“I don’t want to leave, but I can’t stay here and live like this. And I can’t live without Hong-Wei.”
He braced for them to yell, but neither of them did. Owen seemed more sad than furious for a change. He kept his hand on Simon’s back, rubbing slow circles as he spoke. “Where are you going to go?”
“We don’t know yet. We argue about it. He thinks we should stay close to Copper Point, but he’s the one who’s the incredible doctor, and he should go to a good hospital—”
Simon had to stop to draw breath, and Jared took his hand. “It’s all right. You two will sort it out.”
Hearing the two of them say the same thing he and Hong-Wei kept telling each other broke Simon. “I’m going to miss you so much.”
Owen huffed and ruffled Simon’s hair. “What do you mean, miss us? You think you’re going to get rid of us so easily? If you leave, we’re following you.”
Simon was sure he was joking. Except he seemed entirely serious, and when Simon glanced at Jared, he held up his hands. “Don’t look at me like that. We made a vow in middle school, remember? Pledged to be brothers for all time, to be together until the end no matter what happens. I’m with Owen. We came back to Copper Point because you wanted to come home, and we liked the idea of helping out the people here. But if they’re going to drive the two of you out, it’s not home anymore, and it’s not worth staying. We’re following you like a pair of bad pennies.”
Simon covered his mouth, but he couldn’t stop the sob. “You guys.”
Owen grinned. “You think Jack will be annoyed we’re following? I mean, I want him to be happy, but I want him to be at least a little pissed off as well.”
Jared leaned against the table, propping himself on his elbows. “I just hope Nick shits himself when he realizes he’s losing so much good staff. You think we could get Kathryn and Rebecca to walk with us too?”
Simon laugh-sobbed then, and they started crying too, and hugged him. He was late getting to his shift, but he felt so much better.
Somehow, despite him only telling Owen and Jared, people’s whispers about him changed, and as he ended his shift, Susan asked him if it was true that he was leaving Copper Point. Too surprised to react properly, Simon mumbled noncommittally and made his escape, but a paramedic stopped him on the way to the parking lot and asked him the same question. Simon hurried over to Hong-Wei’s apartment, concerned now, and a bit annoyed at Owen and Jared, because it wasn’t like them to spread gossip.
When he shared the story with Hong-Wei, it turned out his boyfriend had been the leak.
“I’m so sorry.” Hong-Wei looked sheepish as he sank into the couch. “The quartet pulled the story out of me. I told them to keep it quiet, but it sounds like they didn’t.”
“It’s okay.” Simon settled into Hong-Wei’s side, tucking his feet onto the cushion. “It was probably Ram or Tim. They’re both terrible gossips. No way it was Amanda. She’ll take everything to the grave. This does mean I need to tell my mother as soon as possible, though.”
Unfortunately, as Simon had feared, it was already too late. When he picked up his phone, he had a missed call from his mother, and when she answered, she started in immediately, asking him if the rumor was true, that he was leaving Copper Point with Jack. He apologized, saying he hadn’t meant for her to find out this way, but yes, it was true.
He and Hong-Wei ended up going over there for a few hours to talk, which became interesting, since they still hadn’t officially made their own plans.
“We honestly don’t know where we’re going yet.” Simon glanced at Hong-Wei, who sat beside him at the table, sipping coffee with Simon’s father. “I want Hong-Wei to go somewhere he feels comfortable as a doctor.”
Hong-Wei cast a stern glare at Simon over the rim of his cup. “And I want Simon to stay close to his family.”
“Listen to the two of you.” Maddy sighed. “I wish the board would come to their senses so you didn’t have to leave. I hate that Simon has finally found the right person for him and it comes to this. I swear I’m going to march over to John Jean and give him a piece of my mind.”
“Don’t,” Simon’s father said from behind his paper. “Nothing good will come from engaging that man.”
Later, as they left, Simon’s father pulled him aside and pressed a check for one thousand dollars into his hand.
“This is to get you started.” His voice was gruff, more so than usual, and he couldn’t look Simon in the eye as he patted him on the back. “You need more, you speak up, you hear?”
Simon cried all the way home.
He was weepy a lot over the next week, as people from the tapestry of his life came up to him, expressing their happiness for his relationship with Hong-Wei but their sorrow that he was leaving. They were upset about Hong-Wei as well, not liking that the town would be without a surgeon again, sad to see him as an individual going away.
When word got out Jared and Owen intended to leave as well, people’s upset reached near-riot levels. The reality that they were about to lose their anesthesiologist didn’t quite process, though it was the more critical problem, but every parent in town sent their child to Jared, except for the handful who were so conservative they feared an openly gay man might corrupt their offspring. The clinic doctors were already at critical mass with their patient load, and until Jared had come home with his degree, Copper Springs had never had its own pediatrician. The same had gone for Kathryn and her OB-GYN practice, and they’d begged for nurse anesthetists until Owen returned. Though Kathryn and Rebecca insisted they weren’t going anywhere, the rumor began to spread they were leaving too, and the town was in a panic. People wrote letters to the editor and the hospital, and there were plans by some from the community to attend the next hospital board meeting and demand the hospital rescind the dating policy that had started all this in the first place.
Owen was particularly pleased with the chaos, sitting with the paper every night and grinning over the letters, reading them aloud and cackling at the parts he felt were particularly cunning. Jared focused on suggesting new locations. He had a three-ring binder full of tabs, and he liked to sit with Hong-Wei going over options for possible new hospitals and cities.
Simon was fairly sure Hong-Wei’s heart wasn’t in this move any more than his was.
None of them had given notice at St. Ann’s, but the hospital behaved as if they were leaving tomorrow, everyone hugging Simon and getting teary, looking sadly at Hong-Wei and telling him they didn’t know how they’d get along without him.
“The board members are in a panic,” Hong-Wei told Simon one day as they ate lunch in his office—takeout from China Garden. The Zhangs had also heard the rumor they were leaving, and now when they ate in or carried out, their portions were more crazed than before. One takeout order became enough lunch for three days.
“I can only imagine.” Simon poked his chopsticks into some noodles. “Have they tried to bargain with you at all?”
“No, which surprises me. I suspect John Jean thinks this is some kind of power move and is trying to stall. Or it’s possible they truly don’t know what to do with this.” He nudged a dumpling.
Simon leaned across the desk and kissed his cheek.
As Jared’s binder began to fill, Owen and Simon started looking at it too. After some debate, they decided to focus their efforts on a few hospitals in the Twin Cities area. They vowed it was the Four Musketeers policy: together or not at all.
Simon did his best to join in as well. He was glad, at least, he wouldn’t lose his best friends. And he did laugh when Hong-Wei balked at Owen’s assumption they were all four buying a house together, though something bloomed inside him as he realized Hong-Wei assumed the two of them would be sharing a residence.
He was daydreaming about what it would be like to live with Hong-Wei when he ran into Erin Andreas in the hall at work one day. Literally—he bumped into the HR director and sent his armful of files cascading across the tile.
; “Oh, I’m so sorry.” Blushing, Simon hurried to pick up the papers. “Here, let me get that for you.”
“It’s all right, I can get it.” Erin crouched beside him, reaching for the folders as well.
His hands were shaking.
Simon glanced again at the director, regarding him more carefully. Erin looked wan, more so than usual, and he had bags under his eyes, as if he hadn’t been sleeping well.
Simon focused on the papers. “I’m just off shift. I’m happy to help.”
“It’s a terrible mess. Everything’s out of order, and I have a meeting in forty minutes.”
Something was seriously wrong with Erin, there wasn’t any question. It was the same sort of reply Erin would have given him on any other day, but how he said it, his voice too clipped and thin, the way he couldn’t seem to look Simon in the eye…. The change was subtle, and Simon wondered if he’d have registered it if he’d still been ruled by fear of the man.
Now, kneeling here next to him, Simon regarded the man carefully, trying to ascertain what was wrong. Erin looked, in fact, the way Hong-Wei had seemed when he returned from a single dinner with John Jean.
Erin lives with the man all the time.
Simon cleared his throat. “The conference room across the hall here is empty. Let’s go in there, and if you tell me what to do, I’ll help you sort these, and it’ll go faster. It’s the least I can do for causing the trouble in the first place.”
He half expected Erin to refuse his offer, but to his surprise, Erin only nodded curtly. Simon focused on gathering up the remainder of the files and papers—he had the majority of them, since Erin was still trembling and unable to do much. The director followed Simon into the conference room, but he mostly stood by as Simon set the folders on the table.
On a hunch, Simon shut the door. It took about thirty seconds for Erin to start talking.
“I tried to warn you.”
Simon, who had begun to sort the papers, glanced up. “Warn me of what?”
Holding on to the back of a chair, Erin stared at Simon, his expression flat. “I knew you were going to work in close quarters with Dr. Wu. I’d done research on him and had heard he’d had a few relationships with men, and I knew he was exactly the type of man you’d be interested in. This was why I handed you another copy of the memo the day you went to pick him up.”
Oh. That… was unexpected. “I didn’t realize.” He paused, then added, “Thank you. I guess.”
Erin snorted. “You didn’t heed my warning, so it doesn’t matter. You didn’t heed it from the beginning. Neither of you. I suppose I should blame him more than you. I kept trying to find ways to get him to stop, but when he’s determined, he’s determined. It makes him a good surgeon, but it makes him difficult to direct.”
Simon decided he didn’t have anything to lose. “If you didn’t try so hard to control him—and everyone here—we wouldn’t have to leave.”
Erin’s gaze cut sharply to Simon. “So it’s true. You really are leaving? This isn’t a stunt?”
Simon blinked. “What do you mean, a stunt? This is my life. We’re leaving because we want to live, not be controlled.”
Erin rolled his eyes. “Everyone’s controlled, everywhere you go.”
“Not like this.”
Erin was unraveling now. “My father told him he’d make an exception for the two of you—”
“Yes, so long as Hong-Wei was his puppet. Why in the world would he agree to it, Erin? He can get a job anywhere he wants, but he’d stay here to be manipulated by your father so I can stay in Copper Point? You think I’d let him do that? Even if I were selfish to allow it, how stupid are you to believe I’d be anything but ostracized by the rest of the hospital staff for being the one nurse who wasn’t fired?”
Erin’s grip on the chair was so tight his knuckles were white. “I told you, I tried to warn you—”
“I fell in love, okay?” Simon grimaced. “Why did you warn me, anyway? It’s not like we’re close. I don’t know you at all. You’re making it sound like you only warned me. Why?”
The conference room was silent as Erin met Simon’s stare, saying nothing for almost half a minute. When he finally spoke, his voice was brittle. “Since you’re truly leaving, I suppose I can assume Dr. Gagnon and Dr. Kumpel are also serious about going along?”
Something about the way Erin spoke, his eyes a window of fury, betrayal, frustration, and deep sorrow, made Simon pause. Simon remembered all the times Erin and Owen had fought, how they’d fought. The way they seemed to seek each other out.
Oh.
Oh no.
What a mess this was. What a stupid, needless mess.
Simon pushed the pile of files forward on the table. “Can I ask who made the no-dating rule?”
Erin hesitated only a moment. “The board wanted to implement it because of the scandals, and Nick and the vice president agreed. But they basically do whatever the board says.”
“And you do too, I suppose?”
Erin said nothing.
Simon kept his focus on the mess of paper. “Our nursing shortage was already critical since the unions were made toothless—why work here when you can easily move to Minnesota where the pay and benefits are better? But now it’s awful because the word on the street is St. Ann’s is a place where if you step out of line at all, you’re sent away. We can’t get doctors here because we’re so small—and now you’re about to lose three. I imagine the board thinks this is a threat, that we’re hoping you’ll back down so we can stay. I admit, I’d love if that happened. But we’re assuming it won’t, and we’re planning to go. You’re not a stupid man, Erin. You know if this keeps up, you’ll keep bleeding people, and the hospital will founder. Kathryn will stay a long time because of her moms, but Rebecca will make her go if things get too bad.”
Erin said nothing, but his fists tightened.
Simon laughed sadly and shook his head. “Hong-Wei was legitimately excited about building St. Ann’s into a better place. He liked how small it was. He loved the idea of being his own version of an intensivist here. You don’t know it, but until this happened, he’d been emailing friends of his to see if they’d potentially be interested in relocating. You almost had a cardiologist. But then you decided you’d rather have this policy.”
“It’s not me who wants it.”
“But it is, Erin. Because you’re the one focused on trying to control me instead of the board. Because this hospital, this town, has decided this is the vision it wants, instead of the one the four of us have been trying to help you build.” Simon stepped away from the table. “You know, I’m sorry. I think you’re going to have to sort this mess out on your own after all. Good luck.”
He left Erin alone in the room, heavy in heart and lighter in spirit at once. He felt as if he’d let go of something he truly needed to set free.
That night he sat with the rest of them as they thumbed through Jared’s binder, and this time he had Owen’s laptop out, looking for places to rent.
Leaving Copper Point wasn’t the future he wanted, exactly—but he was going to find a way to make it the best future possible.
Chapter Sixteen
BY THE time the Founder’s Day festival came around, Hong-Wei had serious offers from six different hospitals in the Twin Cities area, one he hadn’t even applied to. Hong-Wei wanted a smaller hospital where they had more of a chance to work together and see one another the way they did at St. Ann’s. The front-runner was a midsize hospital in a southern suburb of the Twin Cities. Owen spent a lot of time showing Simon all the things they could do in a city like Minneapolis. Simon was starting to get excited.
Only a little, but he told himself it would get better once they moved.
The festival distracted him—it saddened him too, reminding him of what he was about to leave, but in the here and now, he had his family and longtime friends with him. Founders Day was always a highlight of the year for Simon, this time all the more so since he’d helped
plan it. He took pride in walking around the booths along Main Street, perched on the long stretch of greenbelt overlooking the bay. He’d been a part of this. It felt appropriate somehow, like he was giving Copper Point a goodbye in a way only he could do.
Copper Point was giving back to him as well—and so was Hong-Wei. In the city gazebo near the China Garden booth, the newly formed Copper Point Quartet played for the guests as they milled about. They performed several classical numbers, but they had pop pieces in their repertoire too, which pleased the crowd. They were quite talented, all four of them, but Simon couldn’t help beaming with pride because Hong-Wei wasn’t simply good. He was exceptional.
He was also incredibly handsome in his tuxedo. They all wore their tuxedos well, especially Amanda, but Hong-Wei, in Simon’s eyes, made everyone else look slightly shabby.
Simon told him so when the quartet took a break, and Hong-Wei smiled and kissed him on the cheek.
Simon inhaled a heady whiff of Hong-Wei and ran a hand over his broad back. “You play beautifully as well. All of you.”
“I’m glad you’re enjoying it. I’m having fun.”
Simon almost said something about how he hated that Hong-Wei would have to give this up, but he decided this wasn’t the day for such things. He focused on the positive instead. “Are you going to keep performing after lunch? I know there’s a group scheduled here later, but there’s a gap in the schedule after the lunch break.”
A mysterious smile spread across Hong-Wei’s face. “Ah, well. We’re going to do a few more numbers. Something special. I want you to stay and watch. Will you promise?”
“Of course.” Simon eyed him carefully. “You’re up to something, aren’t you?”
With a wink, Hong-Wei kissed Simon on the lips and went off to join the others.
Owen and Jared found Simon then—Owen had a corn dog, and Jared was munching on a bag of kettle corn. Jared nudged Simon with his elbow. “So. You ready to see their performance? I hear the quartet thinks they’re going to show us up.”
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