[Two]
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Authority gives one the power to change the lives of others, and that power comes with a weight that only a few can bare lightly. It had always been easier working with the complying leaders of the rooted teams of the NIH, their supervisors always listened, followed orders, gave her a modicum of respect. The trouble with Stephen Connor's team, Kate Ewing had learned years prior, was not that he lived with a warped view of who she was and what she did, but that he'd allowed that view to filter down to those under his authority. Arguments were easier to control if they were behind wooden doors, but the NIH had more glass than timber, and so his flock had always been given a good view of their verbal scuffles.
She'd played the doctor once, the hero in a white lab coat wielding a stethoscope. It had been an era she wouldn't trade for anything, but she had grown out of that role long before it had grown out of her.
Unlike Connor, Kate had learned she couldn't spend her life saving others; the guilt of losing people had become repressive, constricting in a way that someone with her intermediate strength could not bear. She'd given the institutes her eight years of service in the field, and then she had hung up her lab coat and put away her gloves. Why he disliked her for it now, she had always had trouble understanding; Natalie Durant was a much better pathologist than she had been, much quicker and precise with the equipment. It wasn't as if she'd left him with someone incompetent for the position and what it called for...oh no...it was that she'd left.
It had taken some time to get use to the high heels, the business suits and skirts, but if one was going to be subjected to the public...no, if they were going to be the face of the NIH, then they could not wear jeans and boots. They couldn't be blunt any longer, or coddling, or pleasing. They had to speak in a language that only politicians could understand, in a language that the modern human being despised. They had to sell their likable soul to the Washington Devil and smile in the face of the calamity that was unfolding on the ladder below them.
The position had been enjoyable at first. She had liked it. A director of the NIH could eat dinner for free every night of the week, was never left alone long enough to think about how alone they really were. They were held on a pedestal in the medical field and always had their seats reserved.
But the love had dwindled away after time, and now more than ever it had become a duty. The NIH needed money, and it was her responsibility to get it what it needed. If it meant wearing stiletto's and walking around with the stigma of 'bitch' following in her wake, then it was her responsibility to lose herself in something she didn't want to be. She was married to the Institutes, and if she wanted to keep her livelihood, then it was one marriage she couldn't abandon.
But she itched, she had since the beginning of Colima, not to climb backward on the chain of command she had spent her entire adult life working to reach the top of, but to experience what it felt like to directly help real people again. Kate held no illusions that the itch would be scratched, or, if it was, scratched for very long. But she wanted it, despite the odds, and knew that if anyone was going to let her work a case with them, it was not going to be Stephen Connor.