In fact, she was rather stern. She certainly didn’t blush or giggle when he spoke to her; then again, he was still flouncing around in his hospital gown at the time. Perhaps now she’d find him more charming? Eh – probably not. She was stunningly beautiful, so she likely had loads of men wrapped around her finger. One disoriented Brit was not going to charm her.
After about an hour, a volunteer came up to show Craig the various donated articles of men’s clothing for him to choose from. He was not pleased with his options. He settled on a pair of slightly worn, but otherwise decent quality leather chukka boots. The coat was more of a problem – every one was a ghastly, poofy parka. Did everyone walk around looking like the abominable snowman in this town? He selected one, noting it appeared to be better suited for skiing, and thanked the volunteer.
Despite feeling a bit bad about it, he decided it’d be best if he scooted out unseen. Hopefully Lisa wouldn’t get in too much trouble for not handing him over to the billing people before he left. He was sure that he had money – somewhere, of course. Probably. He could pay after he discovered who he was, but he wasn’t going to remember anything while living with a man who was actively coughing out his lung.
Craig kept his head down as he made his way out of the room without being noticed. He walked for a minute until he reached the end of the hall, but wasn’t sure where to go from there.
“You look lost, can I help you find where you’re going?”
Craig startled, turning to see that the woman sitting behind a desk was addressing him. “Er, yes, thank you. I’m looking for the lift?”
She frowned for a moment, “And where are you trying to go?”
“Just trying to go home,” he said, turning towards her so his back faced his old hospital room.
“Oh,” she said, letting out a small laugh. “You mean the elevator.”
“Right, the elevator.” How likely was it that he was an international spy if he didn’t know what to call the lift in the US? The chance of being a real life Bond was rapidly decreasing.
“Just turn left here, and you’ll find the elevator. Take it down to floor two, that’s where the lobby is. Don’t go down to floor one, that’ll take you to the basement.”
“Right, thanks again,” he said quickly before walking off.
He made it to the lift without incident. He stepped inside, pressed two, and breathed a sigh of relief when the doors closed. He forgot to look around for cameras – surely there weren’t cameras everywhere? Perhaps just in the lobby, and it was unlikely anyone noticed he was missing yet.
The doors of the lift opened and he saw his chance to escape – he only had to pass the gift shop and a lightly staffed desk. He stepped into the busy lobby and quickly made his way through, weaving through visitors and employees alike. He got to the door and the glass panes slid open, releasing him into the freezing air.
It was frigid, no doubt about that. He was grateful for his poofy coat now. He then realized that there was a snag in his plan – he didn’t know where he was or where he was going quite yet. He considered going back inside to get some information from the person at the front desk, but he decided against it. Surely it would all come back to him now that he was walking around the city again. He headed confidently in the direction that felt best.
After walking for an hour (or more, he had no way to keep track of the time), it seemed like he’d chosen the wrong direction. The buildings thinned out and at times, it was hard to walk alongside the road because the sidewalks disappeared. He saw a group of five people waiting on the sidewalk ahead of him and decided to have a chat with them.
“Excuse me,” he said, “can you tell me what you are all waiting for?”
A guy turned to him, slightly puzzled. “We’re waiting for the bus.”
“Oh! A bus! Lovely. Where does it go?”
“Well,” the guy said slowly, clearly suspicious that he was being manipulated in some way, “there’s more than one bus.”
“Oh, right. Is there one going into town?”
“Downtown?”
“Yes,” Craig said, nodding, “downtown.”
“Yeah. Should be here soon.”
“Ah, lovely.” He paused, realizing that he had no money to pay for the bus. “Sorry, one more question – how much is the fare?”
The guy shrugged. “Dunno, I have a bus pass.” He took a step away from Craig and put his headphones back into his ears.
Craig stood for a moment. That was going to be a problem. He certainly didn’t want to beg for bus fare, but he also didn’t want to live the rest of his life at this bus stop.
A bus approached the stop and a few people lined up to get on. It slowed, opening both its front and back doors, and unloaded a handful of people. Craig stood on the sidewalk, lined up with the back door and saw his opportunity – he took a swift step, hopping in and hiding amongst the rest of the standing bus patrons.
The doors closed and the bus lurched forward. There were so many people standing that the bus driver could hardly see what was going on back there. Perfect.
Craig rode along as the landscape changed – more buildings and people out and about. A lot of people got off when they reached Capitol Square, and Craig decided it was as good a time as any to get off of the bus.
It was a very pretty area, and he felt like he’d reached somewhere that might jog his memory. If only someone told him where exactly he was found; he could return there and see if anything looked familiar. Craig felt sure that if he just had a moment to think that he’d remember everything.
His stomach grumbled. It’d been hours since he had breakfast at the hospital, and he walked a good bit. He decided that before he remembered who he was, he needed to find some food.
Chapter 3
At the end of her shift, Kali swung by the hospital’s cafeteria to pick up the unused food. The year prior, she and some of the nurses on her old floor started a program to donate it to a local food bank. They took turns making the deliveries to the food bank, and even though Kali just finished her fourth 12-hour shift of the week, it was her turn and she wasn’t going to skip it.
She thought about stopping by her old floor to ask for advice on how to handle Betsy, but apparently there was a recent patient elopement that had everyone in a tizzy. It didn’t seem that bad – it sounded as though the patient thought they were okay to leave, so they did, but they didn’t get their discharge paperwork or any care coordination. It wasn’t as bad as her ICU patient almost escaping. She still got a bad feeling in the pit of her stomach when she thought of it. How could she have let that happen? She so badly wanted to succeed as an ICU nurse, but it felt like everything she did was wrong.
After work, she’d call her mom to unload about the various things that went wrong at work; she’d still worry about them at home, too. No one ever got hurt, but it scared her to even think of how things could go wrong.
It wasn’t like Kali was a new nurse; she’d been at it for four years. She got her RN degree when she was 21, then worked as a nurse while attending night school to get her bachelors. Nursing was her life. Other people her age went out and partied; they traveled the world or got married. Kali didn’t do any of those things. Her life took a different path.
When she was 19, her high school sweetheart, then fiancé, lost his fight with leukemia. Kali cared for him until his last breath. It forced her to grow up almost overnight, and when he passed away, it felt like her life was over.
She decided not to waste her life, though, and after caring for him, she knew that she needed to become a nurse. She felt a calling from deep in her bones that her purpose was to lessen the suffering of others. Deep down, she knew that she would never love again or get to be married or have kids. But she would become be a nurse, and she’d be the best there was.
Except now she wasn’t doing so hot. Not wanting to dwell on it, Kali chatted with Marge, the cafeteria manager, and loaded her arms with spare food. It wasn’t until after she loaded it into h
er car and she was halfway to the food bank that Betsy’s voice drifted into her head again.
“You act like you’ve never mixed an IV before,” she’d said with a sneer, watching Kali fumble the glass vial of vasopressin.
Kali gritted her teeth remembering it. Of course she’d mixed an IV before. Her hands were tired from doing chest compressions because they were in the middle of a code – a cardiac arrest! Her adrenaline was flowing, it’s not like she was incompetent because her hands got a little shaky. The guy lived, though. That was all that really mattered.
She pulled up to the front of the food bank and put on her flashers; it never took long for her to run the food inside. Kali ran back into the kitchen; everyone knew her there, and she yelled a hello before dropping the food off and rushing back to the front doors.
There were a lot of people milling about the food bank that evening. The staff prepared some hot meals for people as well, which always made it a popular spot when the weather got so cold. Kali smiled at everyone as she walked through, feeling guilty that she didn’t volunteer more often to actually serve food.
She was almost at the front door when she saw a familiar face. She stopped, trying to think where she knew him from.
He saw her looking at him and said, “Fancy seeing you here! I thought they’d pay you nurses a bit more fairly so you could afford a meal, heaven knows you deserve it.”
She couldn’t help but crack a smile. It was her British escapee patient. “Hi Craig, it’s nice to see you. I was just dropping off some food from the hospital.”
“These poor people,” he said, lowering his voice, “aren’t even in hospital and you’re going to inflict that food on them anyway?”
In hospital. Was that how British people said “in the hospital?” Or did he actually have a head injury? “Oh come on, the food isn’t that bad.”
He laughed. “No, I just had the stew and it was quite agreeable.”
“Oh, that’s good. Is your memory almost back to normal?”
He frowned. “Do you know – it isn’t really. Still figuring out exactly what happened that night.”
“Oh,” she replied.
“And what my last name is,” he added with a laugh.
Oh shoot. Here Kali assumed he was back to his normal life – that maybe he fell on hard times and was living in the shelters. He certainly didn’t look like someone on hard times. True, he had on a ridiculous jacket, but the color made his blue eyes pop. Plus, he was an extremely handsome man, all sharp jawed and rugged with just a bit of stubble. With his tall and muscular build, he certainly didn’t fit the profile of someone scraping by on the streets.
“So you…don’t know where home is, still?” she asked carefully.
He shook his head, rubbing a hand on his chin. “Not yet. I’m hoping it’ll come back to me soon enough.”
“Oh,” she said again. “Well…did one of the social workers set you up with a place to stay?”
“They can do that?” he sounded surprised.
“I think so – maybe? Or they may have gotten you into the men’s shelter?”
“Ah, yes, the men’s shelter,” he said, leaning back. “They’re ah – out of beds at the moment. Terrible luck.”
“That’s awful!” she said without thinking. It was awful, though. Where was he supposed to go? The man had no memory, no money and no options. How could the hospital have just sent him out like that? It was so out of character for one of their social workers to drop the ball like that.
“It’s alright,” he said quickly, almost as though he knew what she was thinking. “No one is at fault. It seemed like I got there just when they ran out of space. You know, bad weather and all.”
“Sure,” she said.
She didn’t have time to have a long conversation. Her car was parked in an unloading only zone, plus she was exhausted from her shift and needed to get home. Also, it wasn’t her job to figure out where this guy could go stay. But…
Maybe she wasn’t thinking clearly because she was so tired, but this guy was going to freeze to death if he had nowhere to go. How could she let that happen?
She bit her lip, thinking about how she’d only recently finished the basement of her small townhouse and turned it into a simple, but useful, studio apartment. Her plan was to put it up on Airbnb to rent for some extra money. The only thing she hadn’t gotten around to yet was getting a lock on her side of the basement door to keep visitors out of her living space.
Logically, it seemed it would be reasonable for him to stay there so he didn’t freeze to death. Yet her anxiety chimed in and reminded her that not having a lock on the door made it dangerous, especially if he was actually a lying psychopath who decided to come up and murder her.
“If you know any other places, I’m all ears,” he said.
“Hold on a second,” she said, unable to work through the very bad idea that was forming in her head. She struggled between anxious thoughts of him freezing to death and her car currently being towed.
Kali stepped past him and went out to her car. She was happy to see that it was still sitting there, un-towed, and she took a deep breath to clear her head.
This was a bad idea. She knew it was a bad idea. First of all, she didn’t know this guy. She lived alone. If he attacked her, she would end up on the local news as the woman who stupidly picked up a strange man at the food bank and suffered the obvious consequences. Then again, she kind of did know him. Just a few days ago, he was in a coma. He had no memory of his life – so Kali was one of the only people who knew anything about him.
Second, if the hospital found out that she allowed a patient to stay in her apartment, even as a renter, she would be fired immediately. They frowned on anyone forming inappropriate relationships with prior patients or their families; becoming a landlord to a former patient would definitely be inappropriate.
But he had nowhere to go. It was going to snow again tonight and the temperature would stay well below zero. He had no plan, and if he wandered out into the night, they’d find him the next morning frozen solid like a popsicle. And she would have his life on her hands, because she could’ve prevented his death, but instead she did nothing.
Kali closed her eyes and tried to think. She needed to push away her anxiety about the situation and do the right thing. All she needed to do was employ her most stern nurse voice and let him know that she wasn’t messing around. She’d developed the voice after years of working as a nurse – it was almost funny to her, because before that, she was the most shy and meek person on earth. She still had trouble being assertive outside of work sometimes. But not when she was in nurse mode.
She walked back into the food bank. “Alright, listen Craig.”
He turned to her, a surprised look on his face. “Yes?”
“I have somewhere you can stay, just until you regain your memory.”
“Oh, that’s great!”
She lowered her voice. “I have an apartment that I was going to rent out, but I’ll make an exception on the rent for you.”
He started speaking again but she cut him off. “However, if you are destructive, aggressive, or uncooperative to any degree, you are out. If you so much as sneeze in a way that makes me uncomfortable, you are out. Are we clear?”
He nodded. “Yes, got it. Creepy behavior is punishable by death.”
She frowned. “I’m not joking, Craig.”
“Of course not! I understand and you have my promise that I’ll behave in a most gentlemanly manner.”
Kali decided to leave it there. “Alright, let’s go.”
He followed her outside and she unlocked her car’s doors. He motioned to open the passenger’s door in the front and she hesitated for a moment. Should she make him sit in the back like she was running a cab service? Or would that be weird?
It was too late, he already got in. She sighed and walked over to the driver’s side.
“I’d offer to drive,” he said, “but I’m not sure that I know how.”
“That’s fine,” she answered before turning on the car and pulling away from the curb.
He kept talking. “So, what brings you to Madison? Did you grow up here?”
“No. I grew up about a half hour north of here.”
“Ah. Well, let me tell you what brought me to Madison.”
She kept her eyes on the road. “Yeah?”
He was silent for a few moments. “Oh, didn’t work. I hoped that would force me to remember something.”
She ignored him. Was he trying to crack jokes to lower her guard? It wasn’t going to work.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw his hand extend towards her, causing her to flinch.
“Sorry!” he said, snapping his hand back. “Just wanted to turn up the radio.”
“Oh, go ahead.” Relax, Kali. He’s not going to kill you while you’re driving him around. He’ll at least wait until you stop the car.
He continued chatting for the rest of the fifteen minute drive and Kali kept her answers short. She needed him to know that she was serious about him not breaking any rules. She’d have no choice but to kick him out if he did something weird.
They arrived at her apartment and she parked on the street.
“Oh, this looks nice,” he remarked.
She ignored him and led him to the side door that worked as a private entrance for the basement apartment.
“This way,” she said.
“Oh dear,” he said, following behind her, “this isn’t one of those Sweeney Todd type basements, is it? Am I on my way to becoming one of those vagrants you see on the news?”
Kali almost cracked a smile but managed to stop it. “I hate to break it to you, Craig, but you’re already kind of off the grid. No one knows that you’re here.”
“You’re right,” he said with a fake gasp. “A perfect victim, really.”
She looked at him, holding a key in the door. “Do you prefer to sleep outside, then?”
He answered immediately. “You know, I like you. I think I’m going to go with my gut on this one and put my life in your hands.”
“Again, you mean?” she replied.
Nurse's Date with a Billionaire Page 2