Chapter 3 - The Ring in the Palm
Ten minutes earlier, in the chaotic triage area outside the department store, Lieutenant Alex Davis had been standing by the back of Ambulance 12.
His turnout coat was unbuttoned, his face streaked with soot and sweat. Valerie was sitting on the bumper of the ambulance, a thermal blanket draped over her shoulders, sipping water from a paper cup. She was still trembling, her eyes wide and luminous as she watched him.
“You saved my life, Alex,” she murmured, her voice shaking just enough to sound fragile. “I thought... I thought I was going to die in there. If you hadn’t come...”
“You’re safe, Val,” Alex said, though his eyes were scanning the crowd of evacuees being loaded into secondary ambulances. His chest felt tight. A strange, cold knot was forming in his stomach. “The others... the pregnant woman in the back. Did they get her out?”
“Sir?”
Alex turned. Mark, the rookie firefighter from his engine, was standing there. The young man’s face was pale, his eyes fixed on Alex with an expression that wasn't respect.
It was disgust.
“What is it, Mark?” Alex asked, his professional mask slipping back on. “Did you clear the secondary sweep?”
Mark didn’t answer. He walked closer, his boots heavy on the wet asphalt. He didn’t look at Valerie. He kept his eyes locked on Alex’s face.
“She told me to give you this,” Mark said. His voice was flat. Cold.
He reached out and grabbed Alex’s hand, turning it palm-up. He dropped a heavy, simple platinum band into it.
Alex stared at it. The metal was still warm from the heat of the elevator, but to Alex, it felt like a block of dry ice.
“Where did you get this?” Alex’s voice dropped to a whisper. The air left his lungs. “This is... this is Lucy’s. Where is she? Mark! Where is my wife?”
“She was in the corner,” Mark said. His voice was dangerously quiet, vibrating with a young man's fierce anger. “Directly behind the woman you carried out first. The woman who has no medical issues other than a panic attack. Your wife was twenty-four weeks pregnant, hypoxic, and semi-conscious. And you walked right past her.”
Alex staggered back a step, his heel catching on the curb.
“No,” he breathed. “No, I... the light was bad. I saw the casualty with the head wound... I thought Lucy was at home. She told me she was going to her mother’s...”
“She wrote a triage list, Lieutenant,” Mark interrupted, stepping closer. “On a notepad. She organized the extraction for us while she was suffocating. Her name was at the bottom. Lucy Miller. She used her maiden name.”
Mark leaned in, his voice dropping to a harsh whisper.
“She said to tell you: her and the baby won't be waiting for you anymore. She’s at General. And if I were you, I’d take that uniform off before you go there. Because you don’t deserve to wear it.”
Valerie stood up from the ambulance bumper, reaching for Alex’s arm. “Alex? What’s wrong? Who is Lucy?”
Alex flinched away from her touch as if she had burned him. He looked down at the platinum ring in his hand.
The promise.
May you like
“When you need me, I’ll be the first one running toward you.”
He had run. But he had run the wrong way.
