"Your plan was smart and solid and more in line with what the patient wanted." Owen tried to explain to Amelia. He knew she was medically right. Undefined-girlfriend or not, she was right. Her decision was superior. He just had to let her know that.
"But why where you there?" Amelia screamed as the anger, disappointment, and and sorrow for her patient boiled over.
"That's why I suggested-" Owen tried to get a word in, but she came back even louder.
"Why?!"
She was now seething. He just didn't understand what she was insinuating. This was their fault! She raised her voice even higher and bounced up onto her toes in her fury.
"The only reason you even walked into that room was because you heard my voice and you wanted to check on me and see me because of your personal feelings," she spat to try and get him to comprehend how he didn't enter that room just for one of his doctors, one of his employees. He entered the room for her.
It wasn't just him and his personal feelings, though, it was hers too.
"I know, because I would have done the same thing," she confessed. "Because we can't help it."
She needed logic, something she knew, something that would take all the damn feeling out of the conversation.
"We are hardwired. Our brains change when we-"
For once, her filter saved her. It saved her from saying it. You know, that that word that has four letters and starts with the letter "L"? Yeah, that one. As terrifying as that word is, it is how she feels about him- not that she's going to say it or anything, until-
"When we fall for another person, our neurological pathways get altered and we make choices, we make decisions whether we want to or not."
Logic, science, medicine. How could he argue with that. She knew no better argument than the truth. The truth that he wasn't in the right mind when he stepped into that room and that he was clearly biased towards her care plan. Couldn't he see that and just accept it?
"This-this is why it is not smart to mix personal and professional."
She felt herself getting choked up, but knew she had to keep going.
"All of this could have been avoided if I had just-"
It was too much- him, the feelings, the consequences. Why couldn't it ever just be easy? Why was love so difficult? Oh, that word. It just keeps coming up. That darn word that has taken over her being. Her brain was telling her to run, run fast. But her heart was pulling her to him. The battle within her was tearing her apart. She grabbed her scrub cap wanting to rip it off and throw it on the ground, but instead she decided to shut down all the emotions in her. No emotions. They just make everything messy. She tried her best to make a wave of apathy wash over her as she calmed herself.
"If we had just kept our professional lives professional-"
Amelia was good at becoming apathetic. She had always been able to just switch off the emotions when she wanted to. This time, though, it wasn't working, because the second she looked into his eyes, the emotions- the love- all flooded back. The tears started to form in her eyes and she swallowed the lump in her throat.
" But we didn't."
Yes, she was blaming him for intervening in the situation, but she kept telling herself that she was the one who made the real mistake- she let him in. She had let him into her life, her heart, and her head, and now her patients were paying the consequences. It was all her fault. If she hadn't let her guard down and fallen so hard, none of this would have happened.
"It was a mistake."
Looking him straight in the eyes, she said it as bluntly as she could. She needed to get out of it before it destroyed not only her, but everyone around her- her patients, her family, him.
"This is a mistake."
