Zoya’s P.O.V
Adjusting to my new life in the Sapphire Mountains was not at all as easy as I
thought it would be, and I was pretty sure that a lot of my difficulties had
something to do with the stranger I call Sam, who insisted upon using my cabin as a
temporary shelter to hide from whoever it was that was searching for him.
He was the type to do whatever he wanted whenever he wanted without regard for
me, who, in case he forgot, was also living in the same house as he was. He would
tinker with whatever he could get his hands on, curious, even if it was my property,
and he would not even ask if I allowed him to touch it.
And I hated it whenever people touched my stuff without my permission, so one
could imagine the stress I was under. Still, I was surprised with how far my
people-pleasing tendencies could go, because instead of mindlessly faulting him for
it and holding this nature of his against him, I found myself trying to justify his
actions.
It did not seem like he did it out of malice, I would find myself thinking. Instead, it
seemed more like a force of habit, a telltale sign of how he must have been like
before he found himself in this situation. It's probably just what he was used to, and
no one would call him out for it, maybe because he was some sort of leader, or
someone in a position of power.
But then I would wonder, how much power could someone even have in a town as
small as this? It was unlikely that he came from somewhere else, considering how
secluded the Sapphire Mountains were.
Whatever the case, at some point I got too drained to deal with his idiosyncrasies
that I finally had enough and walked out the front door to perch atop my car and
have this moment in the afternoon all to myself. I was going to have to attend to my
duties in the clinic soon, and I did not want to spend most of my personal time
around that guy who was a restless, ticking time bomb.
I was just enjoying the quiet all to myself when my phone suddenly rang. The
reception up here was really stronger in comparison to basically everywhere else in
the general area of my cabin. I checked the caller ID and found that the call was
coming from my old office.
Part of me did not want to answer it, because I was already in the process of moving
on from that aspect of my life, but some other hopeful part of me wanted to know
whether there were things from my old life worth wanting back. So I took the call.
“Hello?” I said into my phone.
“Oh, finally!” a voice from the other end of the line said. “We've been trying to call
you for ages!”
“Jan?” I asked. Jan was one of my friends from my old workplace; we were polar
opposites, her and I, and people have always mentioned that we were the unlikely
duo of the hospital, coupled with our other peers that were more similar to her
than me.
“Yes, it's me!” she let loose a little giggle as she confirmed her identity. “What, did
that ghost town of place take you a million years back in time already and now
you've forgotten the people you left behind?” In the background, I heard some
muffled laughter and realized that she was probably with the rest of our friends and
had this phone call on loudspeaker.
I faked a laugh. “Yeah, something like that,” I played along. Jan had always hated it
whenever I didn't go with her jokes, and she would tell me that I was overreacting
and too uptight, so I learned early on that instead of telling her off whenever her
jokes crossed the line with me, I should just laugh it off and fake a smile or two.
“Anyway,” she gushed, eager to change the topic, “weren't you supposed to be
assigned to the New York City Hospital? Why are you all the way over there in the
Sapphire Mountains? And why didn't you tell me? I only heard about it when I
clocked in today.”
“It's a long story, Jan,” I said tiredly, “and I'm not sure if I want to recount it now.”
“Aw, that's too bad,” Jan said, and I didn't know if it was simply because I had a
relatively bad morning, but something in the tone of her voice made me want to
hang up without any explanation.
“Oh, ask her about Ravi,” another voice said on her end of the line, followed by
another round of muffled laughter.
“Right,” said Jan, and I could still hear the smile in her voice. I felt my heart snap into
two, and I wanted to throw up. “Zoya, sweetie, how did Ravi take the news of your
transfer? You two didn't break up over that, now, did you?”
It did not take much for me to be able to put two and two together. It was clear that
they already knew, or at least had a hunch, that Ravi was cheating on me… and
simply decided not to tell me. For what? For the laughs? To see what I, precious
little people-pleaser Zoya, would do once I found out?
When I did not answer Jan continued, “Well, I'll have you know that life here in the
hospital is pretty boring without you.” I could imagine her sympathetic look,
although now I was beginning to wonder whether everything about her was fake. “If
it's any consolation, I'm sure you would be happy to know that at least, with you
assigned to a different clinic, me and the rest of our friends now have equal
treatment and attention from Dr. Salvador.”
I heard a third round of laughter in the background, as I was finally faced with the harsh reality of the situation I was in.