Kiara walked down the corridor with purpose, identified a blind spot between two distracted nurses, and entered the office without knocking. It wasn't the first time. It wouldn't be the last.
She was immediately met with a murderous look. Its owner, however, was on the phone, which spared her from having to produce a polite response. Kiara, not particularly unsettled by this kind of reception, perched on the edge of the desk and waited, swinging her legs idly, for him to deign to hang up.
Which he finally did, turning toward her:
— Knocking isn't just for dogs, you know.
— Hello to you too, she replied, rolling a pen between her fingers.
The handsome brunet with hazel eyes retreated behind his desk with the dignity of a man who knows the battle is already lost.
— How are the preparations coming along?
— Badly. Very badly. The audacity of that bastard, setting his own arrival date, the day before his offer, no less, he snapped, jaw tight.
— Nothing surprising from him. You should consider yourself lucky he chose your hospital. Hadn't he been talking about retirement?
— He didn't give me his reasons, he murmured. I hope his intentions aren't… bad.
His phone rang. Speak of the devil.
He picked up. Long minutes stretched by, punctuated by monosyllables and an increasingly telling silence. When he hung up, his face had taken on the color of a blank sheet of A4 paper.
Kiara noticed.
— What's going on?
— He's here.
★★★
On the other side of the hospital, Tae-Hee was pushing a linen cart toward the laundry room.
He had been grinding away like this for a week — service tasks, Doctor Douglas's errands, small favors for the seniors — without anyone raising an eyebrow. Jacob, meanwhile, skipped duties freely and without the slightest restraint, and nobody seemed to take issue with it. The word *favoritism* grazed Tae-Hee's mind, but he brushed it aside at once. Self-pity was not on the agenda.
There were, after all, unexpected advantages to these chores. He now knew every patient in the orthopedics ward by first name. He had struck up friendships with the maintenance staff, the woman at the cafeteria, the security guard on the ground floor who did crossword puzzles in secret. A sort of unintentional fieldwork sociology.
The main elevator was full. The second was strictly reserved for doctors — a rule carved in stone and in the gazes of department heads. Tae-Hee therefore took the stairs with his cart, descending with the caution of someone who knows that fatigue makes for poor judgment.
Reaching the first floor, his vision blurred slightly. Beads of sweat threatened to reach his eyes. He let go of the cart for a fraction of a second, just long enough to fish a tissue from his pocket.
That was enough.
The cart hurtled down the stairs with enthusiastic and perfectly oblivious momentum, all the way to the ground floor. Tae-Hee lunged to catch it, slipped, and crashed onto it with a noise that echoed through the entire stairwell.
The fall unfolded in slow motion or at least, that was how Tae-Hee experienced it. He had time to make out a silhouette at the bottom of the stairs. A fraction of a second: pale grey eyes, almost unsettlingly clear. Then everything snapped back to normal speed.
Adull impact.
Tae-Hee struggled to get up, then realized the floor was unusually comfortable. He understood then that he was lying on top of someone. He lifted his head.
The same grey eyes stared back at him.
With, this time, a furrowed brow.
Tae-Hee scrambled upright in one jerky motion, cheeks burning, and looked properly at the man who had served as his landing pad. Fair hair. A broad frame. And a face he recognized with the terrible precision of someone who realizes they have just fallen on top of their superior.
DoctorChristopher Ashton. In person.
A cold sweat ran down his spine. He settled on the only reasonable solution available to him:
— I'm so sorry. Please forgive me, he pleaded, bowing in the Korean fashion.
Doctor Ashton did not respond immediately. His feline eyes assessed Tae-Hee with the methodical calm of someone who is never in a hurry and knows it. Doctor Douglas would not have let such an opportunity pass. Tae-Hee braced himself.
— You-
A voice rang out from the corridor. Tae-Hee felt a brief, violent wave of relief wash through his chest.
It was short-lived.
The owner of the voice was none other than Professor Sydney, the hospital director, practised smile included. The poor intern felt a shiver run up his spine. He made the decision most suited to his situation.
Flight.
— How can you be arriving now? We haven't even finished the preparations for your welcome party!
Ashton was no longer listening. His gaze had settled on the spot where the intern had been standing a moment before.
He was gone.
A small smile formed on Ashton's lips, discreet, almost imperceptible, but there.
Sydney noticed.
— What is it?
— I've just crossed paths with a charming little mouse, Ashton murmured. Isn't that something?
Sydney stared at him. His colleague's expression did not belong to someone who was joking, which was precisely the problem. A mouse in a hospital was the worst insult one could inflict on hygiene standards.
I'll have to call an exterminator, he thought soberly.
They headed toward the elevator. Ashton's smile had not faded.
Sydney, for his part, had still not deciphered his colleague's true intentions. Ashton was manifestly not here out of the goodness of his heart, whatever he might claim. And the director fully intended to get to the bottom of it, by whatever means necessary.
★★★
Tae-Hee did not stop until the third corridor.
He ducked into it, back against the wall, and waited. Five seconds. Ten. No footsteps heading his way. He exhaled slowly, a long, quiet breath, the kind one holds without realizing it and releases only once the danger has officially passed.
He looked down at his hands. They were trembling slightly. From fatigue, he told himself. Purely from fatigue.
The cart had stayed at the bottom of the stairs.
He was going to have to go back for it.
°
°
°
It took him two minutes to convince himself to turn around, and two more to make his way back to the ground floor by a carefully roundabout route — service staircase, technical corridor, blind spot near the equipment storage room. A path that made no geographical sense but offered the considerable advantage of avoiding any area where a man with grey eyes might plausibly be found.
The cart was exactly where he had left it or rather, where he had abandoned it in his fall. Someone had set it upright again. Tae-Hee chose not to think about who.
He gripped the handle, checked that the linen hadn't suffered too much, and headed back toward the laundry room.
The day was not over.
…
The hospital laundry room was a place nobody visited voluntarily. It smelled of hot detergent and permanent dampness, and the machines produced a continuous background noise that had something strangely soothing about it, as though the world, here, existed only through that steady, predictable hum.
Tae-Hee rather liked the laundry room. He had never told anyone.
Mrs. Chow, a member of the cleaning staff, sixty years old, impeccable bun and eyes that missed nothing, looked up when he came in pushing his cart.
— You look like a survivor, she said without preamble.
— Is it that obvious?
She took the cart from his hands before he had time to protest.
— Sit down. I have tea.
Tae-Hee wanted to refuse, he still had two more trips to make before the end of the afternoon, and Doctor Douglas had a very personal way of handling tardiness. But his legs had apparently made the decision without consulting him, because he found himself seated on the metal bench in the corner of the room before he had managed to formulate an objection.
Mrs. Chow handed him a chipped thermos cup. The tea was too strong and barely sweetened.
It was exactly what he needed.
— I hear the great Ashton has arrived, she said, sorting the linen with unhurried efficiency.
Tae-Hee nearly choked.
— You know about that?
— Everyone knows.
She shrugged.
— The cleaning staff knows everything. People see us, but they don't look at us. Very convenient.
Tae-Hee absorbed this. He hesitated, then:
— Do you know him? Ashton?
Mrs. Chow paused for a fraction of a second on a patient's shirt. A brief, measured silence.
— By reputation.
She resumed her sorting.
— Men like him, you always know them by reputation before you see them in person.
— Meaning?
She looked at him over her shoulder with the expression of someone choosing their words carefully.
— Meaning you would do well not to get in his way.
A beat.
— Which you seem to have already managed, from what I've been told.
Tae-Hee set down his cup.
— Who told you that?
— The agent on the ground floor. He saw you tumbling down the stairs.
A quiet smile.
— He says you fell on top of him. Literally.
★★★
Tae-Hee left twenty minutes later, shoulders slightly less tense than when he had walked in. Not by much, just what two cups of overly strong tea and a no-nonsense conversation could offer.
He went back up to the orthopedics ward by the main staircase this time, because there was no longer any objective reason to avoid it. Doctor Ashton was certainly in a meeting with Sydney. Or touring the floors with an escort of department heads. Or in any part of this hospital that was not this particular corridor.
He repeated this logic to himself all the way to the second floor.
He had almost finished convincing himself when he looked up and met a pair of grey eyes.
Doctor Ashton was leaning against the corridor wall, arms crossed, with the air of someone waiting for no one in particular — and yet looking not the least bit surprised.
Tae-Hee stopped dead.
For one absurd second, he considered turning back.
— You can stay, said Ashton. I don't bite.
A pause.
— Generally.
Tae-Hee stayed where he was, neither quite moving forward nor quite fleeing. An uncomfortable position in every sense.
— I… I'm really sorry about earlier, Doctor, he said. The cart-
— I know what happened.
Ashton looked at him with that slightly unsettling composure that seemed to be his natural state.
— What's your name?
Tae-Hee blinked.
— Jong Tae-Hee. Orthopedics intern.
Ashton nodded slowly, as though filing the information away somewhere.
— Jong Tae-Hee.
He had not mispronounced his name. A first.
He said nothing more. He pushed off the wall, slipped his hands into the pockets of his coat, and walked away down the corridor in the opposite direction, without looking back, without another word.
Tae-Hee stood still for a few more seconds.
He wasn't sure exactly what he had been afraid of. A reprimand? A formal complaint? The kind of cutting remark Doctor Douglas would have delivered with a smile? None of that had happened.
And in a way, he wasn't sure that was reassuring.
That evening, in the small room he shared with two other interns, Tae-Hee lay down on his bed fully dressed and stared at the ceiling.
I've just crossed paths with a charming little mouse.
He hadn't heard the phrase directly. It was Mrs. Chow who had passed it on, from the ground floor agent, who had heard everything from his post, and had insisted on the word murmured.
Tae-Hee wasn't certain what it meant.
But something in the tone — the murmur of it, the agent had stressed, leaning on the word — gave him the uncomfortable impression that Christopher Ashton was not the kind of man who spoke without purpose.
He closed his eyes.
He had sheets to sort tomorrow morning at seven.