“No, I mean I’m going to have to let you go. You’re fired,” I tell her.
“You know, I’m pretty sure it’s illegal to fire someone for disclosing your unethical behavior.”
“Well, the way it’s looking, it’s not going to matter too much whether you lay another charge on me,” I tell her. “You’ve done plenty.”
I hang up the phone.
After putting the phone in my pocket, I reach out to open Grace’s door further and go inside, but the door creaks open before I can lay my hand on the knob.
Grace is standing behind the door, saying, “That was bullshit.”
“I know,” I tell her. “I had no idea Yuri was going to-”
“Very much not what I was talking about,” Grace says, and slams the door in my face.
It’s been that kind of day.
Chapter Seventeen
Rebooting
Grace
The downside of cutting off all contact with Jace is that I couldn’t get a referral from him. Of course, with all the shit he’s in right now, I’m not sure if that many doctors would really be interested in taking his referrals anyway.
Right now, I’m sitting in the chemo suite of Parkside Hospital. My new doctor, Dr. Quintana, tends to favor an intravenous approach when it comes to a chemo delivery system.
I’m not a fan.
The oral crap was bad enough, but with this stuff, my vein feels like it’s eroding at an incredible rate, and I’m getting hit with all the hell of chemo that I had just started to get used to before I went in for that stupid trial, only the symptoms are worse and they’re hitting me a lot quicker.
“How are you feeling?” Dr. Quintana asks me after my next round of vomiting.
“I’ve never felt better,” I tell him. “I hope there’s a marathon today because I feel like going for a nice 26-mile run right about now.”
“I wouldn’t suggest that you go running in your current condition, especially for such a distance,” he says.
Dr. Quintana doesn’t seem to understand or appreciate sarcasm.
This is the kind of thing that makes me miss Jace. I’m not mad at him for me getting kicked out of the trial. I mean, I was at first, but I’m not anymore.
Even when I was upset at him over the trial, I knew it wasn’t his fault, that I wouldn’t have been in the trial in the first place if he hadn’t put himself in such a precarious position.
My phone rings, and it’s with a great deal of annoyance that I reach into my purse to answer it.
“Hello?”
“Grace, it’s me, Margaret. You really need to come in,” my intrepid little secretary says.
“I’m having toxic sludge pumped into my veins at the moment,” I tell her. “Can it wait?”
“Shoot,” she says. “I forgot you were back on chemo.”
“What’s going on?”
“John just got fired,” she says. “I guess he was badmouthing this idea you shared with one of the members of the board and it got kind of heated. He said that it was either him or you and they chose to keep you.”
“Why would they fire him just for badmouthing me?” I ask. “He’s been doing that for years.”