“Morning, babe.” Ruby comes breezing out from her treatment room, beaming her usual wide smile. Her hair has been back-combed and pinned in a bun, with intricate twisted sections on either side. Both Annalise and Ruby are totally into their hairdos—it’s almost a competition between them. “Now, look, it’s a real pain, but I have to give you a disciplinary hearing.”
“What?” I gape at her.
“Not my fault!” She lifts her hands. “I want to get accreditation from this new body, the PFFA. I’ve just been reading the material, and it says if your staff chat up the patients you have to discipline them. We should have done it anyway, you know that, but now I need to have the notes ready for the inspector. We’ll get it done really quickly.”
“I didn’t chat him up,” I say defensively. “He chatted me up!”
“I think the panel will decide that, don’t you?” chimes in Annalise forbiddingly. She looks so grave, I feel a tickle of worry. “I told you you’d been unethical,” she adds. “You should be prosecuted.”
“Prosecuted?” I appeal to Ruby. I can’t believe this is happening. Back when Magnus proposed, Ruby said it was such a romantic story she wanted to cry, and that, OK, strictly it was against the rules, but in her opinion love conquered all, and please could she be a bridesmaid?
“Annalise, you don’t mean ‘prosecuted.’ ” Ruby rolls her eyes. “Come on. Let’s convene the panel.”
“Who’s on the panel?”
“Us,” says Ruby blithely. “Annalise and me. I know we should have an external person, but I didn’t know who to get. I’ll tell the inspector I had someone lined up and they were ill.” She glances at her watch. “OK, we’ve got twenty minutes. Morning, Angela!” she adds cheerily as our receptionist pushes the front door open. “Don’t let any calls through, OK?”
Angela just nods and sniffs and dumps her rucksack on the floor. She has a boyfriend in a band, so she’s never very communicative in the mornings.
“Oh, Poppy,” Ruby says over her shoulder as she leads the way into the meeting room. “I was supposed to give you two weeks’ notice to prepare. You don’t need that, do you? Can we say you had it? Because there’s only a week and a bit till the wedding, so it would mean dragging you away from your honeymoon or leaving it till you’re back, and I really want to get the paperwork done… .”
She’s ushering me to the sole chair, marooned in the middle of the floor, while she and Annalise take their seats behind the table. Any minute I expect a bright light to shine in my eyes. This is horrible. Everything’s suddenly turned. It’s them against me.
“Are you going to fire me?” I feel ridiculously panicked.
“No! Of course not!” Ruby is unscrewing her pen. “Don’t be silly!”
“We might,” says Annalise, shooting me an ominous look.
She’s obviously loving her role as chief henchwoman. I know what this is all about. It’s because I got Magnus and she didn’t.
Here’s the thing. Annalise’s the beautiful one. Even I want to stare at her all day, and I’m a girl. If you’d said to anyone last year, “Which of these three will land a guy and be engaged by next summer?” they’d have said immediately, “Annalise.”
So I can understand her point of view. She must look in the mirror and see herself (Greek goddess) and then see me (lanky legs, dark hair; best feature—long eyelashes) and think: WTF?
Plus, as I said, Magnus was originally booked with her. And at the last minute we switched appointments. Which is not my fault.
“So.” Ruby looks up from her foolscap pad. “Let’s run over the facts, Miss Wyatt. On December fifteenth last year, you treated a Mr. Magnus Tavish here at the clinic.”
“Yes.”
For what form of injury?”
“A sprained wrist sustained while skiing.”
“And during this appointment, did he show any … inappropriate interest in you? Or you in him?”
I cast my mind back to that first instant Magnus walked into my room. He was wearing a long gray tweed coat, and his tawny hair was glistening with rain and his face was flushed from walking. He was ten minutes late, and he immediately rushed over, clasped both my hands, and said, “I’m most terribly sorry,” in this lovely, well-educated voice.
“I … er … no,” I say defensively. “It was just a standard appointment.”
Even as I say this, I know it’s not true. In standard appointments, your heart doesn’t start to pound as you take the patient’s arm. The hairs on the back of your neck don’t rise. You don’t hold on to his hand very slightly longer than you need to.
Not that I can say any of this. I really would be fired.
“I treated the patient over the course of a number of appointments.” I try to sound calm and professional. “By the time we realized our affection for each other, his treatment was over. It was therefore totally ethical.”
“He told me it was love at first sight!” shoots back Annalise. “How do you explain that ? He told me you were instantly attracted to each other and he wanted to ravish you right there on the couch. He said he’d never known anything so sexy as you in your uniform.”
I’m going to shoot Magnus. What did he have to say that for?
“Objection!” I glower at her. “That evidence was procured while under the influence of alcohol and in a nonprofessional capacity. It therefore cannot be allowed in court.”