The Doctor Who Has No Chance (Soulless 11)

“Yeah.” He sat up and looked at the meal in front of him. “Looks good.” He grabbed the food I’d brought for him, tamales with rice and beans, and he leaned back to eat it with his fork. “You have plans tonight?” He didn’t look at me as he asked the question, but his tone was different, like he was anticipating what I would say.

“Nothing big. Just dinner.” We were right next to each other, but it seemed like we were worlds apart.

Dex ate his lunch and didn’t have any follow-up questions.

I decided to change the subject to something that was easy. “So, a transplant. That’s intense.”

“Yeah.” He cut into his tamale and ate it in a couple bites. “It’s…it’s a pain.”

“I’ve never heard you describe a procedure that way.”

“Because it’s all or nothing, you know?” He scooped his fork into rice and beans and took a few bites before he continued to talk. “When something goes wrong in the operating room, there’re different procedures to keep the patient alive, to stall until you figure out exactly what the problem is. But when it comes to a transplant, if their body rejects it…that’s it. It’s not like you put the old heart back in. You can’t push drugs or voltage into a patient that doesn’t have a working heart. And even if the transplant is successful, the body could reject it later… It’s just a lot.”

“I never considered that.”

“It’s complicated.” He ate his food until his plate was empty and returned it to the coffee table. “But I try to think of it as, the patient has to take the risk. Otherwise, they’re going to die anyway. All I can do is make the transfer and leave the rest up to…science, God, not sure. But it’s out of my control.”

“Yeah.” Sometimes I couldn’t believe what Dex was capable of, the amount of responsibility that was constantly on his shoulders, because he behaved like it was weightless. He didn’t let the stress get to him, let it dissolve his smile. It was truly heroic, how much he sacrificed without complaint.

“You can get going. I’m just gonna catch up on paperwork since I don’t have plans until later tonight.”

I was free to go, to walk out of that office and live my life, but I just wanted to stay there. “You haven’t mentioned the Doctors Without Borders stint in a while. Is that still happening?”

“Oh shit, I totally forgot.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone. “When is that again?”

“The beginning of April.”

He made the notes in his calendar. “Yeah, it should be fine.” He set the phone on the coffee table. “And you don’t need to come with me. You could take advantage of the opportunity to play catch up, or just go on a vacation.”

Was he letting me off the hook after what happened, or did he not want me there? “I already have my vaccinations, so I’m prepared…unless you don’t want me to come.”

“I want you to come,” he said immediately. “I just don’t want you to feel obligated, because you aren’t.” He reached for the paperwork that he’d dropped earlier and got to work like I wasn’t sitting there. “You don’t owe me anything.”

I sat across from Zach at another fancy place he’d brought me. He never wanted to stop by a deli or a Chinese food restaurant. It was always Michelin-star places, restaurants that didn’t have entrees for less than a hundred dollars. In the beginning, it was fun, but the dining experience always took several hours, they didn’t just have a plain burger, and I had to get dressed up every single time.

Zach talked about work a lot of the time, and I wasn’t entirely sure what he did. He seemed to buy companies and then sell those companies, kinda like flipping real estate. He was interested in monopolies, getting the upper hand on certain products before they became mainstream. “It was a pain in the ass, but I closed on that shit. Hard.” He cut into his steak and took a bite. “On Monday, we’ll get the acquisition under way.”

“So, why did you buy this company?”

“Because the value is going to spike after Donnelly’s fails to adapt to the new privacy changes.”

“But what do you like about the company?”

“What do I like about it?” he asked blankly. “Nothing.”

“Then what’s the point?” I genuinely wasn’t following along.

“To make money. To monopolize the market. To crush my competitors.”

“So, there’s nothing else to it?”

“Like what?” He swirled his wine then took a drink. “This is how you make money. You think ahead of the game, make your move, and beat the other sharks before they can smell the chum. That’s why they call me a business mogul.”

“But you’re already a billionaire. How do you stay so ambitious?”