Anger at him for being a cop, for putting her in a position where she’d been forced to watch him suffer, for being shot, for lying there on the bed oblivious to everything going on with her, for not waking up, damn it!
For making her love him—but also resent him. She didn’t want to feel this way, this constant buzz of fury and fear.
“Regina?” Her mother’s voice startled her.
“What the hell are you doing here?” Gina snapped. So typical of her mother, barging into the ICU, totally ignoring the rules to do what she damn well pleased.
LaRose didn’t censure her for her tone or language. Gina squinted at her—was she okay? Her mother kept a safe distance from Jerry and the medical paraphernalia, holding the skirt of her ballgown as she maneuvered to Gina’s side of the bed. Then she laid her palm against Gina’s cheek as if feeling for a fever. So not like LaRose.
“You’re hurt.” LaRose gestured to Gina’s split lip. Good thing she couldn’t see the other bruises.
“It’s nothing.” Gina turned her attention back to Jerry. She was too tired to spend energy deciphering LaRose’s machinations.
“I’m sorry you didn’t get your medal. They announced that they’ll hold the ceremony sometime after New Year’s. Hopefully Moses will get to see you accept it. It would make him so proud.”
Her words finally penetrated. Gina raised her head. “Moses isn’t even here? He didn’t come?”
LaRose shrugged one shoulder. “Emergency with a client. He called to check on you when he heard.”
“To see if I’d embarrassed him, no doubt.” Gina didn’t bother to disguise her scorn.
“No, baby. To see if you were okay. He was worried. So was I.”
Gina stared at her, disbelieving. LaRose didn’t meet her gaze, but instead concentrated on smoothing the wrinkles from her dress. A Dior, Gina recognized.
“Tell him I’m fine.”
There was a long pause. “I will. I’d better go now.” LaRose stepped back as Janet Kwon entered the ICU and made a beeline for Jerry’s bedside, scattering anyone in her way. “Take care, Regina.”
“How’s he doing?” Janet Kwon asked, ignoring LaRose as the other woman left.
“Stable.” Gina hated that word.
“I wanted to ask you a few questions.”
Gina looked up at that. She’d already talked with the cops ad nauseam—Janet wouldn’t be investigating the case, not when her own partner was the victim.
“What?” She had no energy for pleasantries.
“The gunman. We found an old newspaper clipping in his pocket. You know anything about it?”
Lydia. Gina’s anger blazed into fury. This was all Lydia’s fault—and Gina had no idea what to do about it. Try to warn Lydia? Tell the cops? Say nothing and let whatever happened, happen?
“Ask Lydia Fiore.”
Janet didn’t look surprised. “I wondered. Jerry mentioned some cold case she was involved in. Guess it’s not so cold after all.”
Gina felt her fury settle into a low simmer that warmed her gut. “What did the surgeons tell Jerry’s family?”
“A lot of muckety-muck. Not sure if they understood it all, but they didn’t paint a pretty picture.” Janet surprised Gina by taking Jerry’s other hand in hers, stroking it with her thumb. “Why do I get the feeling they might have been optimistic?”
“The bullet didn’t exit; it plowed over the top of his frontal cortex, came to rest on the opposite side. It’s a miracle he’s alive,” Gina said, her voice flat. As if she were talking about someone else, anyone else besides Jerry. In a way she was. “Whatever happens, even if he lives, he might never be the Jerry Boyle you and I knew.”
Janet’s lips thinned, and she brushed her eyes with her hand. “Okay. Thanks for giving it to me straight, Gina.” She kissed the back of Jerry’s hand and tucked it under the sheets as if she were putting a child to bed. “Oh, one more thing. Diana DeFalco found this in his pocket.”
She opened her fist, revealing a woman’s diamond ring.
Gina blinked back tears blurring her vision. She turned away to focus on Jerry’s face. Swollen with bruises and post-op fluid retention, he looked grotesque, nothing like her Jerry.
But he wasn’t hers anymore, was he? She’d acted like a coward, she’d led him into danger, she didn’t deserve him. “It’s not mine.”
“I thought maybe you’d like to hold on to it,” Janet said in a quiet tone. She pressed the cold, hard diamond into Gina’s palm, wrapping her fingers around it. “Jerry would want it that way.”
As Janet walked away, Gina’s tears were finally free to fall, splashing onto Jerry’s cheek where they glittered in the harsh overhead exam light.
She sat there, head bowed, eyes closed, trying hard not to think, not to remember, not to feel. A man laid his hand on her shoulder. She didn’t need to look to know it was Ken Rosen.
“Are you all right?” he asked, standing behind her.
No one had asked that. They asked about Jerry, asked about what happened, asked about the gunman.
Only Ken had wanted to know about her. She bit her lip, desperate to tell him the truth. Her shoulders quivered with the effort it took to hold herself together, but she refused to surrender.
She straightened, tucked in the sheet around Jerry, and folded her hands in her lap, still not looking back at Ken. Jerry’s diamond was sharp against her sweaty palm. “Why’d you keep the bulletproof vest, Ken?”
He sucked in his breath, his fingers curling against her shoulder. Holding on tight. As if he needed her strength. Hah. Not Mr. Zen Master.
“That day back in July,” he finally said. “I didn’t save those kids because I was any kind of hero. Just the opposite. Those guys started shooting and there I was and all I could think was it was my chance to—” He faltered, his fingers slipping from her shoulder. Gina reached back, anchoring his hand beneath her own. “I thought I’d be with my family. At last.” He cleared his throat. “Silly, since I don’t believe in heaven or anything. But I was . . . ready.”
His words hung in the air until the beeping of Jerry’s heart rate on the monitor scattered them. Gina sneaked in a breath, afraid to say anything. Behind her, Ken shifted his weight.
“Anyway, that’s when you showed up. Saved me.”
She shook her head, glad he couldn’t see her face. “Wasn’t me. It was Jerry—he gave me the vest. Without it, we’d both be dead.”
He spun her in the chair so that she faced him, her back to Jerry. He took her hand in both of his and crouched down until they were eye to eye. “Don’t you believe that, Gina. Jerry wasn’t out there on that street. You were. You were the real hero. You
are
a real hero. Even if you don’t want to believe it.” He squeezed her fingers so tightly they hurt. “Don’t you ever forget that. I won’t. You saved my life.”
The icy numbness that had encased Gina was slow to crack. Something splintered inside her as his words chiseled into her awareness. Then he surprised her by kissing her forehead, his lips warm against her chilled skin. “Thank you.” He walked away.
Gina wanted to say something, wanted to race after him, wanted desperately to believe his words.
But she needed time.
She sat there, watching him leave, her eyes glazed over. He looked back at her once, before the ICU doors closed behind him. A wistful glance that told her everything she needed to know. She let her breath out and curled her fingers around Jerry’s ring.
“Everything’s going to be all right,” she whispered. Jerry’s heartbeat beeped steady. She took that as a sign. “I’ll make it right. For everyone. I promise.”
“NICE JOB,” LUCAS TOLD AMANDA WHEN SHE FINALLY turned away from Zachary’s bedside. The little boy had surprised them all. His lungs were working, keeping him alive. “You have a talent for this. Have you thought of critical care medicine?”
This discussion wasn’t about her choice of specialty, and they both knew it. Amanda motioned him into the break room. He followed her, standing motionless at the door, while she paced the room, finally coming to rest at the window overlooking the snow-covered cemetery. Even the vandalized angel where Karen had been found looked peaceful in the snow.
“I owe you an apology,” she started. “I’m sorry. It all just kind of—”
He shook his head at her sternly. “No. That’s not the problem. It’s not about your overeager need to solve the problems of the world. It’s about the fact that if I were any other attending in this medical center, hell, in the state, you’d be on your way to being dismissed from medical school right now. It’s about your gambling with your career and using me to do it.”
His anger propelled her back against the window despite the fact that he hadn’t raised his voice or taken a step in her direction. It didn’t help matters knowing that he was right.
“I was wrong not to talk to you,” she admitted. “I should have called you as soon as I confirmed the teratoma.”
“Yes, a phone call before my patient was whisked away to surgery would have been most appreciated.” He scowled, crossing his arms over his chest, still not moving toward her.
“You could have trusted me,” she protested, her own anger beginning to flare.
His eyes grew wide with surprise, and he dropped his arms to his side. “I do trust you. I would believe you if you told me the sky was polka-dot,” he said. “But don’t ask me to change the way I treat patients, not based on a gut feeling. I need facts. I can’t risk their lives on anything less.”
“But I had facts—”
“One case study is not a fact. It’s one person out of six billion.”
“Two. Now it’s two. Plus those reports Dr. Koenig has.”
“Unpublished reports don’t count.” He waved Dr. Koenig’s cases aside. “I can’t practice medicine with my gut instincts, not like Lydia. And you’re still learning; you should learn how to interpret things like case studies, how to be a little cynical about what you read, research methodology, conclusions—”
The door burst open and Tank rushed in. He’d somehow conned his mother into agreeing to let him stay at Narolie’s bedside.
“She’s awake!” he shouted. “She said my name, she’s talking and everything!”
He slammed the door again, dancing a little jig as he rushed back to Narolie’s room across the hall. Amanda felt her heart rise with joy.
“See?” she said to Lucas, joining him at the door and taking his hand. “There are two cases. You just needed to have a little faith.”
“Faith? Faith had nothing to do—” His words stalled as he got a faraway look on his face. “There
are
two, aren’t there?”
“Lucas?”
“There are two! You still need to do a research project for your senior thesis, right?”
“I was going to do a chart review—”
“No. You’re going to learn how to do real science. Not some piddly chart review where the computer does all the work for you. You’re going to learn how to think.” He held her around the waist as if they were waltzing. “How to think like a real scientist. So next time you won’t need to trust in faith to save your patients.”
“You want me to document the antibodies that caused Narolie’s symptoms? But how? Would we need her brain tissue?”
“Think it through.” He stood at arm’s length, his hands on her hips, head cocked as he watched her.
“Wait. We have her blood. Before and after the tumor was removed. And”—her face lit up—“we have the tumor. We can tag the white blood cells, bathe the tumor in them, do an immunofluorescence stain—”
“Right, and we can do follow up titres a month or two out.”
“Lucas, it’s perfect. We can even get it published, I bet!”
“I’m sure of it.” His smile lit his face. “Only one problem.”
“What’s that?” Amanda asked, her mind still spinning through the science.
“I won’t have time to plan a wedding if I’m working on a new research project with you.”
She laughed. “Actually, I think that would be the best gift you could ever give your future mother-in-law. She’ll love taking it on.”
Amanda stopped. Through the glass walls of Narolie’s room she saw Narolie sitting up, beaming as she gestured animat edly to Tank. “Look at those two. It’s so beautiful. You know what? We need to run a quick errand before we go in.” She tugged at his hand, leading him toward the PICU doors.
“Wait, where are we going?”
“Outside, where it’s snowing, Lucas. Snow! We’re going to get Narolie a wheelchair and take her out to see it. You and Tank can show her how to make a snow angel.”
His laughter echoed through the hallway, startling a nurse’s aide walking from the elevator. He pulled Amanda tight to him. “You’re the only angel I need.”
LYDIA LAY ON HER BACK, HER FINGERS TRAPPED in small cages that held them suspended as the ortho resident added more weight to the stack hanging from her right arm. He’d been trying for almost an hour to realign the bones in her forearm. A broken ulna and radius and an assortment of bruises were her only injuries from Glen Bakker’s attack.
She still had to deal with the nonphysical fallout. Starting with the police questioning her endlessly, and now Trey, who had rushed over but had been kept waiting until the police were done.
Wincing as the weight settled into place, she turned to face Trey. It seemed like their conversation kept spinning in the same circles: that she somehow should have abandoned Nora to Glen, how she should have called Trey—as if that would have done any good with him across town at his parents’ house—and that she needed to stay in the hospital overnight to be on the safe side.
Wrong on all counts.
“She needs more fentanyl,” Trey protested when she gritted her teeth and her heart rate spiked on the monitor above her.
“No, I don’t.” She wanted to keep a clear head. The cops had told her about Jerry—what little they knew, at any rate. “Did you reach Janet Kwon yet?”
“She said she’d be down as soon as she checked on Jerry.”
“How’s he doing?”