The Surgeon and the Cowgirl

“Wait. What was that about?” Jessie said waving her arm in the direction of the stall. “You hate horses. When Candy Cane got out one night, and I asked you to help, you said that there was no way you were losing sleep over a ‘dumb animal.’”

“Jessie, I was in the middle of my residency and had just come off a forty-eight-hour shift. I was exhausted. Plus Candy Cane always came back by morning. You used to say that she must have had tomcat in her because she liked to roam at night.”

“When we lived out near Carefree that was fine. There weren’t any busy roads and people watched for critters. But then we moved to town so you’d have a shorter drive, which meant we were near a ton of major roads, including the 10. She wasn’t used to that and could have gotten hit.”

Payson didn’t speak for a moment. “I’m sorry,” he said, stunning her for a second time this morning. “I didn’t even think about that. You had never worried before when she got out. I thought you were trying to punish me for missing your birthday.”

She’d completely forgotten that. The week before Candy Cane went missing Payson and she had planned a nice evening to celebrate her twenty-fourth birthday. Then at the last minute he’d been called in to cover an extra shift. “I was upset that we didn’t get to go out that night. It had been weeks since we’d spent any time together, but I understood. It wasn’t your fault.”

“That’s not what you said. You said that if I had loved you, I would have said no to the shift. But I couldn’t. The only time you could say no to shifts was if you were in the hospital yourself—in ICU.”

“I said that? I’m sorry. I was being a real witch with a B, as Mama would say. Really, I barely remember the missed dinner,” Jessie said.

“Amazing what sticks with you. We weren’t as good at talking about our problems as we thought.”