Secret Santa. Cynthia Reese

she saw who Charli had with her. “Uh, I’ll let you two talk,” she muttered as she swept by with her half-eaten sandwich.

      The lounge, like the rest of the hospital, was tiny, worn and had last seen a decorator somewhere around 1980. Her father pulled out one of the folding metal chairs and sat down.

      As he did, his phone buzzed. He fished it out of his pocket, glanced at it, frowned and stabbed at the touch screen. His face cleared. “It’s Lige Whitaker. Well, he can wait.” His tone was entirely more cavalier than Charli would have treated their chairman of the hospital authority—their boss’s boss.

      Her father pocketed the phone again. He leaned back against the chair. “This is where you tell me that I’m an old fogey, and that medicine has completely changed since I got out of med school myself a hundred years ago, and that specialists are specialists for a reason.” His lips twitched at the corner with barely concealed amusement. “I agree. Guilty on all counts.” With his foot, he shoved the chair beside him away from the table. “Have a seat. Now that you’re a doctor, you’ll need to learn to sit when you can.”

      She crossed her arms. The chair was tempting to her aching feet, but she ignored it and her father’s good-old-boy charm, which he always pulled out as his weapon of choice. “No,” she said firmly. “This is where I tell you that the next time you undermine me with a patient is when I walk out. What you did—what you have been doing—is disrespectful and not professional. Emory University—along with Georgia Health Sciences, not to mention Memorial in Savannah—are convinced that I am a physician. So is the state board. You may have got away with treating other doctors like this—and the way you treat your nurses is like something you’d see on a 1980s soap opera, by the way—but you will not treat me with professional discourtesy.”

      Her father wrinkled his nose. “Thank God some of those shows are off the air. All those subdural hematomas and amnesias and people waking up perfectly fine out of months-long comas bugged the stew out of me. Fake doctors.”

      “I’m referring to the way those fake doctors treated their fake nurses, Dad.”

      The older Dr. Prescott opened his mouth, shut it, fiddled with his stethoscope. “I’m that bad? I can’t be. I haven’t pinched a gal on the backside in a decade.”

      Charli sent her eyes heavenward. Leave it to her father to think that simply avoiding overt sexual harassment was enough to prevent him from being gender-biased. “You’re lucky you’re the chief of staff at this hospital, Dad. Otherwise, you’d have been a frequent flyer in sensitivity training—and only if you’d had an understanding chief of staff.”

      He ran a hand over his rumpled silver hair. Suddenly, Charli could see all of her father’s sixty-seven years in the lines of his face. “Dad...”

      “Nope, give it to me straight. Cut me no quarter just because I’m your old man.” He held up his hands to forestall any softening in her stance. “I admit, I could probably do with a few of those sensitivity training sessions. I am an old fogey, but I can learn. And that in there—I was trying to save the poor guy money. He has high-deductible insurance that pays practically nothing. That’s what you young punks can’t get in your head—you think just because you have all this medical technology available you need to use it.” He must have seen her anger as it rekindled and realized his apology was going off the rails. “But you’re right. I’d have had your head if you’d pulled the same stunt on me.”

      Her father stood up, back straight, lab coat amazingly still showing the creases her mother had lovingly pressed into it that morning. “Apology accepted?”

      “Yes,” she said. “And by the way...Knife Guy? He’s staying.”

      “You’re going to break this hospital, you know that? Knife Guy’s got no insurance.”

      But her father didn’t wait for her to answer, just headed past her with a slap on the shoulder. “I’m proud of you, kiddo. You might make a good doctor one day.”

      The door slammed behind him, and for a long minute she stood there. Would this ever work out? She’d either kill herself or kill her dad. But this was the one thing she’d wanted, right? To work by her father’s side, prove to him that she knew what she was doing, prove to him that she could be a doctor—not a nurse as he’d suggested so many times.

      Don’t forget that by working here, a good chunk of your student loans will be forgiven, she told herself. It’s a win-win. I’m home with Dad and Mom, and I can work off some of my debt. So suck it up, Prescott.

      She went back to see Neil Bailey on her own. “Let me tell you what could happen if you don’t see a specialist,” she said. “Your wrist has what’s called a Colles fracture, and the ulna has a clean break. Either one alone, I wouldn’t be too worried about. But since you broke both bones, and since you’re a writer, they worry me. I want you to have full range of motion with the wrist. It’s your choice. You can do it the—” She bit back “the old-fogey way.” Using that expression, even if that’s what she thought of her dad’s method, would break her own dictates about professionalism. “You can take my dad’s suggestion and follow up with him, since I’m assuming he’s your primary care doctor. Or...”

      “I’ll take the referral. No offense to your dad. But I am a writer. Like you say. I’ll figure out how to pay for the specialist some way. How long do you think I’ll be typing one-handed?”

      “Hard to say. But probably, if you don’t need any surgery or pins—which I don’t think you will—at least six to eight weeks, depending on if you drink your milk and eat your green veggies.”

      Neil nodded. “I will double my intake of both.”

      “Now, let’s give you some pain medicine and see if we can get the swelling reduced.”

      “That would be ibuprofen or Tylenol—don’t like anything stronger.”

      “Okay, tough guy. We’ll see about that.” Charli had seen biker dudes beg for morphine when a bone was being set, but she knew from hard experience you had to let a man figure things out on his own. She headed for the curtain and the other patients who waited for her. “Give us a few minutes while we get you a shot of Toradol—it’s pretty much souped-up ibuprofen. That okay with you?”

      “Does the Toradol do a better job? It’s not a narcotic, is it?” he asked her. “Because I don’t want to be zonked out.”

      “Nope, it’s not a narcotic, and, yes, Toradol by injection works faster than oral meds like ibuprofen. Did you drive yourself?”

      “Nah. I had my buddy drive me.”

      Charli paused at the curtain and looked back over her shoulder. “So where was this buddy when you were climbing a ladder all by yourself?”

      “Oh, Brinson was there. But he was busy texting Jill—his wife—to get out of the doghouse about being late for supper.”

      “Wait...” Charli’s brain turned over the uncommon first name in combination with a wife named Jill. “Brinson Hughes? He’s my neighbor.”

      “Yeah? Well, what do you know? It’s a small world.”

      “What were you doing on a ladder, anyway?”

      “Finishing up my Christmas lights.”

      She frowned again. “It’s the first of November.”

      “Ya know, that’s what Jill said.”

      Just then, Knife Guy started in on a particularly loud rendition of Elvis’s “Suspicious Minds.” It served as a reminder to her that no matter how interesting Neil Bailey was, no matter how she enjoyed chatting with him, she had other patients who needed her.

      “I’ll be back,” Charli told him.

      “I’ll be here,” he replied. His dimples jumped and she found herself liking the fact that he didn’t whine when in pain.

      Outside,