Authors: Linda Howard
The gray-haired woman patted his arm in sympathy, evidently thinking he was on the verge of tears. The simple, compassionate gesture startled him. People didn’t touch him so casually, so easily. There had always been something about him that made people keep their distance, something cold and lethal to which this woman was evidently impervious. Drea had touched him, though; she’d put her hand on his chest, she had clung to him and kissed him, her mouth as tender and hungry as if she couldn’t resist the urge. The memory made him swallow convulsively, and that loosened his throat enough that he managed to talk. “I think I read something about that,” he lied, choking the words out.
“The medics said she was dead at the scene. They were packing everything up when one of them heard her gasping. They swore she hadn’t had a pulse, but all of a sudden she did. They had to cut the branch off so they could bring her in, because they figured if they pulled it out they’d do even more damage, plus the branch must somehow have been pressing against her aorta, kept her from bleeding to death.” The burly guy crossed his arms over his massive chest. “They thought for sure she’d be brain dead, but she wasn’t. Took over eighteen hours of surgery to patch her up, then…was it three days ago when they moved her?”
“Two. Day before yesterday,” said the gray-haired woman, picking up the story.
“They moved her into a regular room. I heard she’s doing fine, but I also heard she can’t talk, so maybe there was some brain damage.”
“She’s started talking,” someone else said. “She said something to one of the nurses. They were all talking about it.”
“That’s amazing,” Simon said, his stomach doing the loop-the-loop again, this time joined by his heart. With distant amazement, he realized he might pass out—or vomit. Or both. She was doing fine. She was talking.
“It’s a miracle, for sure,” said the burly guy. “She was a Jane Doe. She didn’t have any kind of ID, and nobody seemed to be looking for her. They couldn’t get her to write her name or anything. Now that she’s talking, though, I guess they know her real name.”
No, they wouldn’t, Simon realized. Drea was too sharp for that. She’d give them a fake name, which presented him with a problem: how was he to find her? Even if he gained access to a computer, which he had no doubt he could manage, he had no idea what name she’d told them. Swiftly he abandoned that idea; he’d have to tackle this from a different direction.
“Who was her doctor?” He had no reason to ask a question like that, but people talked about any number of subjects in a hospital waiting room. They talked to pass the time, they talked to distract themselves, they formed relationships that might not last beyond their loved one’s stay in the ICU, but while they were enclosed in this glass cell they laughed and cried together, comforted one another, passed along family recipes and birthdays—anything to get by.
“Meecham” was the prompt answer. “Heart surgeon.”
The surgeon would make his rounds every day, visit all his patients. When someone had a traumatic injury like Drea had suffered, the surgeon’s ego got all tied up in how well that patient was doing, especially when the patient had defied all odds and survived. Finding Dr. Meecham wouldn’t be difficult; following him around wouldn’t be, either.
He thought about hospitals, about how they were organized. Patients weren’t assigned willy-nilly to an empty bed; different floors were for different situations, which streamlined different types of care by concentrating it. There was the maternity floor, the orthopedic floor—and the post-op surgical floor, which was where Drea would most likely be.
Doors to the patients’ rooms were left open a lot, whether it was from carelessness, haste, or for the nurses’ convenience. The odds were at least fifty-fifty he could walk down the hall on the surgical floor, glance in all the rooms that had open doors, and find her. If not, then he’d trail Dr. Meecham. One way or another, though, he would find her. There had never been anything more important to him than that.
He had never cared about anything before, much less so intensely that he couldn’t let it go and walk away. He didn’t like it, but he still couldn’t let it go. Drea represented a weakness that could be used against him, by
Across the hall, the double doors to the ICU swung open and a small knot of nurses, both male and female, came out of the unit. He didn’t need access to the unit now, so he didn’t follow them. If it turned out he needed to lift an ID tag so he could go into controlled areas, he’d get one, but first he’d see if he could locate Drea the easy way.
She was here, she was alive, and she was talking.
Abruptly he couldn’t sit there another minute, another second, couldn’t hold his act together and pretend he was concerned about his nonexistent mother when all he wanted to do was get somewhere he could be alone until he had himself back under control.
“I’m sorry,” he said, breaking into the conversation that had been flowing around and over him, then getting up and striding out of the waiting room. He looked around, spotted a restroom, and all but bolted for it. It was, thank God, a one-seater; he locked the door, then stood trembling in the middle of the tiny room.
What in hell was going on? He’d spent his entire adult life, and some years before that, perfecting his control. He tested himself, learned his own limits, and then pushed those limits. He didn’t fall apart, had never fallen apart. Everything he did and everything he said was deliberate, chosen to produce the response or result he wanted.
He could handle this. Finding out she was alive and at least functional was good news—still a shock, but nothing to send him over the edge. If he could find a way to talk to her without scaring her to death, he’d tell her she had nothing to fear from him, that as far as
Besides, there was always the possibility that she truly didn’t remember who she was, in which case she wouldn’t remember him, either. Just because she was talking didn’t mean she was mentally unscathed. He had to get a grip, and find out exactly how she was instead of letting his imagination run away with him.
Shit. Imagination. When the fuck had he started having an imagination? He dealt in facts, in hard reality, in what was. Reality was solid. He could depend on reality, depend on it being a cold, hard bitch. That was okay with him, because he was a cold, hard bastard. They were a good pair.
He took several deep breaths and shook off whatever the hell it was that had him so on edge. All he had to do was find Drea, and discover for himself exactly what her condition was; then he could get back to
SURGICAL POST-OP WAS ONE FLOOR DOWN, SO SIMON TOOK the stairs instead of dealing with the elevator. He preferred the stairs anyway; they gave him two directions of escape, while an elevator not only trapped him in a small box, it followed its electronic commands in the order in which it received them. If it was going “down” and had already received a call from a lower floor, he couldn’t punch the button for a higher floor and make the elevator go “up” instead.
The hospital’s general shape was a giant T, but it was lying down instead of standing up. He came out at the end of the long hallway and systematically walked the floor. Each room had a small plaque outside the door with the patient’s last name as well as the doctor’s name, which was damn convenient for his purposes.
The nurses’ station was situated at the intersection of the T, but the nurses couldn’t see down the hallways unless they stepped out from behind the divider. At the moment, with the shift change just ending and the morning meals being delivered, the hallways were a beehive of activity and he blended into the general hubbub. He kept an easy pace, looking into all the rooms with open doors but taking care to move only his eyes and keep his head steady, so to the casual observer he wouldn’t be paying any attention to the patients.
At least half the doors were closed, but with one reconnaissance he was able to eliminate all of those patients whose doors were open, because none of them were Drea. As he walked he noted the rooms that had Dr. Meecham listed as the doctor, marking their location in the three-dimensional map of his surroundings that he carried at all times in his head.
Then he saw the name “Doe,” and he almost stumbled.
Room 614. Meecham was the doctor listed.
The door was closed, but he knew he’d found her. She was there, just on the other side of that door. He knew it was Drea. There were people with the actual last name of “Doe,” but what were the odds one of them would be on this floor, at this time, with Meecham as the doctor?
His hand closed around the door handle almost before he realized he was reaching for it.
Slowly, carefully, he forced himself to release the handle. If he walked in there she’d scream the place down—assuming she recognized him. He still didn’t know her mental state.
The name “Doe” didn’t tell him anything. If she’d come through without brain damage, she would take full advantage of the circumstances and not tell them her real name. If she did have brain damage, which was likely, then she might not know her name.
Belatedly he noticed the sign on the door: No Visitors.
There were two layers of meaning to the sign. The first was obvious: no visitors. The second was “why not?” Who had put it there? The hospital, because curiosity-seekers and/or the press had been annoying/agitating/gawking at the patient, or had the patient herself requested the sign be posted? Drea certainly wouldn’t want any press, and she would want to keep any cops at bay, too, until she had cooked up a suitable story and felt able to handle them.
But he now had the name she was registered under, and he knew her room number. He’d be able to find out everything he wanted to know. He didn’t have to actually see her, didn’t have to talk to her; he could safely ignore the weird compulsion he felt to do exactly that.
Looking down the hall, he saw that the big cart laden with food trays was just three rooms down. The door to the room next to Drea’s was closed, too, so he moved farther down and leaned against the wall right outside the door, as if a nurse or tech had gone into the room to perform some duty and asked him to wait outside. He kept his gaze on the floor.
The cafeteria lady worked quickly, delivering the food trays to the proper rooms. She pushed the cart toward him, stopping it just past the door to Drea’s room. He glanced up, ready to give a quick, polite smile if she looked at him, but she ignored him as if he were so much furniture. People who worked in hospitals saw a lot of people leaning against walls.
She pulled out a tray, which looked as if it held only orange gelatin, fruit juice, coffee, and milk, but any food at all meant Drea was capable of feeding herself, rather than being fed by a tube. The cafeteria worker knocked quickly on the door, then opened it without waiting for an answer.
“Is that real food?” he heard Drea ask, her tone grumpy.
The cafeteria lady laughed. “You’ve graduated to Jell-O. If your stomach handles that without any upset, maybe tomorrow you can have mashed potatoes. We just bring what your doctor says you can have.”
After a brief silence, Drea said, “
“Would you like to have two?”
“Can you do that?”
“Sure. Any time you want more, just let us know.”
“In that case, yes, I definitely want another Jell-O. I’m starving.”
While Drea was talking to the cafeteria lady and concentrating on her food, Simon straightened away from the wall and walked quickly past her door, not turning his head to look at her.
For a moment he was walking blindly, and did not see the young woman who stepped out of a room until he bumped into her. “Sorry,” he said automatically, without looking at her, and plowed ahead.
The next thing he knew, he was crushed into the back corner of a crowded elevator and had no memory of getting on it. He, who always knew not only exactly what he was doing but what everyone around him was doing, who even studied a public restroom from a strategic standpoint before entering it, had let himself get so wrapped up in his thoughts he hadn’t paid any attention to what he was doing or where he was going.
He exited on the ground floor, but the elevator he’d taken wasn’t in the same bank as the one he’d used going up. Instead of coming out close to the emergency room entrance, he was in the main lobby, which boasted a soaring, two-story atrium in which live ficus trees grew.