I smoothed my fingertips up and down the veins along his forearm. “You’re not responsible for your sister contracting pneumonia.”
He gave me a sad smile. “I know that now. But at the time that she contracted pneumonia, I was battling the flu.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah,” he said with a soft head nod. “And for the longest time, even though I didn’t tell my parents, I thought that I gave my sister the flu and that it turned into pneumonia.”
I practically held my breath before he continued.
“But,” he said with a heavy sigh, “when I enlisted and got going with my medic training, it didn’t take me long to learn that even though pneumonia is a common symptom that develops if someone contracts the flu, that wasn’t what happened to my sister.”
I couldn’t help the question that flew out of my mouth. “How do you know what happened to your sister?”
He grinned. “I commissioned her medical records when I was granted that privilege.”
It clicked into place. “Did you become a medic because of your sister?”
His tongue darted out to lick his lower lip. “Yes.”
“Doc.”
“I wanted to make sure no one died of anything stupid ever again,” he said as he leaned forward, resting his arms on the table. “While I contracted the flu, my sister developed mono. Epstein-Barr, to be specific. It came about in the autopsy my parents apparently had done.”
“You didn’t know about it?”
He shook his head. “Even if they wanted to tell me about it, I would’ve probably just waved them off. I wasn’t quite nineteen before she passed. I had just finished basic. It was…”
“I’m so sorry for everything you’ve lost, Doc.”
I could’ve sworn his eyes glistened before he blinked it away. “After commissioning my sister’s medical records and figuring out what really killed her, I vowed to never let any sort of testing ever slide under the radar again. If someone came to me with symptoms, we test for the whole gamut.”
“So that’s why you’re so big on the blood testing regularly.”
He nodded and pointed at me. “Exactly. Things can develop later on or be masked by other things. Our bodies are incredible organisms, and it has its own methods of survival that modern medicine and testing has to work around. For my sister, it was less about what had developed and more about the symptoms she wasn’t showing. Epstein-Barr is supposed to come with a host of symptoms, but my sister only had a couple of them because her immune system was working so hard to fight the damned virus off. And when she became compromised to a certain point?—”
“Pneumonia set in,” I finished.
He nodded. “Exactly.”
I wanted to stand and give him a hug, but I settled for squeezing his forearm one last time before I pulled away.
“You should eat, Miss Elizabeth,” he said as he picked up his spoon. “Brutus will kill me if he thinks I made you wait until the soup got cold before we ate.”
I giggled as I picked up my spoon. “I won’t tell him if you won’t.”
And when I peeked back over at him, he tossed me a cheeky little wink.
“Deal.”
11
DOC
I thoroughly enjoyed the meal. We talked about her favorite video games, and I filed them away. Maybe I could talk Ranger into letting me get my hands on them, especially since they weren’t multiplayer online games. We talked about all of the teasing Anna does with Brutus. We talked about Marla, and how she finally got to the downslope of her condition. More healed than not. I watched her eyes light up as she told me of all the antics the two of them got into as young girls.
I enjoyed seeing her smile.
Yet all too soon, the soup was gone. The bread was picked apart. The drinks were sipped on until there was nothing but ice licking the bottom of the glass. The nighttime sky hung high overhead, pregnant with twinkling stars and a half-moon that pumped out that blue hue light as if it were its full-time job.
