooled him down. Machines and muscle and discipline stitched the moment into something resembling order. Afterwards the chairman's wife wept like rain and thanked me until her voice broke.
"She will owe you," I heard someone say later.
"Good," I muttered, exhausted. I didn't expect the media.
Someone had recorded our actions and they were edited—carefully, mercilessly—into a short, glossy segment. The footage cut out the parts where I pushed and pushed and left the close-up triumphs to Kiera, who smiled like a child offered applause.
"Interview tomorrow," someone in PR said when they found me in the office after an hour of interviews. "The station wants a face. The chairman personally requested a star."
Fabian had been quiet these days, appearing like a ghost in the edges of stories. I thought I had broken my tether to his world, but reality is stubborn. He showed up at the hospital as if possessed by some interest in machinations. He spoke to the board. He nodded at the cameras. He posed with a smile that meant negotiation.
When I saw the edited piece online—my actions cut into little frames and given to a woman taking bows for my work—I felt something cold and steady break.
"Fabian did this," I told Dalton quietly. "He's playing politics."
He took my hand. "Then let's make sure the truth has eyes," he murmured.
I sat up half the night writing a post: the sequence of events, the lines I had given, the moment I pushed the Dantrolene into the IV. I wrote it as simply as the facts allowed. I posted it to the hospital forum, to my account, to anyone who would listen.
Nothing.
The clip had a million views in a morning. The PR machine had already crowned Kiera. People in the staff room looked at me in a way I couldn't decide was pity or hunger.
"Don't bother," said a nurse, blunt. "The station has already run it twice."
I knew what I needed. I messaged the anesthetist who had been present and asked him to re-upload the raw footage. He did. It felt like throwing a coin into a river and watching it come up an ocean away. But the raw tape had my hands, the hard breathing, the calling out of orders—all the parts that had been cut away.
"You're going to make enemies," Dalton warned.
"Enemies exist already," I said. "They just have good lighting."
I struck the match.
We called a press conference two days later. It was no elaborate setup. I booked the patient conference room, invited the board, and sent copies of the raw footage to the reporters who had been breathless about the hospital's hero. I had printed out hospital records, the anesthetic logs, and a transcript of the PR interview. I had one more thing—my sister Autumn had been in the wrong place at the wrong time once before because of a man, and I had a little card with an account of Fabian's other dealings; a paper trail isn't romantic, but it's decisive.
The room filled. Cameras rolled. Fabian sat at the far end with that same calm face and a defense in his hand like a shield. Kiera hunched, further from the cameras than etiquette recommended, eyes shining with a smugness that made me sick.
"When I was an intern," I began, and my voice was a thin wire of fatigue and resolve, "I learned to listen to the machine. I learned that life keeps a record—a heartrate, an airway pressure, a temperature. We cannot edit that. We cannot put lipstick on vital signs."
"Doctor Richter speaks to bias," someone in the front row joked, but it fell flat.
I played the raw tape.
The room watched my hands steady a dying boy. I watched himself—a man who had once loved me—look at the screen and blanch when Dantrolene appeared. I watched Kiera argue for the camera. When the footage ended, the air was thick enough to cut.
Fabian stood first. "This is a smear," he said. "You are trying to ruin reputations."
"You tried to steal a colleague's work for a PR boost," I said evenly. "You allowed a junior doctor to be hyped when the saving work had been accomplished by someone else. There is more."
Someone coughed. "More? More?"
I set the other folder on the table between us. "There are payments. There are letters. There are transfers to accounts tied to PR firms who specialize in 'repositioning' medical personnel. There are messages from you, Fabian, arranging lines and faces. There is an email where you suggest 'gift packages' for the anchor."
He laughed like a thrown stone. "This is ridiculous."
"Is it ridiculous to assault my sister in a motel and then leave money in her bag and call it charity?" Autumn said, standing up like a reed snapping into steel. The room hummed. "Is it ridiculous to threaten my fiance's business partner because they said a single word against you?"
Fabian's face went through the stages: surprise, then denial, and finally a bright, sharp edge of what looked like real fear.
"These are lies," he said. "You are... you are making things up to ruin me."
"You started a campaign to trade credibility for fame in this hospital," I said, my voice steady. "You used a child in surgery and turned it into a transaction. You used staff you thought you could control. You used me."
People who had thought me melodramatic before looked at him like he had a lit match in his hand. A journalist pulled out a phone. A board member snapped his fingers at a legal advisor.
Fabian's fingers began to tremble. "Everyone, please," he said. "This is slander. I have donors. I have benefactors. I have—"
"Do it," Dalton said softly from the doorway. He had waited silent until now, standing like a carved thing. "Tell them about the donations. Tell them about the messages. Tell them who benefited."
Fabian looked at Dalton as if seeing a stranger. Panic leaked into his voice. "You—this is personal. You are with her now—"
"You're a doctor," Dalton said. "You know what it means when someone manipulates the narrative of a patient for personal gain. You're a man who chose press over life."
People were murmuring, cameras flashed. A nurse posted a picture to a chat that instantly filled the room with the faces of everyone who had attended operations Fabian had staged as PR.
Fabian's mask cracked. "You can't—" he began.
"You are fired," announced the hospital director—from the corner where he had sat face set. "Pending investigation."
Fabian's face slid from arrogance to speechless outrage. He moved from denial to anger to pleading before the whole room, while journalists leaned forward and board members recorded. A man who had always traded in polite contempt found himself under the bright, dispassionate eye of evidence. He tried to explain, to shift blame, to paint himself as the injured party. People around him whispered, took photos, recorded. One of the nurses stood and recited a change in shifts, a name Fabian had used for favors. A tech produced time-stamped bank transfers. A string of donations tagged for PR were shown. The room watched him become smaller.
He lunged once, ridiculous and pathetic, to grab a folder from the table. "You'll all regret this," he hissed.
"You're losing your privileges, Fabian," the director said. "Security will escort you off campus."
He staggered. The press swarmed like a tide. He clutched at the arm of the nearest cameraman, begging into the lens for the sympathy he usually manufactured behind closed doors. People stepped back. The director's security, stern, professional, moved him toward the exit. He called my name—where I stood, hands folded tight in front of me—and tried to smear me with some last breath of grievance.
"Love is messy," he said. "You were always the dramatic one, Fiona."
"Not anymore," Dalton said, cold as winter water. "You're the only one who wanted the drama."
They took him out. Cameras captured the way his suit collar twisted, the way his shoes scuffed. Journalists typed furiously. The hospital spokesman promised a formal release in twenty-four hours.
When the press left, when the board members took their own tight breaths, Kiera sat with her head in her hands. She hadn't shown up for the big steps: she hadn't called the anesthetist, she hadn't scoured the monitors; but she had taken her smile and the edit had made it seem that she had. The raw footage had changed that.
"How can you keep your job?" she asked, voice high with panic. "I—people will think I stole—"
"They already think you stole," a senior nurse said. "You were too willing to be the face."
Kiera's eyes found me. They were feral with fear. "Please—please don't ruin me."
"I did nothing to you," I said softly. "But I will not let the truth be bought."
She had tremors later, in the staff room; you could see how brittle she had become. Her supporters evaporated like morning mist. Patients who had praised her suddenly asked to change attending physicians. Her social feeds that had been full of sponsored photos found themselves full of questions.
The punishment wasn't only a firing or a call to HR—a cold, bureaucratic jolt. It was a people's verdict. Nurses who had been told to keep their mouths shut spoke. An OR tech who had been paid in coffee and praise posted a thread describing the small things Kiera had done in the weeks preceding the edit: missing counts, distracted sutures, a phone buzzing during a critical moment. People who had been used to gossip as a currency watched their names attached to a line of integrity and chose which side they would stand on.
Kiera's fall had layers. She had to answer to the board, to the medical review committee, and to the patients who had trusted a camera more than a chart. She tried to salvage herself with apologies filmed on a phone; they were thin and vain. A thousand comments called out inconsistencies, quoted the anesthetist's logs, and highlighted the part of the raw footage where I had been steady as an anchor.
"I'm sorry," she said to me once in the hallway, and the word sounded like a child learning to say a word bigger than its mouth. "I—"
"You were part of a choice," I said. "Choose better next time."
She left the hospital with a letter from the board. People turned their heads as she walked past. I watched until she disappeared into a cab. For a long time afterward the hospital smelled like the antiseptic of an operating room and the odd, metallic tang of a world rearranged by truth.
After that, things quieted. The chairman's son recovered and wrote a letter to the hospital about the doctors who saved him. The press ran the uncut clip the next week; the public had seen both versions and made their own judgment.
Dalton and I kept living in the small mercy of acts that were not dramatic: he handed me his scarf when it was cold; he took a jacket over my shoulders when a winter gust invaded the clinic; he stood at my elbow during an interview and carried my notes when my hand shook. He did small things that felt, in their repetition, like love. There were little moments that made my breath stutter: the way he smiled at my name, once, in a packed room; the time he answered a call from my sister with patience and warmth; a night when he'd taken off his coat and draped it over my shoulders while I fell asleep on the couch after a late shift.
"You're ridiculous," I told him once, handing him a cup of coffee.
He drank, looking at me. "And you," he said, "are stubborn."
"Stubbornness is a medical requirement," I said.
"Appears to be working," he murmured.
We had other reckonings. There were months of cleaning up PR, of reconciling with old donors, of practicing how to say no to interviews unless we controlled the narrative. We had small domestic victories: learning to do each other's laundry without making a mess, buying a second kettle because he liked his tea hot and I liked it hotter.
One evening at home, after a long day, he put his palm against my cheek and made me look at him. "You were magnificent in the OR," he said. "Do you know that?"
"Not always," I admitted.
"Then know it now." He bent and kissed me with a gentleness that folded the whole day into a single breath.
We had to confront the past again. Fabian tried to negotiate with the legal team for a public explanation where he would emerge chivalrous. He showed up at a hospital gala, a cheery banquet they had arranged to celebrate a donor. He had that old smile—only this time it frayed when people looked past him at me.
"Why is she here?" he asked, loud enough for a table over to hear.
"Because she saved a boy who many thought was lost," the chairman said coolly. "Because she does the work. You are no longer employed here."
Fabian's face flushed. He stood up, tall and petulant. "You will pay for this humiliation," he hissed.
"Do it in public," Dalton said, stepping forward. He didn't shout; he didn't have to. He simply said, "Walk with me, Fabian."
They moved toward the stage. People quieted. I followed, because if a confrontation was to happen, I wanted to be there.
Fabian tried to make the moment about me, about our history. "We had something," he said. "You left me."
"I left because you were not what you pretended," I said. "We are not children here, Fabian. Grow up."
He laughed bitterly and lunged for the microphone, but hands—security—lifted and guided him away.
There is a particular cruelty in trying to make someone else your villain while you are the one committing the crime. Fabian's last attempt to salvage dignity became a spectacle where he was the imploding sun. Reporters filmed his face as he moved from confidence to baffled fury to shame. A woman who had once admired his work turned and spat that she'd caught him editing surgical footage to make a junior doctor look better.
The punishment had folds. It was formal: termination, investigation, and the legal consequences of falsifying hospital records. It was social: former supporters attempting to erase their bylines and tweets. It was personal: the scene in which he asked a room of trustees and journalists to believe him while his own emails and messages contradicted him. He begged, he denied, he attempted to charm; for once the charm bounced off.
"Don't call him a monster," Fabian said to a camera outside the hospital doors, his voice cracking. "I'm a good man. People make mistakes."
"Not this time," a nurse muttered as we walked past. "Not in an OR."
When the dust settled, the hospital smelled cleaner for a week. People were kinder to one another in small ways. I went back to the OR and found my rhythm. I found the young intern Sullivan Zeng watching me with an eager attention that felt like sunlight. We reviewed surgical footage together; he offered me a steady hand when I needed it. Autumn's life found a slower and safer rhythm. Kiera was gone from our hallways like a rumor that turned out to be untrue.
"Do you regret the whole thing?" Dalton asked me one night as we sat on the balcony and watched blurred city lights.
"For a minute," I said. "But the minute passed."
He reached out and tucked a loose strand of hair behind my ear. "You embarrassed the pretty illusions people liked," he said gently. "You put facts where fancy had been."
"Someone had to," I said, and let the truth fall between us like a shared warmth.
Our life after wasn't fireworks every night. It was smaller magic: his hand finding mine across a chart table, a coffee kept warm in a thermos he carried for me between surgeries, the way he mocked how I over-indexed my scrubs for sterility.
We had a last reckoning months later, an ordinary Tuesday that started with someone asking for directions in the street and ended with a message from the hospital director: the board had closed the case, and the hospital's reputation had been restored by transparency.
"You were steady," Dalton said when he hugged me in the staff room. "Like a compass."
"I'm always a little dramatic," I said. "But only when truth needs a louder voice."
He kissed my temple. "You are my dramatic, brilliant surgeon. And I will continue to put coats around your shoulders whenever you fall asleep in them."
"Deal," I said.
And we went on, patching the small things of life together, knowing that the big things—integrity, brave mistakes, the right kind of stubbornness—would be what held us steady.
The End
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