Aria looked at the corridor.
The ordinary morning hospital corridor with its trolleys and its clipboards and its particular smell that she had learned to love years ago and that still, every morning, felt like arriving somewhere she was supposed to be.
She pressed her lips together.
"Don't," Morrison said. Not unkindly.
"I'm not," she said.
"You are." He tucked his phone away. "You're allowed to. Briefly. In this corridor where it's just us."
She looked at the ceiling.
She thought about Dr Morrison's office three years ago. Her first week. Standing in front of his desk thinking she was about to be fired for something she'd done wrong in a patient consult and him telling her instead that she was the best diagnostic mind he'd seen in twenty years of teaching and that she needed to learn to trust herself.
She thought about how far that was from this corridor.
From forty thousand shares and the board chair calling at seven thirty.
She looked back at Morrison.
