A Risk Worth Taking

In his peripheral vision, he registered the nurse scrambling to the door, still arguing over her shoulder with the patient. With a bomber jacket and rucksack, Jamie didn’t look doctorish, but perhaps he could pull off aging consultant trying to pass for cool young hipster. “Ah, yes, so naturally I recommended we use immunostaining to rule out a neuronal tumor, and you can imagine Caroline’s reaction...”

He kept up the monologue as the nurse scanned her card and opened the door. He walked through with a distracted nod of thanks, Samira murmuring in sympathy with his fictitious neurological predicament. The door clunked shut. He trailed off a few meters down the corridor.

“Nearly there,” he said to Samira. “You holding up?”

“Awo,” she said, looking at him with more respect than he deserved—the way people used to look at him back when he wore scrubs and a stethoscope. He’d got off on that look a little too much. But, hey, if his bullshit made Samira confident, he wasn’t about to burst her bubble.

Ahead, at a nurse’s station, a woman in pale blue scrubs leaned over a clipboard. From a patient bay to his left a TV droned. Few patients would be unlucky enough to remain under observation over the weekend. His chest tightened in the same cocktail of nerves and adrenaline he’d felt the first time he’d walked in here as a senior house officer on his first rotation, knowing that people were relying on him to get out of here alive. He, Jamie Armstrong, who’d been playing schoolboy rugby not that long before.

Really, he should be living that Irish numbskull’s life by now. Wife and little kids. Heavily mortgaged semidetached Victorian villa in Ealing. Sweaty-palmed first-year doctors gazing at him with fear and adoration. He could send money to his sister and her kids, rather than emptying his military pay packet into the crevasse of his mother’s private nursing-home upkeep. His dad might still be alive if he’d been there to recognize the danger signs instead of ankle-deep in mud or dust in Mali or Afghanistan or Guyana. Or maybe the old man’s heart wouldn’t have given out in the first place.

Not now, Dad.

They strode silently through the east and north wings, the circuitous route zapping his nerves. Finally, he pushed open the doors into the west wing. A curvy blonde in red scrubs looked up from the reception desk, her green eyes widening.

He nodded. “Mariya.”

“Doctor Armstr... I mean—”

“James,” he said, quickly.

“What are you doing h—?”

“Give this to Harriet, would you?” He slapped the pass on the counter. “And only Harriet. You didn’t see me.”

Mariya screwed up her face. “Does...this mean we’re square?”

“You’re returning an ID pass. As favors go, it’s not a biggie.”

“I’ll have to walk to the other side of the building.”

He pointed to a fitness monitor on her wrist. “It’ll keep up your steps. Besides, that hardly makes up for...” In his peripheral vision he caught Samira tipping her head, assessing the conversation. “Whatever. We’re square.”

“And I won’t ever have to see—?”

“No, you won’t,” he snapped.

Did she have to look so relieved?

He opened an unassuming side door onto the smoker’s porch, ignoring the ALARM WILL SOUND sign. He’d been gone only five years—it probably hadn’t been fixed. By the smell of it, the staff still weren’t respecting the smoke-free rules. Same broken brick to hold the door open while they sucked in the very poison they lectured patients about. He shoved it into position, in case their exit was compromised. Drizzle tapped on the mildewed corrugated plastic awning.

“Where next?” Samira said.

“See that wee gate in the wall, across the car park? It leads to the Thames Path. Easily the most obscure of the hospital’s exits.” Over the solid stone, the broad gray river rolled south. Across it, the houses of parliament and Big Ben were coated in a hazy gold film. Once on the Thames Path they could cross to Westminster. Or, better still, follow the current south to Lambeth Bridge, to avoid doubling back past the hospital walls.

“Do you think they’ll be watching it?”

“Anything’s possible, but they’ll prioritize the other twenty or so exits. They wouldn’t have a big resource out there, at any rate. Come here. Your hair is showing.”

He tucked a black lock under her wig and pulled down her cap. Under the sunglasses, about the only visible parts of her were her chin and nose, already pinking up in the cold air. He resisted the urge to touch.

“Perfect,” he said.

“Peerrrfect,” she repeated, to herself.

“Are you mimicking my accent, Samira?”

She bit one corner of her lip. “Sorry, it’s just...”

“Indecipherable, I know. Sometimes even I have trouble understanding myself. I wonder if we could...borrow another coat for you. The enemy will have seen you in that one. Or maybe you could take it off? What do you have on underneath?”

“A black dress. I have another coat, in my backpack. It’s thinner, but...”

A thumping noise. “Shite, the chopper.” He pushed her back inside. “Change the coat, just in case...” He raised his voice. “You have a brolly, Mariya?”

“Course I do,” she said, in an are-you-still-here voice.

“Can I borrow it?”

“Borrow, as in...?”

“As in, I probably won’t be passing back this way but I’ll think of you every time it rains.”

“I thought we were square.”

“I’m unsquaring us.” He held out a hand. “Come on. It’s just a fucking umbrella.”

“Fine.” She whacked it into his palm. “Whatever. I’ll just catch pneumonia.”

“A small price, Mariya. Lovely catching up.” He nodded sharply and turned. “Wow.” Samira was belting a bright blue coat that wrapped up her curves like a Christmas present. But not one with your name on it.

“I can change my footwear, too,” she said.

“Sure.”

She unzipped her boots and slid on a pair of heels to match the coat, over her black stockings. He imagined himself slipping the shoes off in the nearest hotel bedroom. Rolling the stockings down, slowly. Running his hands back up her legs to—

“Jamie?”

“Sorry, what?”

She’d been speaking? Mariya caught his eye, raising her eyebrows. Samira retied her purple scarf with a convoluted series of twists, then pulled on cream leather gloves.

The scarf—it was the one he’d bought her, the one that made her eyes breathtaking. “La couleur de minuit,” he murmured, clenching the umbrella in both hands so as not to reach out and touch the fabric.

“The color of midnight,” she whispered, her mouth softening. Just the way it had that day beside the river in the moment his self-control had deserted him.

He cleared his throat. “They’ll have seen your rucksack. We’ll pack your things into mine,” he said, loosening the straps to expand his pack. “There’s plenty of room.”