Dr. Patel was waiting for me outside the oncology ward when I got off the elevator.
Dr. Anjali Patel. Fifty-five years old. Twenty-six years in oncology. She’d been my mentor since my second year of residency. She was the one who wrote my fellowship recommendation.
She was standing outside the double doors with her arms crossed. Her face was like stone.
“Your patients have been reassigned,” she said. “I need your badge, Lucas.”
“Why?”
“You married an eighteen-year-old patient,” she said. “Who was dying. And now you stand to inherit her money.”
She clenched her jaw.
“What the hell were you thinking?”
“But I transferred her care,” I said. “To Dr. Kim. Before the wedding. I signed the paperwork.”
“Marrying a patient crosses a professional boundary,” Dr. Patel said. “A bright one. Transferring her care the night before didn’t erase that. You knew her as her doctor. You had power over her. That doesn’t disappear with a form.”
“Am I losing my job?”
“That’s what the review has to determine.”
She held out her hand.
I looked down at my badge, clipped to the pocket of my white coat. LUCAS RAMIREZ, MD. ONCOLOGY FELLOW. My picture. Smiling. Two years younger.
I unclipped it. I gave it to her.
“You’ll be contacted by the medical staff office,” she said. “There’ll be a hearing. You’ll need to write a full account. Everything. From the beginning.”
She turned to go. Then she stopped.
“Lucas,” she said, without looking back. “Why didn’t you come to me? Before?”
“Because I knew what you’d say,” I said.
“Yes,” she said quietly. “That’s usually the reason.”
She pushed through the double doors.
I stood in that hallway with no badge. Nurses walking past. Not looking at me.
Then I took the elevator back down to my car.
Adrian Hawthorne is a celebrated author and dedicated archivist who finds inspiration in the hidden stories of the past. Educated at Oxford, he now works at the National Archives, where preserving history fuels his evocative writing. Balancing archival precision with creative storytelling, Adrian founded the Hawthorne Institute of Literary Arts to mentor emerging writers and honor the timeless art of narrative.