Promises/Rainbows/Twins [antikvár]

Chapter One San Francisco, Califomia August 1991 . Elizabeth Jennings abandoned all hope of fiar-ther sleep shortly before dawn. She had been awake for almost two hours, far too excited—and anxious—to drift back to the tranquility of dreams. Today Elizabeth was going to assist Dr. Nicholas Chase with the transplantation of a small portion of a young mother's healthy liver to her infant daughter's diseased one. If everything went well, and it would because of Nick's immense talent, both mother and daughter would have a long life of health and love ahead of them. Today's surgery wouldn't be the world's first living donor liver transplantation—that monumental surgery had been done twenty-one months before—but it would be the first such operation performed in San Francisco, and the first also in which Elizabeth would participate. The surgery wasn't new to Nick, of course. He had been a member of the surgical team in Chicago on that historic day in November 1989, and he had since become a leading expert on the lifesaving operation. Now, in just a few hours, Nick was going to introduce the extraordinary technique to his own surgical team at Pacific Heights Medical Center as well as to other Bay Area transplant surgeons who had been specially invited to observe the delicate and difficult surgery from the amphitheater above the operating room. Only one surgeon would be in the operating room with Nick, assisting him How Elizabeth wished she could believe that she had been handpicked by Nick because he valued her surgical skill, the decisive agility of her slender fingers combined with her unshakable calm in the OR, but she had no proof whatsoever that the great Nicholas Chase thought she had any surgical aptitude at all. He hadn't chosen her to be the second member of his two-member team, after all, he had simply inherited her. Elizabeth was already on the faculty of the medical center's prestigious Department of Surgery when Nick arrived. She had been recruited because of her expertise in trauma, and once there, because the center's organ transplantation program was expanding, the transplant service chief had convinced her to become trained in that surgical subspecialty as well. Elizabeth had just completed that training when, eight months ago, Nick had arrived to become the new transplant service chief—and he had inherited her as his assistant, the person designated to work most closely with him, the other half of his two-person team. Dr. Elizabeth Jennings was beneath Dr. Nicholas Chase in academic rank, of course. Nick was eight years her senior both in age and in surgical experience. But she was a good surgeon, perhaps even a gifted one. Still, with Nick she felt uncertain, as if he were uncertain of her, unsure of what to do with her and strangely wary. He was always polite to her, a cool formal politeness that kept a vast distance between them despite the intimacy of the work they did together.