Chapter Thirty: The Ghost in the Machine
The click of the door was a full stop. A period at the end of a sentence that had been started five years ago on a porch strewn with the wreckage of her hope. Amaya walked down the hall on legs that felt both too stiff and dangerously fluid, like melting wax.
She did not go back to the intern's lounge. She went to the one place in the hospital guaranteed to be deserted in the mid-afternoon: the third-floor stairwell between the rarely-used obstetrics archive and the old linen storage. It was a concrete-and-metal limbo, smelling of dust and industrial cleaner. She sank onto a cold step, her back against the wall, and finally let the tremor take over.
It wasn't tears. Not yet. It was a fine, internal vibration, a tuning fork struck against the steel of his dismissal. Dr. Snow. Your differentials lack depth. A common early-career error. His words replayed, clinical and scathing. He had looked at five years of her life—the degrees, the internships, the clawing her way back to some semblance of a person—and had seen only inadequacy. He had reduced her to a file, a set of flawed case notes.
And the photograph.
That tiny, devastating glimpse of Elara's kitchen. Of home. He kept it on his desk, turned just enough that a visitor wouldn't see it, but he could. It was a vulnerability, a single crack in the fortress wall. But the ferocity in his eyes when he'd caught her looking… it hadn't been longing. It had been a threat. A silent warning that that part of his life, the part that contained her history, was off-limits. A classified sector.
The stairwell door wheezed open a floor below, the sound of two orderlies chatting about a football match echoing upwards. Amaya froze, the instinct to hide overriding the numbness. She was a professional. She had a session in forty minutes. She couldn't be found curled on a stairwell step having a silent breakdown.
She pushed herself up, smoothed her blouse, and ran her hands over her hair. The bun was still tight, every strand in its place. A perfect metaphor. She was held together by sheer will and bobby pins.
The rest of the day passed in a surreal blur. She conducted her therapy session with a kind of autopilot empathy, her mind a split screen: one side processing the patient's anxiety about workplace conflict, the other replaying the cold, hazel assessment in Dr. Rowon's office.
Chloe pounced the moment Amaya returned to the shared workspace they used for notes. "Well? Spill. Every. Detail. Did he recognize you? Did he mention the wedding? Did he have a heart and apologize?"
Amaya slumped into her chair, the façade crumbling under Chloe's familiar, worried gaze. "He recognized me enough to call me Dr. Snow and critique my 'insufficiently rigorous methodology.'" She gave a hollow laugh. "It was like I was a stranger. A… a defective intern."
Chloe's face fell. "Seriously? Not even a 'hello, how have you been, sorry for emotionally eviscerating you on the worst day of your life'?"
"Not even a flicker." Amaya rubbed her temples. "But… there was a photo. On his desk. Of his mother's kitchen. Our old… my old… the Rowon kitchen."
Chloe's eyes widened. "He keeps a picture of home on his desk? Mr. Ice-For-Blood has a sentimental streak?"
"If you can call it that. He looked like he wanted to incinerate me with his mind when I noticed it. It's not sentiment. It's a… a totem. A reminder of a world that doesn't include this one. A world that definitely doesn't include me."
"Ugh, he's impossible." Chloe drummed her fingers on the desk. "Okay, new plan. We kill him with professionalism. You become the most brilliant, flawless, unimpeachable intern this hospital has ever seen. You make his stupid, beautiful head spin with how competent you are. You out-rowon Rowon."
A faint, real smile touched Amaya's lips for the first time all day. "Out-rowon Rowon. I like it."
"Damn right you do. Now, come on. Let's go get a disgustingly large coffee and you can tell me exactly how he pronounces 'Socratic questioning' so I can mimic it later."
That night, in her quiet apartment, the armor came off. She stood under a shower so hot it turned her skin pink, trying to steam away the feeling of his gaze. She put on soft, old pajamas—a far cry from the silk nightgowns Richard occasionally gave her as "practical gifts." She made tea and sat on her sofa, staring at the city lights outside her window.
Her phone buzzed. A text from Richard. Quarterly reports finalized. Market looking strong. Dinner next Friday? Will book Le Bernardin. 8 PM.
She stared at the message. Le Bernardin was his favorite. It was expensive, silent, and perfect for discussions of asset portfolios. She typed back, her fingers moving automatically. That sounds fine. See you then.
She set the phone down, the emptiness in her chest expanding. This was the life she had bargained for. The life of penance and peace. A respectable career, a respectable fiancé, a respectable distance from her past.
And now her past was in an office two floors above the hospital cafeteria, dissecting her professional worth with surgical indifference. He was a ghost, but not the kind that haunted. He was a ghost that presided. A silent judge in a white coat.
She got up and walked to her bookshelf. Her fingers bypassed the thick psychology texts and found the familiar, worn spine of The Atlas of Forgotten Kingdoms. She hadn't opened it in years. She pulled it out, the weight of it familiar in her hands. She didn't open it. She just held it, tracing the embossed lettering.
He had given her this. He had seen her, then. Just a little. Enough to choose this bridge between their worlds.
What did he see now?
A defective intern. An obligation. A reminder of a messy, emotional history he had clearly walled off and abandoned.
She put the book back on the shelf, next to a framed photo of her and Liam on a video call, him holding up a grotesquely large fish. Look up, he'd said.
She looked at the ceiling of her apartment. Then she looked at her notes for tomorrow's observed session with Dr. Rowon's refractory OCD patient. She opened her laptop, her mouth set in a determined line.
Fine. If he wanted rigorous, she would give him rigorous. If he wanted depth, she would mine her own soul for it. She would become so clinically excellent, so unimpeachably professional, that he would have nothing to critique. She would become a ghost in his machine—silent, efficient, and utterly untouchable.
The game had changed. It was no longer about love, or forgiveness, or even acknowledgment. It was a cold war of competence. And Amaya Snow, for the first time since she'd run away from a wedding, knew exactly what she had to do.