Has been ever since Dad handed her the keys.
I can’t help another sigh as I run a line under my eye with the pencil.
I owe my entire life to Rouge. When I came to her, it was at my lowest point. She gave me a steady job singing and performing, and I make a nice chunk of change by offering my—ahem—other services to the Aces patronage. I can afford a luxury apartment right in the middle of downtown Chicago, a far cry from the mousehole I called home in New York.
I’m doing what I love, even if it’s not quite the avenue I hoped for when I stepped off that plane at LaGuardia Airport all those years ago.
I should be happy.
Except that I’m not.
3
HARRISON
“What do you mean?” Dinah asks.
“Think about it.” I place my cell phone on the nurses’ station counter. “The only communication we’ve received from Alissa has been written. She hasn’t called once. In a month.”
Dinah drops her jaw. “Dr. O’Rourke, you couldn’t possibly be insinuating…”
I hold up a hand. “I’m not insinuating anything. It’s just… They’ve been gone for so long. Before that, they were dating for all of two weeks. To go on a trip twice as long as the time you’ve actually been dating? It feels fishy.” I rub at my jaw. “Something isn’t right here.”
“Alissa seemed to be pretty head over heels for him, though,” Dinah says. “Those first few days she was mooning all over the hospital. Big, dreamy eyes, humming to herself. She was a walking cliché. Even the patients picked up on it.”
“Maddox seemed pretty into Alissa as well,” I reply. “But there’s something gnawing at the back of my neck about this.”
“I feel it, too. I tried to ignore it the first couple of weeks, but now it feels like we need to figure out what the hell is going on.”
“Steady, Dinah. There could be a rational explanation for all of this.” I draw in a breath. “Maybe we’re not seeing the forest for the trees here. We don’t know the whole story.”
“I suppose so. All I really know is that Alissa met Maddox two weeks before Valentine’s Day, and they saw a lot of each other those first few weekends.”
“And then she was back to work Monday.” I open the calendar app on my phone. “That would have been the ninth of February. What happened that day?”
Dinah focuses her gaze on the hospital computer. “It was a pretty normal day here… No big emergencies, no deaths… Oh! But that was the day Lou Chambers got his heart. She would have been overjoyed. He’s one of her all-time favorites.”
“Right. And Carol had just gotten her lungs a few days prior.” I tap my finger to my chin. “So Alissa was in a good mood.”
“Well…she should have been.” Dinah frowns. “But shortly after I told her the good news, she got this haunted look on her face. Like she’d just seen a ghost or something. It was just for a second, and then she pasted on a smile. But she’s my best friend, Dr. O’Rourke. I could see through it in a heartbeat.”
“Why didn’t you say something then?”
“Because she was off to go see Lou before his surgery. She didn’t have a lot of time to spare.”
“Of course.”
“If I remember though”—she narrows her eyes—“she had just come up the elevator with you when I saw her, told her about Lou.”
I smack my palm against my forehead. “Right. I came up with her on the elevator that day. Maddox had walked her to the hospital.” I furrow my brow as I try to remember. “And now that I think of it, he said something odd right before he left.”
Dinah widens her eyes. “What?”
“Well first off, my guard was already up because he had told me he was taking the day off from the haberdashery he runs in Uptown. Extremely out of character for Maddox. I don’t think he had ever closed the shop since his father’s death.” I pace in front of the nurses’ counter. “Something would really have to shake him to keep him from going to work. At the time I thought it was because of Alissa, but that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense since it’s not as if he could hang out with her while she was working at the hospital.”
“But what did Maddox say that was odd?”
“Right. His voice got all serious, which was very off-brand compared to our usual back and forth. He played it off as casual, but like you said, a best friend can tell when something’s up. He told me to make sure she stayed safe while she was working.”
