The dread and fear Hayley had felt just that morning in Deb’s bedroom returned, coiling up and sitting in her stomach like a rock. Stalling for time, she took a long drink of her ice water before answering. “It’s just… it’s been a while since I’ve been with anyone.”
“I remember. About five years, if I recall right.” Mirenda had been by Hayley’s side in the ICU for a long time. She did know where a lot of Hayley’s skeletons were stored.
“Yeah. And you remember how that ended.” The memories were sour, hard to look back on.
“Mmhmm. Well. Actually.” Mirenda sat up with a frown. “I don’t know if I ever knew the ins and outs of it, Hay. You can be a real vault when you want to be.”
“Tell me what you do remember.” It would be interesting to see someone else’s perspective. To see if she was just being overly paranoid.
Mirenda’s eyes went distant as she thought, her finger tapping at her bottom lip. “It was fast. What was her name… Alayna? It was her, right? The charge nurse from Cardiac.”
“That’s the one,” Hayley confirmed grimly.
“You two were together for a while, I remember. It was cute. I mean, I thought it was. Was it?”
“Yeah.” She’d never been so happy. Amazing sex, vacations around the world, nights at home snuggled up together with good books. She and Alayna had been two peas in a pod. Not arelationship with excessive fireworks, but something good and comfortable and serious after many years of alternately screwing around and diving into her work headfirst.
It was perfect, which was when she, Hayley, had fucked it all right up.
“My parents split up when I was seventeen,” Hayley said, twisting her fingers together. “Well. Split up would imply that my father was in any way involved in the decision, but he was as blindsided as I was. One afternoon my mother came home from the private school she taught at, acting perfectly normal. I came home from hanging out with my friends. We did my homework and then made dinner together. Meatloaf, potatoes, a Caesar salad on the side with the dressing she taught me how to make.” She swallowed hard. “Dad came home, we ate in the living room. Watched some movie I don’t remember.”
“Okay…” Mirenda seemed mystified, and Hayley didn’t blame her.
“This all ties together, I promise.” She paused for another drink of water and a deep breath. “We all went to bed at 11 PM. I had never heard my parents so much as argue over buying groceries, right? It’s important that you understand that. No raised voices, no unreasonable demands. We were happy.”
“Someone wasn’t,” Mirenda said, a shrewd note in her voice.
“And we had no idea. None.” Hayley shook her head. “I woke up the next morning and went downstairs, and there’s my dad at the kitchen table with a note in his hand and nothing in his eyes.”
“Oh, damn.” A low whistle from Mirenda and a deep sympathy in her gaze when Hayley looked at her. “I’m sorry, Hay. Did she say why she went?”
“She might have, in her note. But I have no idea.” She looked back down at her hands and knotted her fingers together again. “My dad looked at me, said, ‘She’s gone,’ and left to go to work.He took the note with him and shredded it in the school office. And he never said anything about Mom ever again.”
“Oh,damn,” Mirenda repeated, with more feeling this time, and she covered Hayley’s twitching hands with one of hers, stilling the anxious twisting. “Jesus, Hay. That’s horrible. You never said. All you ever said was that your mom was gone, so we all assumed…”
“You were supposed to assume that. And for all I know, sheisreally gone. Would I ever know otherwise? I don’t know how. I wouldn’t know where to begin looking. Or if I want to. That all…” Hayley waved a hand in the air. “I mean, let’s be real, it fucked me up. I have never been normal with relationships since.”
Mirenda frowned. “What, fear of abandonment?”
Hayley touched her nose and pointed at her colleague. “Got it.” Pulling her shoulders back, she sat up very straight and took a long, deep breath. “I got paranoid. Poor Alayna had to put up with me just…interrogatingher all the time, and for what? She took a little long at the store? Didn’t want me to come with her everywhere all the time? Didn’t immediately answer my text message? Nothing was happening but every day crap, but every little issue was a major disaster for me.” She braced her elbows on the desk and rubbed her forehead.
“I remember,” Mirenda said slowly. “You were so secretive. Your temper wasshort. Always running off and whispering into your phone.” She tapped her chin, deep in thought. “We all thought it was something to do with family issues. No one wanted to ask, though. You had us on eggshells.”
Hayley winced. “Sorry. I didn’t know.”
“Well, now you do.” Propping her head on her hand, Mirenda regarded Hayley soberly. “So that’s why Alayna transferred out of Oakridge. Where’d she go?”
“St. Louis. That heart hospital there. To be fair, she has family in the area, and they headhunted her. She’d turned themdown twice but I finally just… drove her off.” Hayley sighed. “By the end, she didn’t even want to be in the same room with me.”
“That really sucks, Hay. I’m sorry.” Mirenda bit her lip, hesitating. But only for a moment. “So, okay. That is bad. But that was a real relationship, you two had been together for a couple of years. This thing with Doctor Morales, that’s one night.”
“But I want to do itagain.” Hayley buried her face in her hands. The unexpected coziness and passion of the morning had taken her back to the good times she’d had with Alayna… and reminded her of what she’d lost. “I want to fight with her, I want to have makeup sex with her, I want to eat Cinnamon Toast Crunch with her on a Saturday morning, I want to… hell, I want to take her on her first international trip and make out with her in like, five European capitals.”
“And how does she feel about this after one night?” Mirenda asked, a slight note of incredulity in her voice.
“No idea, but what if she wants it too? She’s the one who asked me out.” Panic began to crawl up Hayley’s throat hand over hand from her stomach. “Alayna and I were so, so compatible. We never fought, we just clicked from the start and we worked. And I still messed it up. Deb and I are absolutely the opposite of that, we’ve been at loggerheads since day one. How can that work? I’m just going to push her away, too.” Her throat began to close up. “What if I have to be the one to leave this time? What if I mess up that badly?”
“Whoa, whoa, hey now, Nurse Perfectionist.” Mirenda’s hands reached out to pull Hayley’s hands away from her face, and she turned them both so they were facing each other in their desk chairs. “You are inviting trouble in way before it’s even left its house.”
