Chapter 20

CHAPTER 20

Evie

On Saturday morning, I slept later than I wanted to. Merrick was already showered and dressed, drinking coffee in the kitchen when I walked in. He held up his mug and smiled.

“Morning, sleepyhead.”

“I can’t believe how late it is—almost seven thirty. Why didn’t you wake me? Kitty can be discharged as early as eight.”

“She called this morning. She developed a fever last night, so they’re doing some bloodwork now to make sure it’s not an infection.” He shook his head. “If she gets out today, it’s definitely not going to be early. So I figured I wouldn’t wake you.”

“Oh no. That’s not good. An infection after surgery can be serious.”

He nodded. “Hers is a low-grade fever, right at a hundred. The nurse made the mistake of telling Kitty that some people can go home if the fever is very low. But someone her age they usually keep to monitor.”

I covered my laugh with my hand. “Oh shit. And that nurse now has a cast that matches Kitty’s.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised.”

I sat down at the table across from Merrick. His eyes fell to my chest and lingered, causing me to look down. Shit. I’d forgotten to put on a bra. It was warm in my bedroom, but the kitchen window was wide open, and the temperature change had my nipples peaked against my thin T-shirt.

Merrick cleared his throat and looked away. “Anyway, Kitty asked me to ask you if you would mind bringing her some monkey bread. I don’t know what that is, but she said you’d know.”

I smiled. “It was my grandmother’s specialty. It’s sort of like a cinnamon bun, but made into a cake. My grandmother made it with southern-style biscuits and loads of sticky cinnamon-sugar icing. Not exactly healthy, but everyone loved it, especially Kitty.”

“Where do we get some?”

“I make it.” I stood and walked over to the fridge. “It doesn’t take very long. If she has all the ingredients, I can make the buns and then hop in the shower while they cook.” I started to pull out things I’d need. “It looks like she only has one stick of butter, and I’ll need more than that.”

“Make me a list. I’ll run to the store.”

“You don’t mind?”

“Not at all.”

“Okay.” I finished searching the cabinets and wrote down three things I needed. “I’ll get in the shower while you’re gone to save time.”

He nodded. “Sounds like a plan.”

A little while later, we were back in the kitchen together. I tossed the biscuit ingredients into a bowl and started to whisk. “Can I ask you something?”

“No.”

I turned to look at Merrick. He grinned. “I’ve learned that whenever you say, ‘Can I ask you something?’, it means you want to get inside my head.”

“I think you’re exaggerating.”

He sipped his second cup of coffee. “I’m not. But I was teasing. What do you want to ask?”

“Last night you said you’d had a bad experience with therapy. Why do you feel it didn’t work out? I’m not asking to pry into your problems but to understand your experience in a clinical way.”

Merrick rubbed along the rim of his coffee cup a moment. “I’m not sure you can fix things the patient doesn’t perceive as broken.”

“Are you referring to Amelia or yourself?”

He shrugged. “I don’t even know anymore. To be really honest, it was my idea to go to couple’s therapy, but I didn’t feel like we needed therapy. I mostly did it because I was hoping someone could fix Amelia. She was the type of person you could only get so close to or get to know so much. She had a wall she kept up. I guess I thought the therapist could help break it down or something.”

“Was she receptive to therapy?”

Merrick shook his head. “In hindsight, I think she was doing the same thing as I was—going so the therapist could fix me.”

“She thought you were broken?”

“Just like I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t get closer to her, she couldn’t understand why I would want to.”

I nodded. “If you go into couple’s therapy hoping it will change your partner, that’s usually not a good sign. You have to be in the mindset that it will help you.”

Merrick tilted his mug at me. “Which is why I had an issue with my employees being required to go to therapy. They need to believe in it and want it for it to work.”

“True. But what we’re trying to accomplish in the office isn’t all that different from couple’s therapy. If you look at management as the people on the other side of the relationship with the employee, the goal is to get both parties to take ownership for things that happen and make changes to avoid a repeat in the future. Just like with couple’s therapy, if one side thinks it’s all the other side’s fault and are just waiting for them to change, it won’t work.”

Merrick nodded. “Okay. I get it. I’ll try to be more open. Can I ask you a question now?”

“Uh-oh. Does this mean you’re trying to get into my head?”

Merrick smiled. “I guess I learned from the best.”

I finished the biscuit mix and began spooning dollops into a muffin pan. “What’s your question?”

“You seem to get a solid grasp on people’s mental state so quickly. Yet you didn’t see what was going on with your fiancé?”

I shook my head. “Didn’t you ever hear about the plumber with leaky pipes?”

Merrick laughed. “I guess.”

“The bottom line is therapists are human. We’re trained to help others and look for certain things, but sometimes we don’t examine our own relationships enough.”

“How do you learn to trust again after going through what you did?”

“Are you asking for me or for you?”

Merrick shrugged. “I’m not sure anymore, doc.”

I smiled. “I think there’s always a risk in love. But when the right person comes along, we’ll feel like it’s worth taking that risk.”

Merrick looked into my eyes. My heart raced, and my belly felt all melty at the same time. But then his cell phone rang. He looked down. “It’s my grandmother. She probably wants to make sure I asked you about the monkey bread.”

He swiped to answer and lifted the phone to his ear, still looking at me. “Hey, Grams, what’s up?” He smiled. “Yes, Evie is making it right now.”

I turned around to put the tray in the oven and set the timer. The moment had been ruined, but it was just as well. Merrick didn’t seem anxious to continue our conversation after he hung up either.

“I’m going to go get ready while that’s in the oven,” I said.

He nodded. “I need to make some calls before we head to the hospital. I’ll do that in here and listen for the timer.”

“Thanks.”

When I came back, Merrick was on the phone with Will, his nose buried in some chart on his laptop screen. “Alright, that sounds like a plan,” he said. “Start slow on Monday, so we don’t set off any alarms with people watching us who might jump on without knowing why we’re buying.” He was quiet. “I’m not sure. If she gets out today, I’ll have a better idea. I want to see how she feels once she’s home. Yesterday I mentioned having a visiting nurse come in when I left, and she told me not to let the door hit me or the nurse in the ass on my way out. So we’ll see…”

I heard Will talking again, and then Merrick’s eyes jumped to me. “Don’t be a dick. Goodbye, Will.”

I chuckled as he swiped his phone off. “That conversation seemed to take a quick turn.”

Merrick shook his head. “It’s one of the dangers of working with your friend. He doesn’t know how to stick to business when he should.”

I opened the oven and took out the monkey bread, setting it on the stovetop to cool.

“Holy shit. That smells incredible,” Merrick said.

“You want a piece?”

“Hell yeah.”

I cut off a chunk for each of us and brought it over to the table. “It’s better than an orgasm when it’s hot.”

Merrick’s eyes gave a wicked gleam before he bit in. “That sounds like a challenge, Dr. Vaughn.”

• • •

“Oh, doc,” Kitty said. “This is the lady I was telling you about this morning.”

I turned to smile at the physician in the room. Wow. Just wow. The doctors didn’t look like this when I was in the hospital, that’s for sure.

He smiled and flashed perfect teeth as he extended his hand. “Therapist, right?”

I shook. “Yes.”

“Ms. Harrington here tells me you went to Emory.”

“I did.”

Kitty put her hand on the doctor’s arm. “I told you to call me Kitty.”

He smiled and nodded before turning his attention back to me. “Ms.—I mean, Kitty and I figured out that you would’ve started the semester after I graduated.”

Yeah, I definitely would’ve remembered if I’d seen this guy on campus.

“Dr. Martin is single, dear,” Kitty said. “He almost went into psychiatry. And he likes to hike. I was telling him all about your land and your Airbnbs. You two should grab some coffee when he goes on his break. I bet you have a lot in common.”

“Did the doctor spend any time examining you?” a stern voice from behind me asked. “Or was he too busy using his patient as a matchmaker?”

Oh boy. The look on Merrick’s face could only be described as murderous. His eyes were narrowed, jaw set hard, and he stood with his hands folded across his chest.

I flashed him a dirty look which he promptly ignored, so I shook my head and spoke to the doctor. “I’m sorry.”

Dr. Martin looked back and forth between Merrick and me and gave a curt nod. “Why don’t we move on to Ms. Harrington’s health, shall we?”

For the next fifteen minutes, Dr. Martin went over Kitty’s post-op stats, current vitals, and what they had done so far to rule out less-common causes of her fever. “It’s not unusual to have a low-grade fever after a big surgery like Ms. Harrington had. Most likely, it’s an inflammatory stimulus reaction to tissue damage and the exposure to foreign materials that occurs during surgery. It almost always resolves on its own within a few days. But because she also broke her ankle and is in a cast, and she’s not moving around so much, she’s at a higher risk of DVTs. These type of blood clots can also cause a low-grade fever. We did a sonogram to rule that out, but we’re going to keep her monitored for another day or two and do a repeat before we discharge her to be sure.”

I nodded. “That makes a lot of sense.”

The doctor smiled at Kitty. “To be clear, this has nothing to do with age. I’d recommend the same to a thirty-year-old.”

I laughed, knowing Kitty had already read him the riot act. “Good to know.”

Dr. Martin looked to all three of us. “Any questions?”

I turned to Kitty and Merrick. Merrick still looked cross, but he shook his head. “I’m good. Thank you.”

The doctor nodded to Kitty. “I’ll stop back later before my shift ends to check on you.”

Kitty batted her eyelashes. “Thank you, doc.”

After he left, she fanned herself. “If only I was twenty years younger.”

Merrick raised a brow. “Twenty?”

She squinted at him. “It’s going to hurt a lot more than usual when I kick you in the ass with this cast on.”

I chuckled. “I’m sorry you’re not going to get to go home today like you’d hoped. But they’re being thorough and taking good care of you.”

“Oh that one was thorough alright,” Merrick grumbled.

Kitty’s eyes gleamed. “Something wrong, my darling grandson?”

“It’s hot in here,” he mumbled. “I’m going downstairs to the cafeteria to get something to drink. Either of you want anything?”

“No, thank you,” I said.

Kitty barely waited until Merrick was out the door. Her smile bordered on wicked. “That one has it bad.”