She didn't know she was in love with Dr Mac until he'd been dead for twenty years. All those years ago she knew he was gay. Knew he hung out with the phlebotomists in the back office snorting coke through a one ml. serological pipette. She knew why he did not go home to his beautiful wife and brilliant children. Why he stayed in the lab until three in the morning. The others said Dr Mac wasn't gay, that she had a dirty mind. They did know he wasn't an MD. They did know the nurses on the floors did not know. They did know he wrote orders to change antibiotic medications and the nurses implemented them. They also knew his orders may have saved lives. It was an unspoken secret.
He died of AIDS though no one acknowledged it. It was early on. She visited him when he was admitted, emaciated and hollow eyed and out of his mind. He did not know her.
She didn't believe in ghosts, but in later years he was always there when she tried to interpret a difficult gram stain. She'd enter his interpretation and mostly he was right - or she was, depending how you look on such matters.
She was younger then, still dreamed of a good relationship with a fellow human being. As the years progressed she remembered more and more the quiet conversations and the pizza that he would share around. They ate in the lab in those days...food and coffee cups and ash trays among the microscopes and centrifuges. Dr Mac could talk and laugh about everything and anything.
So now she was old and tired and she allowed herself to believe that the only man she ever loved was a diseased and dying married gay drug addicted imposter. She'd never find another like him.