Chapter 1 - The Cold Light of Day
The transition from the suffocating dark of the elevator to the sterile, blinding fluorescent lights of Chicago General Hospital’s emergency wing was not a relief.
It was a physical assault.
The gurney rattled violently beneath me, every bump in the tile floor sending a sharp, sickening spike of pain straight to my lower abdomen. Oxygen hissed through the mask strapped to my face, tasting of cold plastic and synthetic air.
“Lucy, stay with me,” a voice commanded.
It was Sarah. Dr. Sarah Jenkins. We had worked three years together in this very ER before I took maternity leave. She wasn’t looking at me like a colleague. She was looking at me with the tight, hyper-focused intensity of a doctor trying to keep a patient from slipping into the gray.
“My baby,” I tried to say. The plastic mask fogged up. The sound came out as a wet, useless whistle.
“I’m checking her right now. Just breathe. Let me do the worrying.” Sarah’s hand was warm against my icy arm. She was already shouting orders. “Get OB down here! Now! I want a continuous fetal monitor, a full tox screen, and two large-bore IVs. She’s twenty-four weeks, severe dehydration, prolonged exposure to high-heat, low-oxygen environment.”
The doors to Trauma Room 3 swung shut behind us, cutting off the noise of the sirens outside.
But it couldn’t cut off the image burned into my retinas.
Alex.
May you like
His broad shoulders. The heavy yellow turnout coat with DAVIS stenciled across the back in reflective letters. The way he had lifted Valerie. The way her fingers had curled into his hair, claiming him, marking him, while the rest of the world, including his pregnant wife, dissolved into background noise.
I closed my eyes, but the dark inside my head was worse. In the dark, I could still hear the heavy, rhythmic thump-thump of his boots walking away.
