Madison shrugged. “I will after I’ve seen Mom. That nap helped.”
“Twenty minutes?”
Chuckling, Madison drew cups out of a cabinet. “You know how it goes. We sleep when we can.”
“Did you manage to get any sleep last night?”
“An hour. Maybe two.”
Meagan leaned against the fridge, studying her sister’s always pretty, but pale face. “You aren’t dating anyone now, are you?”
Madison’s laugh was incredulous. “Like I’d have time to date. But you’d know if I were seeing someone important. Mom would tell you.”
“Or your friend Julie would,” Meagan murmured wryly.
Madison laughed again. “Julie does have a way of finding out all the latest gossip. She had all kinds of news when she called me this morning. Even a juicy tidbit about one of your partners.”
Meagan tried to resist. On principle, she disapproved of gossip and made a habit of not spreading it. As a physician, privacy laws and discretion had been drilled into her from the first day of medical school. But like any workplace, hospitals were rife with coworker gossip and it was hard to resist sampling the occasional morsel. “Um…one of my partners?” she asked casually.
Her expression a little too knowing, Madison nodded. “Stephen Easton. He and Danielle broke up last week.”
Meagan almost felt her jaw drop. “They broke up? Seriously?”
“Yeah. Julie said he moved out of the loft Friday.”
A year behind her in medical school, Stephen had been engaged to Danielle Carpenter for almost as long as Meagan had known him. Both busy surgeons on a fast track to local prominence, Stephen and Danielle had appeared to be the ideal couple. They both understood the demands of their jobs, they both came from privileged backgrounds, they seemed to have similar goals and ambitions. “The wedding was going to be in August, wasn’t it?”
“That’s what Julie said. But it’s off. Rumor has it that Danielle is taking a position in another state.”
Meagan was somewhat surprised she hadn’t already heard this news—but then again, if it had only happened on Friday maybe it wasn’t so surprising. She hadn’t talked to anyone from work yesterday. It was odd, though, that Julie, a nutritionist in the hospital, had heard the scuttlebutt before one of Stephen’s partners.
She sighed. So many of her fellow surgeons were single, divorced or in bad relationships. She supposed that was true of many professions—and of course she knew a few happily married surgeons—but it had to be difficult to combine that all-encompassing career with the demands of a long-term commitment.
“If even Stephen and Danielle couldn’t make it work, you have to wonder if anyone could,” she murmured, thinking aloud.
Her sister shrugged. “I always wondered if a couple who’s engaged for four or five years really wants to get married in the first place.”
“Still…”
“It’s no harder for doctors to sustain a relationship than it is for anyone else,” Madison declared firmly. “I’ve never heard anybody say it’s easy, it just takes a lot of work and a determination to beat the odds.”
Meagan lifted an eyebrow. “You make it all sound pretty grim.”
“There’s nothing grim about making a marriage work.”
Their mother’s voice
made both sisters turn in surprise. Meagan hadn’t heard her come in and neither had Madison, apparently. Meagan didn’t know how long she’d been standing in the doorway leading from the kitchen into the hall, but she’d been there long enough to have heard at least part of their conversation.
“Yes, marriages take work and determination,” their mother continued, “but that’s true of anything that matters to you. A career, a hobby, a home. You put in the effort because of the joy you get back in return. And my marriage to your father brought me a great deal of joy—even if it wasn’t always easy being married to a man whose brilliant and eccentric mind often wandered to other planets.”
For just a moment the ghost of the late Timothy Baker seemed to hover in the kitchen, leaving both humor and sadness behind when he drifted away again. Meagan thought she would always remember her wonderfully idiosyncratic father with just that mix of emotions.
“How was your morning out, Mom?”
Accepting a glass of iced tea from Madison, their moth er patted Meagan’s arm. “It was lovely. Thank you again for sitting with your grandmother. Did you have any problems?”
“No. She had an early lunch of soup and crackers and a small slice of cheesecake, and then she wanted to take her nap.”