of this.”
“Just like always—when it’s time to do the cleaning up, you’ve always got something to do,” said Pop, pursing his lips and pretending to be annoyed.
Jake ignored the familiar teasing and went out to grab his laptop, which he’d left in the car when he’d been trying to save his dad from falling off the damned roof. Fortunately, the little one-story cottage Pop and Mom had bought ten years ago was on a small side street just off the main drag of Wicks Hollow. It had a narrow view of Lake Michigan between trees and a couple of buildings, and there was a mile-long path that led to the lakeshore. Fortunately, their quiet residential street didn’t have a lot of tourists coming through, so the laptop was safe in his unlocked car. Whew.
“Don’t know how you can be a doctor without ever going into the hospital,” Pop was grumbling when Jake came back in. “All that money and schooling on a medical degree and you don’t ever go in to the office or visit the hospital. Are you sure you’re not just a quack?”
“Might I remind you that working remotely is what enabled me to move here to be near you,” Jake shot back as he flipped open the laptop. With HIPAA, he had to make certain no one could see anything on the screen—which, even though his dad would have absolutely no clue about how to read an X-ray image, and nor could Pop even read the notes without his thick bifocals—Jake still had to maintain privacy standards. So he sat in the corner with the computer screen facing the wall and logged in to the highly secure VPN for his radiology group.
“What do ya know—this one’s from Sydney,” he said when the patient info came up on the screen.
“You’re looking at an X-ray from a guy from Sydney? As in Australia?” Pops turned from the sink—whoa, he was wearing pink elbow-length dishwashing gloves!—and stared at him. “Why the hell they want to send their X-rays all the way here?”
“A female,” Jake said absently as he read the notes from the emergency physician before opening the image so he could read the film. “Hmm? Just a minute, Pops, I need to take care of this first…”
He carefully examined the image, made his assessment, typed up detailed notes, then sent everything back—a total of twelve minutes after the alert came in. Just as he did, another notification chimed and he had a second film to read and interpret. That one took longer because he had to hunt down previous X-rays from a different system so he could compare the baseline to the new images.
Forty minutes later, he closed the laptop and looked at his dad, who’d taken a seat at the table across from him and was eyeing Jake with an unreadable expression.
“What?” Jake asked.
“Were you really looking at X-rays from Australia?” His dad appeared both skeptical and fascinated.
“I was. It’s one in the morning there, you know, and sometimes they don’t have radiologists on staff at the smaller hospitals or care centers—or they’re unavailable—and so my group is on call for some of the hospitals in Sydney. That way, the Australian radiologists can sleep through the night.” He grinned.
Pop shook his head, scratching at the thick, wavy hair that still grew there. “You can really do all that just on your computer?”
Jake nodded. “Yes. I really can. It’s pretty common for radiologists to work remotely nowadays. There’s usually no reason for us to be on site.”
Working from home most of the time made for an interesting lifestyle. It allowed him to be flexible and comfortable—hell, he worked in his boxers sometimes and had stopped shaving daily three years ago—but it also could be pretty lonely, not leaving the house regularly and having few human interactions. And since his relationship with Mandy had gone south, his social life had been even worse.
He’d spent a lot of time making bread.
Which was one of the reasons he hadn’t minded moving permanently to Wicks Hollow. And why he’d bought his own place instead of living with Dad, because the two months he’d bunked here in this twelve-hundred-square-foot cottage had been enough to turn his own thick head of hair gray. And Jake wasn’t about to go salt-and-pepper at thirty-four.
“That just means I have more time to help you with things around here,” Jake went on. “So no more climbing on the roof, please? I don’t want to be looking at your X-rays