She nodded, lips pursed, trying not to cry. “How do you know that?”
“Because you’re not afraid to follow your heart when things feel wrong. You were bold enough to act.”
A tear rolled down her cheek, but she was smiling. “Your friendship these past few days has meant everything. You prevented me from drowning in my sorrow.”
“Same.”
She reached over and touched my cheek. I squeezed my eyes shut, wanting to remember her touch. I grasped her hand and held on.
“I’ll never forget you,” I whispered.
Then I kissed her one last time and forced myself to leave.
Chapter Three
Ten Months Later
Ani
“The new head of the ER is a real hunkadoodle.” Angie, the head staff nurse in the Oak Bluff ER, waggled her brows and nudged me with her elbow as we walked at a steady clip down a corridor of the emergency department.
“I haven’t met him yet.” I’d only been doing ER shifts for a few months, and it was a little nerve-wracking, but Angie always had my back. Just so long as her poking meant she wasn’t secretly trying to fix me up. That was the very last thing I wanted.
I vowed to take at least a full year to focus on getting used to my practice, getting settled back in my hometown, and learning not to hate the ER shifts that I had to do four times a month, like all the other primary care docs who worked in our small community. We helped out because there simply weren’t enough ER docs to go around.
“He’s coming in to work tonight,” she said. Who? Oh, the hunkadoodle. “So you’ll get to meet him. Except…”
I halted. “Except?”
Angie stopped before a closed exam room door and handed me a rectangular plastic package containing a sterilized set of tweezers. “Except he’s a teeny tiny bit grumpy. The staff’s started calling him Dr. Grumpenstein.”
I didn’t care about the hunk part, as I was off hunks since my failed wedding last summer. (Well, except for the angel hunk I’d met on my honeymoon trip—but he was too wonderful to be real.) But the grumpy part gave me cause for concern. A grumpy boss could make life hell, and my new life in Oak Bluff already felt like that in some ways.
My life was still so unsettled, and one thought kept tugging on my brain: Coming home had been a huge mistake. I just wasn’t gelling with my partners. My mother was troublesome—I still didn’t think she’d forgiven me for all the wedding headaches. The house I’d fully bought out from my ex was still a war zone of remodeling.
And while my two best friends had met their forever people, I was convinced that I would never meet any eligible men under the age of sixty in this small town. Not that I wanted to date right then, but someday. Maybe. So my move home was adding up to my making another big whopping mistake.
I frowned. “How grumpy is he?”
“He’s a stickler for rules. And he’s all business.”
“That’s a good thing,” I said carefully. I didn’t need a boss who noticed me in any way except as a colleague. No matter how messed up my personal life might be, I was a good doctor. And I worked damn hard at it. That was the only thing I wanted to be noticed for—being good at my job.
I was just about to ask his name when Angie adjusted the band of the high-intensity lamp on her forehead. “How do I look?”
“I hear coal miner chic is all the rage for ER nurses now.”
It was near midnight on a blustery April 14th, and it was snowing, which was not unusual for central Wisconsin at this time of year. Above our heads, paper tulips hanging from the ceiling tiles twirled in the breeze from the heat. Lights salvaged from the ER Christmas stash flashed gently as they looped around colored Easter eggs.
Spring should be on the way, but winter was lingering forever.
Plus, the ER was a little scary. I was a pediatrician, not an ER doc. I didn’t like the scary stuff that could walk through the door at any moment, even though the staff was very nice and always competent. Crash and dash simply wasn’t my personality. I loved talking with families, teaching new moms, and dealing with little kids, but I hated knowing that anything could walk in the door at any time—an infected hangnail one minute, a full cardiac arrest the next.
Despite my ER fears, I’d always dreamed of practicing in my hometown, in a small practice where I actually knew my patients and could spend time with them. My mom had said that no one should make any major life decisions within a year of a crisis, so I took that to heart and kept hanging in there, hoping for all my feelings of dread to turn around.
Angie was adjusting the settings on her headlamp. Except she accidentally turned on strobe mode, nearly blinding me. “Sorry,” she said in a sheepish tone, quickly hitting the off switch. “When there’s a foreign body up a toddler’s nose, you need all the help you can get. It’s like a cave in there. Especially when you’re working through snot and tears.”
I laughed. Angie had been working the Oak Bluff Hospital ER way before med school was even a twinkle in my eye. She always managed to make me laugh, regardless of my worries.
