Chapter 49 Hospital Return

Chapter 49 Hospital Return
Aria's POV

Sant'Angelo looked exactly the same.

That was the strange part. She'd half expected it to look different somehow, the way places sometimes looked different after you'd been away long enough for your perception of them to shift. But the lobby was the same pale marble and the smell was the same combination of antiseptic and coffee from the machine near the lifts and the sounds were the same overlapping frequencies of a busy hospital morning.

Everything is exactly the same.

Aria felt like a completely different person standing in it.

She signed in at the front desk and took the lift to the surgical floor and the first person she saw when the doors opened was Bianca, clipboard in hand, reading something with the focused expression of someone who had forty things to do and was annoyed that they couldn't do all of them simultaneously.

Bianca looked up.

Looked Aria over once, the way she looked over everything, quickly and completely.

"You're back," she said.

"I'm back."

"Good." Bianca handed her the clipboard. "Rodrigo in bay four needs his post-op notes signed off. Mrs. Ferrara's drain needs reviewing. And someone moved the suture kits again and I need a doctor to officially complain about it so the administration takes it seriously."

"I'll complain about the suture kits," Aria said.

"Thank you." Bianca took the clipboard back. "There's coffee in the break room. Real coffee, not the machine. Someone brought beans."

She walked away without asking a single question about where Aria had been or what had happened or anything at all, and that lack of questions was the most considerate thing anyone had done for Aria in several days.

She went and signed off Rodrigo's post-op notes.

Reviewed Mrs. Ferrara's drain.

Stood at the nurses' station and read through what she'd missed and let the familiar rhythm of the work settle around her like something she'd forgotten she knew how to do.

This was still hers. Whatever had happened in the past week, this part was still entirely hers.

She was halfway through a consultation note when Elena appeared beside her.

"My office," Elena said. "When you have a moment."

It wasn't really a when-you-have-a-moment situation. Aria finished the note and followed her.

Elena's office was small and orderly the way Elena was small and orderly, everything in its place, nothing decorative that didn't also serve a purpose. She closed the door and sat behind her desk and Aria sat across from her and waited.

Elena looked at her hands for a moment.

"I knew something was wrong with Ricci," she said.

Aria went still.

"Not specifically. Not what he was doing or who he was connected to." Elena looked up. "But something. Small things over about eight months. The way certain conversations stopped when I walked into a room. A patient file I couldn't locate that turned up three days later with an explanation that almost made sense. A scheduling change that benefited him in a way he'd specifically engineered but couldn't have known to engineer unless he had information he shouldn't have had."

"You suspected him," Aria said.

"I suspected something. I didn't know what." Elena's voice was even, the way it got when she was being precise about something difficult. "I told myself I was reading too much into things. That Ricci had been here for six years and had an excellent record and I had no concrete evidence of anything and making an accusation I couldn't support would be irresponsible."

"That's reasonable."

"It's a reasonable justification," Elena said. "It's not the same thing as being right."

The distinction sat between them.

"Why are you telling me this now," Aria said.

"Because you deserve to know I failed to protect you." Elena said it simply, without cushioning it. "You worked alongside him. Assisted in his surgeries. Trusted him because he was here and had seniority and I gave you no reason not to." She paused. "I could have said something. Could have flagged my concerns to the administration and let them investigate. I chose not to because I wasn't certain and I didn't want to be wrong about someone with that kind of reputation."

"And now two people are dead and he's facing charges," Aria said.

"Yes."

The word landed heavily.

Aria looked at her mentor. The woman who'd trained her, pushed her, held her to standards that had made her a better surgeon than she'd have been without them. Elena Russo who was competent and precise and never uncertain about anything in the twenty years she'd been running this surgical floor.

Sitting here looking uncertain.

"You couldn't have known for certain," Aria said.

"No." Elena held her gaze. "But I could have said something. And I didn't. And that's mine to carry, not yours."

Aria thought about what it meant that the person she'd most trusted in this building was telling her she'd failed to act on a suspicion that might have changed what happened. She waited to feel angry about it and found she mostly felt tired.

And then something else. Something that was actually closer to understanding.

"I've been ignoring things I wasn't certain about for months," Aria said. "About my father. About Dante. Telling myself I didn't have proof, I couldn't act on suspicion, I needed to be sure before I changed how I thought about people I'd trusted for years."

Elena was quiet.

"I understand the calculation," Aria said. "I don't think you're a bad person for making it. I think you made the same call most people would make."

"Most people aren't responsible for the safety of everyone on this floor."

"No," Aria said. "They're not."

She let that sit. Let Elena sit with it too because that was what it deserved.

Then she said, "What do you need from me?"

Elena looked at her. "Sorry."

"Going forward. What do you need from me to make sure this floor is what it's supposed to be."

Something shifted in Elena's face. Not relief exactly. More like recognition. "I need you to tell me if you see something. Even if you're not certain."

"Okay," Aria said. "Same goes."

Elena nodded once.

Aria stood. "I have a clinic at eleven."

"I know. Go."

She was at the door when Elena said her name.

She turned.

"I'm glad you're back," Elena said. "The floor functions better with you in it."

From Elena that was significant. Aria took it the way it was meant.

She went to her clinic.

The morning moved the way good mornings at the hospital moved, one thing and then the next, the particular satisfaction of work that required her whole attention and gave her whole attention something worth going to.

She was at the nurses' station writing up her last clinic note of the morning when the radio at Bianca's hip crackled.

Bianca listened. Her eyes came up and found Aria immediately.

"Trauma coming in," Bianca said. "GSW. Multiple. ETA four minutes."

GSW. Gunshot wound.

Aria was already moving toward the trauma bay, the way she always moved toward the thing that needed her, and behind her she heard Bianca coordinating the incoming with the calm efficiency of someone who'd seen everything twice.

The patient arrived in three minutes, not four.

Two men she'd never seen brought him in on a stretcher, moving fast, and the moment she saw the patient's face she recognized him. Not well. But enough. One of the men who'd been in Dante's war council the night Marchetti soldiers had flooded the city. One of his captains.

Shot twice. Shoulder and side. Conscious but barely.

He looked at her through the pain and said, "Moretti sent me here."

Which meant Dante knew this was happening.

Which meant the Marchetti situation wasn't as resolved as she'd thought.

"Get him into bay one," Aria said to the trauma team assembling around her. "Two large bore IVs, type and cross, and get me imaging on that shoulder."

She pulled on gloves and moved into the work and didn't let herself think about what it meant that Dante had sent his man here specifically, to her, rather than anywhere else.

She'd think about that after.

Right now there was a person bleeding on her table who needed her to be a surgeon.

She was a surgeon.

She got to work.