Falling Again for the Brazilian Doc
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Luana DaRosa
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CHAPTER ONE
THE MOST UNUSUAL sensation had pooled inside Yara since she had stepped over the threshold of the hospital. Like a fiery liquid, it surrounded her stomach and filled her chest with every breath. It took a while for her to realise what that sensation was—nerves. For the first time in what felt like an eternity, Yara felt nervous.
Salvador.
Her heart pounded against her chest as she thought of the man she hadn’t seen in thirty years. Once they’d been inseparable—now she didn’t even know what he looked like or what had happened in the three decades since she left Brasília. It was by pure chance that she knew he worked at Centro Médico Juliana Amala, the hospital that had hired her to consult on a difficult case.
Salvador Martins.
Yara shifted in the chair she sat in, picking up the glass of water they had put in front of her without taking a sip. Her fingers traced along the condensation on the outside of the glass, picking up the tiny pearls of water until her fingertips were slick. She quickly put the glass back down, not trusting herself with such a fragile object.
What on earth was wrong with her? Yara had spent the years since becoming a doctor making a name for herself as a top general surgeon and a sharp-minded diagnostician whom other doctors turned to when they were at the end of their rope with the diagnosis of a patient.
Yara was at the Juliana Amala because she needed to help a team of doctors find out what was wrong with their patient. She should not be nervous—she wouldn’t be, were it not for Salvador and the host of ancient feelings his memory resurrected from the deep and dusty corners of her mind. Would he have realised it was her coming to consult on the case? Was he as nervous to see her as she was to see him?
With the way she had left things with him, she doubted that. Their friendship had blossomed into something more serious when she had left for med school in Porto Alegre, far to the south of Brasília, her hometown. During her teenage years her parents had voiced their displeasure at the kind of company she chose to keep. When it came to Salvador, they hadn’t held back with their negative opinions, letting her know that, as their eldest daughter, she was expected to enter into a good marriage with a man from a good family that would be worthy of the Lopes name. Someone like Lawrence Silvia—the son of family friends, and her ex-husband of one year.
They had begun to pressure her when they realised that they couldn’t dissuade her from being with Salvador, dangling the one thing in front of her they knew she couldn’t refuse—her tuition for medical school. Without their financial help her dream of becoming a doctor would have ended right there, along with the approval she so desperately craved from her parents.
And for what? Once Yara had left her childhood home for good, neither of them had cared much what was going on in her life. Was their only motivation to push her so hard in one direction so they could brag to their friends about it? Only for them to realise that nobody cared about this.
By the time her sister, Bianca, was old enough to choose a path for herself, their strange obsession with status had shifted. Or had they been easier on her because she was a surprise child?
Yara didn’t know, and she didn’t care enough to find out any more. Though the memory still burned in her chest, she had realised long ago that she needed to make her own peace with it.
The door opened, pulling her out of her pain-filled memories, and a man she’d met in several video calls strode in with a laptop under his arm. He came to a halt in front of her, stretching his hand out.
Yara got up, quickly wiping her wet fingers on the side of her skirt before she grabbed the hand in a strong shake.
‘Hello, Dr Sakamoto, it’s a pleasure to meet you in person,’ she greeted the Chief of Medicine of the hospital.
‘Likewise, Dr Silvia. I’m glad to have you here. The team and I can’t wait to get started on this,’ he replied and handed the laptop to her as he let go of her hand. ‘These are all the patient scans, files, exams and test results we have on Mr Orlay. The entire team is on standby. If you have any questions, just give them a page.’
He nodded his chin at the phone line on the desk. ‘We turned this small conference room into your office for the duration of your stay.’
Yara smiled. ‘Thank you.’ She nodded as she looked around. With any luck, she wouldn’t be spending too much time in this room, but rather talking to the different doctors about their theories on the patient.
As she had prepared to come to Brasília, she had asked for daily updates on the patient. Her last case had ended almost two days ago, but flying in from Singapore meant Yara had to make the choice between sleeping or reading up on the case—and she could never sleep knowing it would leave her underprepared.
Mr Orlay had come into the hospital for a procedure on his heart that he had never fully recovered from. From the briefing material Dr Sakamoto had sent, she could see that the team here had already gone through some neurological tests, yielding a lot of different results that didn’t make any sense to them.
‘I’d like to see the patient before I look at his file. I need to do my own exam so I can check for any inaccuracies or potentially false conclusions.’ This was usually the part where she noticed some resistance from the doctors she worked with on different cases. No one liked the outsider to come into their space, telling them they were wrong about a step in the diagnosis—even though if they weren’t, she wouldn’t be here.
A feeling Yara understood well. She hadn’t come as far as she had without learning from her mistakes. Though her parents’ unending pressure for perfection had almost broken her at times, the resilience she had to establish to withstand the expectations during her younger adult years helped her to this day when it came to her career.
Dr Sakamoto, however, took the comment without even flinching, leading her outside the office and down the corridor, where they came to a halt in front of a closed door. ‘We chose that conference room due to its proximity to the patient room,’ he said when he noticed Yara’s gaze flicking backwards.
They were in the general wing of the medical centre, in what Yara believed to be a more secluded area. Both the floors and the walls shone at her in a soothing off-white. The absence of scuffs and marks that she often saw in other hospitals showed her the age of the centro médico. If she had to guess, she would say the Juliana Amala had been founded no more than five years ago. That or Chief Sakamoto had run a renovation crew through just to impress her.
And Yara definitely was impressed. This was by far one of the nicest hospitals she had been to, the space light and airy rather than functional, giving patients a relaxing environment so they could focus on healing and recovery.
The doors along the corridor they walked down were spaced out, with each bearing a name on the frosted glass panes. Someone had probably had to vacate their office to turn it into a patient room for the duration of her stay here.
A detail that made her smirk on the inside. Some hospital administrators couldn’t resist the urge to impress her with strange fanfares such as this one. She appreciated the convenience, but her main focus would always be the patient, and it didn’t matter how far she had to walk for that.
The Chief of Medicine knocked and opened the door a second later, leading her into the patient room.
A man in his sixties lay in the bed in front of her, the heavy bags under his eyes and the washed-out complexion hinting at the strain this mystery disease had on him.
‘Bom dia, senhor. I’m Dr Silvia and I’m here to assist the team with your diagnosis. Are you okay with me examining you?’
‘Sim.’ His voice was raspy, no doubt from the breathing tube they had him on as he recovered from his surgery.
Yara turned to the patient and grabbed her stethoscope to listen to the patient’s chest. Breath signs were shallow but there. Enough to breathe on his own—for now. According to the brief she’d received when she agreed to consult on this case, Mr Orlay had been suffering from an unexplained and progressive weakness ever since he woke up from surgery.
Listening to his heart, she could tell that his new valve was moving enough blood to keep him alive, yet he didn’t have enough energy to even get out of bed to do his post-surgical physiotherapy.
Had it been something between the surgery and now that had put him in such a state? Medication they’d given him as prophylaxis? Or was this an unknown disease digging its claws deeper with each passing minute, unaffected by any treatment they tried? Something unrelated to his previously weakened heart valve?
Yara made a mental note to check the list of medication he was on and to stop anything that wasn’t warranted by the symptoms she could see. Then she took a small pen-light out of her pocket, testing his pupillary reaction—normal. No sign of any neurological damage.
‘Thank you, Mr Orlay. I’m hoping to get to the bottom of this. I’ll be back shortly to discuss our next course of action.’
This was much better. The moment the Chief of Medicine had walked in with the information package around the patient, Yara had felt back in control and on an even keel. Diagnosing patients—that was what she needed to concern herself with. Not her girlhood boyfriend and what their reunion would be like.
With a critical patient at hand, she didn’t have time to devote herself to any kind of lengthy catch-up, anyway. Her primary focus would be solving this medical mystery and then she would leave her home city behind again.
Maybe she was making too much of it in her mind. Three decades had passed since they had seen each other and, while Yara had never tried to get in touch with him over the years, neither had he. So maybe he didn’t want to see her, and their brief reunion would be all about the medicine and nothing else.
Maybe it was better this way.
Salvador closed his eyes for a moment, letting the deep sigh building in his chest escape into the room. In front of him were the scans of Henrique Orlay, a patient suffering from a strange post-surgical side-effect no one could make anything of. He himself had spent the last four days scrutinising the patient’s scans, looking them over with a literal magnifying glass, turning them this way and that way in an attempt to find something—anything—to help this man who seemed to struggle to hold on to life for no particular reason.
Things had turned so dire that Chief Sakamoto had brought in some famous consultant to advise them on this case. His colleagues working on the case with him had bristled at the suggestion that they were no longer deemed good enough to solve this on their own, but Salvador cared little.
All he wanted to do was a good job—for his own sake and the sake of his nephew, who had recently come to live with him full-time. The hours were already tough, and having a critical patient only made things worse. Since he’d been the one with the patient from the very beginning, he was the radiologist most involved in the case. Other people on his team could run the scans, but he’d been the one studying them all in such detail. If anyone would spot anything, it’d be him.
His phone lit up, and he looked at it, reading the reminder he had set for himself. Chief Sakamoto wanted an updated contrast MRI, but when Salvador had arrived at the patient’s room earlier, the man had still been sleeping. By now, the trainee doctors and med students would have done their rounds, and he’d be able to transport the patient.
When he got to the patient’s room, he found the door slightly ajar and spotted the familiar figure of Chief Sakamoto in the room, along with someone else, who had to be the consulting doctor to help them figure out the case.
Salvador stopped in the doorway, his eyes drawn to the woman. She wasn’t wearing anything remarkable—a dark blue blouse and a pencil skirt—yet his reaction to her was as instant as it was unexpected. His eyes followed the gentle curve of her neck as she leaned forward to listen to the patient’s heartbeat. A few strands of her dark brown hair had fought themselves out of the grip of the hair tie holding the rest of her locks in a bun at her nape.
Her lips were drawn down slightly—because of the situation with the patient, or had something else displeased her? Whatever it was, Salvador’s gaze lingered on them, their shape suggesting unending softness and...and what?
He blinked, trying to rid himself of the sudden fantasy coming over him and forced his attention back into the room. What was her name again? Salvador had received the news of the doctor joining them a couple of days ago, along with the rest of the team assigned to Mr Orlay’s case.
He couldn’t remember her last name, though he knew her first name, as that name was permanently branded into a hidden part of his soul. Yara.
Even after all these years, the thought of his teenage sweetheart came with a strange sense of melancholy—as if he had lost a piece of himself when she left this city, and him, saying goodbye for the last time without his knowing it was a final farewell. The confusion and hurt had lessened over the three decades that had passed since he last saw her, but remnants of their time together still remained within him. Or rather, the betrayal he’d experienced had taught him to never let his guard down with anyone. No matter how much he believed he knew someone, in the end he had to remember that people changed. They did whatever was best for them and nobody else.
Just like Yara had done. Something he actually owed her a debt of gratitude for. If she hadn’t cut him out of her life the way she had, he’d still chase the belief that he was worthy of more than what life currently had to offer. Thanks to her, Salvador had been able to keep his relationships casual, never letting anyone get too attached to him.
His most recent ex, Edinho, had come close to breaking through the heavy fortification he’d built around his heart. But even he had failed when it came to the ultimate test—Salvador’s duty towards his nephew. Keeping Felix safe and out of trouble was the one calling that made Salvador feel worthy of his place in society.
‘Ah, Martins, good of you to join us so I can introduce you to Dr Silvia.’ Chief Sakamoto had spotted him, ripping him out of his contemplations over the scars dwelling beneath the surface.
Salvador’s eyes drifted back to Dr Silvia, who was still facing the patient, and he watched with bewilderment as her entire posture stiffened. The gentle look on her half-obscured face melted away, into an expression he wasn’t able to understand from this angle.
Surprise? Wasn’t she expecting to meet the doctors on her team?
‘It’s nice to meet you, Dr Silvia. I’m Salvador Martins, your radiologist on the case.’ He stepped forward to stretch out his hand but stopped cold when a familiar sensation washed over him.
Dr Silvia hesitated for a moment, and when she finally turned around, the ghost of something ancient came rushing at him, a sense of familiarity that was impossible. It felt as though a connection fell back into place—back where it belonged—and the sheer force of it pressed the air out of his lungs.
She looked at him, her light brown eyes wide, darting all over his body for a moment before they settled on his face.
This feeling... It couldn’t be right. How?
‘Yara?’ He forced the name over his lips, praying that he might be mistaken. Or that he might be right. The emotions were such a whirl within his chest, he didn’t know how he wanted to feel.
The woman in front of him gave a nod, as if she understood he needed a sign to tell him she was really her.
‘Hello, Salvador,’ she said, her voice coated in something he couldn’t decipher.
‘You two already know each other?’ Chief Sakamoto looked at him with a playfully hurt expression, as if he was angry he hadn’t told him.
‘I didn’t know you were Dr Silvia,’ he said, fighting through the fog that had come over his brain. ‘You changed your name.’
A quick expression fluttered over her face, something painful that she shoved away just as fast as it had appeared. ‘People tend to do that when they get married.’
‘They do. But you said you wouldn’t.’ The words came out of his mouth before Salvador could understand where they had even come from. This conversation he was recalling had happened when they were teenagers, fickle beings whose words were worth little to their adult selves.
Only Yara had been so adamant about it. Her family name had been part of her. Lopes. It was strange to believe she had changed her mind. Then again, the woman in front of him wasn’t the girl he had used to know.
He’d do well to remember that.
Yara opened her mouth in a response that wouldn’t come, for her brain had been wiped clear of any thought the second her eyes had met Salvador’s in a moment that had been in the making for decades.
And in all the years she’d thought about what their reunion would be like, she’d never thought it would be those words he hurled at her, aiming for a weakness he couldn’t know lay bare underneath her skin.
What was she supposed to say to that? That her parents had believed him beneath her, so they pressured her into marriage to a different man? One that had stripped all meaning from the name Yara Lopes to the point where she didn’t know if that woman still existed? If that was who Salvador wanted to meet, it would be better for him to find out now that his Yara was long gone.
No one knew about her divorce or how broken it had left her. She certainly wasn’t going to break her silence for Salvador. There were a lot of things she owed him, but that part of her story wasn’t one. What had happened with Lawrence was one of the reasons she had avoided coming back to Brazil, choosing instead to travel the world and make a career out of it. No one could ask questions if she never spent more than a week in one place, and she could keep her secret to herself for just a bit longer.
How could she admit that her parents had wielded so much power over her, threatening her future and her dream if she didn’t do as they asked? She had believed them to have her best interests in mind, despite their stooping low to force her hand. And instead of fighting for Salvador, the man her younger self had believed could be the one, she gave in to the pressure, scared to lose her spot at the University of Rio Grande do Sul if she didn’t comply with their orders.
‘I’m originally from Brasília,’ she said towards Dr Sakamoto, who shot puzzled looks between them. ‘We went to school together.’
He nodded, seemingly satisfied with her explanation, and turned his attention to Salvador.
‘Ah, in this case, I trust you will take some time to get your old friend acquainted with the hospital? Introduce her to everyone in the team?’
Salvador nodded, his spine so stiff from the surprise he looked almost menacing as he towered over the already tall Dr Sakamoto. The Chief only smiled, either unaware of the tension between them or choosing to ignore it altogether, as he nodded to both of them and left.
Silence filled the room, only interrupted by the soft whirring and beeping of the monitor Mr Orlay was hooked up to. There were so many things she wanted to say to him, yet none of the words formed in her head.
How did one apologise for ghosting their teenage boyfriend thirty years after the fact?
‘Can we have a word outside?’ A different setting was definitely the first step.
Salvador glanced at her for a second before moving to the patient. ‘Henrique, I’m afraid we have to take you for another ride to the MRI. You’re still familiar with this?’ He pulled gloves over his hands before showing him a syringe filled with a dark liquid.
Mr Orlay nodded with a sigh that showed just how much he’d already been probed and prodded as they tried to cure him from his mystery ailment. Yara hoped she didn’t have to add too many procedures to his time here before she found out what ailed him.
Salvador had picked up on his unease as well, for he pulled up a stool for a moment so they could be at eye level with each other. ‘I’ve got good news for you, Henry. We flew this kick-ass doctor in to treat you. If anyone can find out what’s going on, it’ll be her. You just have to hang in there a little longer.’
Yara wasn’t sure if some colour had returned to Mr Orlay’s face or if she just imagined it, but she was surprised when he managed to smile at Salvador with a tired nod.
‘I’ll inject the contrast agent now and then we’ll take you down for the scan.’ He got off the chair and injected the agent through the cannula in his hand. ‘Let me arrange an escort for you and I’ll see you in a moment.’
Yara had watched the entire interaction with a warm feeling pooling in the pit of her stomach, which slowly spread through her entire body. She was glad to see that the years had not robbed him of his kindness. He’d always been a caring person, looking out for the weaker people around him and helping them stand strong. Qualities she had always admired in him. It was what had once driven her to strive to be better.
She unfroze when Salvador passed her with barely more than a glance, walking out of the room and down the corridor to the nurses’ station, where he ordered the MRI for Mr Orlay.
‘Salvador,’ she called when she caught up with him and fell silent when he turned around to face her, his eyes filled with an ancient pain she hadn’t expected.
‘I can’t talk right now, Yara, and I’m not even sure I want to,’ he said when the nurse had stepped away and they were alone for the first time.
‘I just need one minute. For better or for worse, we’ll be working together on this for the next few days. So, I want to take a moment to...clear the air. I know nothing I can say will make a difference, but at least give me the chance to listen to you and just...take it.’
She didn’t want to insult him with empty apologies that rang hollow with the decades they had been left unsaid.
Salvador crossed his arms in front of his chest, his jaw rolling as he considered her words, and with each passing second the knot in her stomach got tighter.
This was so not how she had imagined any of this would go. Sure, she knew he was going to be angry. He had every right to be. But, knowing the kind soul beneath the gruff exterior, she also truly had thought he’d give her a chance to say what she had to say. If, at the end of that, he decided that the hurt ran too deep, Yara would let it be and work with him in any professional capacity necessary.
Though as she watched Salvador silently making the decision of whether he wanted to hear her out, she realised that not a small part of her wanted to reconcile with him. Their friendship had meant so much to her and if it hadn’t been for the pressure her parents put on her they might have seen their budding romance come to fruition. Her heart had called for him even as she decided to leave, choosing her dream of becoming a physician over their relationship—just as her parents had wanted her to.
‘I can’t deal with this right now, Yara,’ Salvador finally said, and those words cracked her chest open. Disappointment flooded her system, extinguishing the tiny glimmer of hope she had nurtured on her way here.
His gaze flickered over her shoulder and she followed it, watching as someone from their medical team wheeled Mr Orlay down the corridor.
‘It doesn’t have to be much. Just one cup of coffee in between patients. We’ll be working together on this, no matter how we feel about each other—so I need to know there won’t be any problems.’
She was the lead physician on this case, after all, and there was truth in her reasoning. They were going to work together, and the tension between them wouldn’t help with the patient’s care, especially not if either of them was constantly thinking about the other one.
‘Give me one minute of your time, Salvador,’ she said when his eyes drifted back to her, his glare hard and unreadable.
The line of his jaw tightened as his chest rose in a deep inhale. ‘I’m needed for the scan.’
