Going For Gold: Providence Gold Series Book Four

by Moore, Mary B.

  How did I turn into this person who was looking at every minute like it may well be their last? Well, I wasn’t at that stage – I was at the ‘what if’ stage. What if something happened, and I hadn’t experienced as much as I could? Well, I’d end up sitting on my cloud, looking down on the world at everyone having fun and would most likely be pissed at the missed opportunities. I’d be like one of those spirits on a television show that wouldn’t cross over to the other side, begging people to let me hijack their bodies so I could just do what I needed to do, and I just didn’t want to be that spirit.

  Sound dramatic? Well, let me rewind to the moment that led up to me becoming this person. Two years ago at my friend Amber’s birthday party, she’d brought in this familiar looking old woman and told us that we were all getting our ‘futures read’. The woman turned out to be her grandmother, and she’d made a big deal about how qualified the woman was, that she’d read the futures of celebrities and how big an honor it was for us to have her with us.

  I was only nineteen, and we’d been drinking alcohol that we’d all stolen from our parents, but something about it just seemed off to me. I mean - not to mock what some people truly believed in - I found it hard to believe that someone’s future or destiny could be told by reading cards, tea leaves, the lines on their palms, or whatever else was being used to do it. It didn’t make any sense to me.

  Regardless, I was the fifth person who was taken into the small room, and Amber’s grandmother laid out five cards in front of me, studied them, and then gasped and grabbed my hand to look at my palm. That’s when she laid it all out for me.

  The first thing I was told was to be careful of the men in my life that I trusted. The second was that I would face heartache. The third was two people I trusted were keeping a life altering secret from me. The fourth, I would move hundreds of miles away from my hometown in Oregon in the near future. The fifth on was the most crushing, apparently my life would change after I turned twenty-one, and she said I was to make the most of the time I had left. As if it wasn’t bad enough already, she said it in an almost ominous tone that made it sound sinister and all negative, not a happy, excited one, too.

  Now, like I’ve said, I’m definitely what you’d call a sceptic about shit like this. I don’t believe in ghosts, I don’t believe in life after death, and I don’t believe in people being able to see our futures. There’s just nothing in me that finds any of it scientifically feasible, so I leave it as a matter of personal choice if people take any of that stuff seriously or not. Obviously, my feelings have changed about that now seeing as how I was picturing me being a ghost and shit, but at the time no.

  Regardless, it weighed on my mind, but I didn’t truly believe it and went on just living life like I normally did. I had a boyfriend named Eric who I’d known since I was middle school. He was the boy next door type of guy, and the good guy that everyone loved. We got along well and had been dating for six months by then, and it felt like it was heading for something serious. I wasn’t in love, but maybe I could have gotten to that stage with him. Well, so I thought at the time.

  One night, a month after the party, I came home from the library and overheard my parents arguing. This was a big deal and caught my attention because they tended to be emotionless people – ones that had pushed me all my life, but gave nothing back emotionally or physically.

  Examples of that were: at age two they put me into an advanced learning pre-school. We did our alphabet, math, we learned scientific things – at age freaking two. After that, my parents hired a team of homeschool teachers who came over every day and worked with me on an advanced learning curriculum. Is that possible? If you have money, hell yes it is.

  My parents were both leading surgeons in a hospital in Portland that catered to rich people – celebrities, famous business moguls, the world’s elite. They pioneered groundbreaking plastic surgeries and were paid huge amounts for it. Because of that of course they had the money to put their kindergarten daughter through an education at home that was years ahead of where she was meant to be.

  By age eight I was in middle school. Age fifteen I graduated from high school and started college at home. Before I started, I’d decided to go into nursing, which was a huge disappointment to them. I just didn’t have the mind to perform surgeries like my parents. Regardless, I stood strong, and in my second year of college I began going to classes on campus.

  After school I’d go to the hospital, and I’d have to sit in surgeries and consultations with one of them. That’s how it continued until I was at the stage where I could physically assist them during procedures.

  I was only four months away from my twentieth birthday when I graduated and was immediately employed by my parents at the hospital they worked at. It might sound like a caring move by then, but more than likely they organized it because they were hoping I’d decide to go back and study to become what they were, aka medical robots fixated on their next paychecks.

  Sound harsh? So does controlling your daughter’s life to the point that the only friends she had were ones that you’d chosen for her. People you’d deemed ‘suitable’ to socialize with your child, people who wouldn’t hinder the plan you had for them… basically, my whole life had been controlled by them to that point.

  That’s why I was at that party. Amber was on the approved list, my ‘best friend’ since I could walk, and my parents had no idea how far away she was from what they thought. She wasn’t the innocent girl she made herself out to be, the one who wore the matching twin set and who was afraid of her own shadow. Amber had a dark side to her that she released through alcohol and holding parties when her parents were out of town. She was my best friend because she was the only person I was allowed to get close to until I started dating Eric.

  Like I said, we’d met when I was in middle school, so when I was nine. His parents worked with mine and we were allowed to hangout now and then. It wasn’t until I was almost nineteen that our relationship developed, and I was careful to hide it from my parents. We’d known each other for so long that I trusted him, I even let down the barriers and showed emotions that I didn’t normally. My parents loved him as a person, but I was worried that if they’d known we were together, they’d have stopped it.

  Anyway, on the night in question, I’d come home from the library preoccupied with the fact that Eric had been acting weird, and wanted to take our relationship to a new level immediately. He’d just cornered me in the library and told me to suck him off because the idea of public sex was a huge turn on for him. After that, he said he was going to fuck me over the railing that looked down onto the entrance of the building. Yes, we’d fooled around, but doing something like that was a hell no for me. I’d told him my parents were expecting me, knowing that it would make him back off, and had driven home and walked in on the argument – and every minute after that changed my life.

  * * *

  “There’s no reason for her to ever know,” Dad yelled, the sound of something slamming following it. “You were the one who forced the adoption after Kelly-Anne died, not me. I told you when I found out that from now on I would be in charge of what happened, and that you were never to defy me again.”

  A condescending laugh interrupted him. “Defy you? I think you forget who you’re talking to, dear. If it wasn’t for me, you wouldn’t have the reputation you have now. You wouldn’t be the respected surgeon you are now. You’d be working in a city hospital, earning jack shit for your time and effort, dear.” I heard the sound of her heels clicking on the marble floor and tensed in case she was headed toward where I was standing outside the door. “You’re the one who got that girl pregnant and had to pay her off, not me. That night when she killed herself, I acted to protect our reputations. What do you think people would have said if they found out you’d had an affair? That you’d gotten the receptionist pregnant? Yet again because of me you have a good reputation, so don’t you dare accuse me of ‘defying’ you.”

  I was swallowing ha
rshly over the lump in my throat, so I almost missed what happened next.

  “At least I wanted to fuck her, Raquel,” he shot back, and I heard a crack after it. “That was a cheap shot, but then that’s you in a nutshell, isn’t it?” My dad’s voice took on a tone I’d never heard from him before. “Listen carefully, that’s the only time you’ll ever get to hit me. You seem to forget, dear, I have a whole file of evidence of the shit you’ve done. It would be a shame if people ever saw it.”

  Evidence? What kind of evidence?

  “You need to stick with the plan for her, Ed. She’s just graduated and is taking those damned nursing exams soon. All of that time and money for nothing because she wants to be a nurse, not a doctor. We’re paying people enough to do what needs done, so she’ll be re-enrolling in college to do the degree we chose for her and starting it in the fall. I’ve already paid for her to be accepted, just like we did before…”

  “And that’s the problem,” he interrupted her. “All I do is pay out for her, money that’s being wasted. Ten thousand dollars a month for both of them, one hundred thousand to the Dean, school fees, a car…”

  I couldn’t listen to anymore, so I turned around and ran out the door. I drove blindly to the one person I had left that I figured I could trust – Amber. When I got to her apartment, I let myself in with the key she’d given me, and walked in on her fucking my boyfriend as he snorted a line of white powder off her lips. They were both so high and caught up in what they were doing that they didn’t even notice me standing there, or look up when the door shut behind me as I left.

  It was an hour into my drive around the city that I came up with a plan. Money talked – my ‘parents’ had proven that tonight, so I was going to make it talk for me, too.

  The next day, I went to the group of guys that I knew would be able to help me at the hospital that I’d be taking my NCLEX-RN exams at – ones that everyone was scared of apart from me – and I outlined my plan. They were good guys who were judged because of their backgrounds, and to that day I’d never even thought about them like that, so of course they asked why I wanted what I was asking for – an old car that wouldn’t draw any attention. A lot of people in the area we lived in knew me and my parents, so if I was seen buying it myself, my plan would have been blown before I got the chance to leave. The guys knew I was good for the money, but they wanted to make sure I was ok.

  After I gave them a brief outline of what had happened, they got me what I needed, not even accepting one hundred dollars for it in exchange for regular updates from me and the promise that I’d contact them if I was ever in trouble. See what happens when you judge people incorrectly? You miss out on the beauty that we often think doesn’t exist in the world, and they almost restored my faith in humanity after the big old dump it had taken on me.

  A month later I passed my exams, getting only one question wrong out of one-hundred-and-nineteen of them, and that night I climbed out of the window and got in the car the men had bought for me and left three blocks away from my house. I left a letter explaining that I knew my parent’s secrets - knowing that would deter them from trying to bring me home - and drove as far away from them as I could, until I finally drove through Gonzales, and fell in love with it.

  After I found a place to live, I applied for my state license and three weeks after I got it I started work at the local hospital as a registered nurse.

  Initially, Eric, Amber, and even my parents called and texted, trying to get me to go home, but after I laid my cards out, threatening to report Eric to the administrator of the hospital that he’d been offered a residency at – the same hospital that my parents worked for – suggesting that they perform a drug screen on him, and threats that I knew would hit the other three hard, they stopped, and I hadn’t heard from them since.

  * * *

  During the drive from Portland to Texas I’d remembered the words of the lady who’d told me my fortune at the party – be careful of the men in my life that I trusted. Given that both Eric and my father had lied to me in the worst ways, this was true.

  The fact that I would face heartache was blatantly true, too. How much more can a heart break hearing out loud that your parents didn’t want you, that you were adopted by one of them because you were the product of an affair with a woman who’d died?

  And then to find your boyfriend and best friend fucking each other? She’d also said two people I trusted were keeping a life altering secret from me – well, duh. How about we make that two sets of two people who were doing that – one of which were being paid?

  In the fourth one, she’d said that I would move hundreds of miles away, and that was maybe an understatement seeing as how it was technically two-thousand-one-hundred-and-forty miles, but I could forgive her for phrasing it as hundreds. Maybe her cards had a boundary line or something and she could only see so far?

  Basically, everything she’d told me that night had come true which didn’t bode well for the fifth one. I was turning twenty-one in just over a year, and her advice had been to make the most of the time I had left because life was going to change after that.

  And this was something that I’d spent hours - and still spent hours - agonizing over. Did she mean life was going to change as in I was going to die, seeing as how she’d phrased it as ‘the time I had left’? Was I going to lose my legs? Get hit by a car and end up in a wheelchair for the rest of my life?

  What exactly did it mean?

  And that’s when I made a hard choice. Everything she’d predicted had happened, it had all been true, so I was going to take her advice and live life like it was my last day. I was obviously more careful with how I lived – I crossed roads when the cars stopped, I refused to drive behind vehicles that were carrying loads that could come undone in a freak accident and impale me, I drove under the speed limit, I looked up every single superstition and good luck charm there was, and I did things that people thought brought them luck every damn day.

  Some people freaked out when a black cat crossed in front of them, but not me. I just rubbed the rabbit’s foot in my pocket, knocked on the piece of wood I carried in my purse, and crossed my fingers. I also followed international good luck superstitions, sweeping the dirt away from my front door every night like they do in China on New Year’s Eve, and I Feng Shui’d the hell out of my house.

  That was also when I started my bucket list. It started off with small things and was now moving onto much bigger things the further into twenty-one I got. Initially, it had been ear piercing, four small tattoos of good luck symbols, watching Bon Jovi in concert, sitting on the roof to watch the sunrise when I was afraid of heights but wanting to see it from up high… I made a list of all of it and worked through it one by one.

  And then came the bigger things, ones that I was terrified of doing and was trying to talk myself into doing, anyway.

  Not once, though, did I neglect a patient or become too distracted to care for them fully. I hadn’t even wanted to become a nurse, I’d wanted to be a counselor for abused kids, but I’d be damned if anyone would suffer because of what I was going through. I’d worked my ass off to be a nurse and to understand what patients needed, I wouldn’t ruin that because the people in my life were messed up assholes.

  I’d started off in the ER when I’d gotten the job, and now I was on the Neurological Ward dealing with different areas and conditions, which was what I’d focused on during my degree. I’d read up on it, spoken to Neurologists at the hospital I’d worked in, assisted in some surgeries when I’d wanted to get away from my parents… none of it had been by the book, but that had been one perk of being the daughter of Ed and Raquel Rose.

  That was why my education had slowed down slightly – because I’d been making sure while I was doing all of this that I was learning everything I could about this area of medicine. I didn’t want to rush through it and then end up fucking up someone’s life.

  So, now I was working with patients who had neurological illnesses and trauma
s, and with the conditions they suffered from, any slip of my focus and concentration could lead to life changing problems. That could happen on any ward, sure, but for some reason neurosciences had always struck me as the most complex out of all of them.

  I was still only just starting out in the department and the work was hard as hell, but I loved it and was studying for my neuroscience nursing exam so that I had my CNRN and could take on even more work. I already had a lot of it done, but there was no hurrying this so I was working my ass off to make sure I was confident with what I knew.

  In my first week at the hospital in Gonzales County, I’d met the Townsend family when one of their girlfriends had been brought in. It had been Tate Townsend’s girlfriend Lily who’d been caught in a burning building while she was heavily pregnant, so I’d met him and his brother Levi before the others. It had only been minutes before the others, but they were my introduction to the Townsends. I’d been the one assigned with helping them all that night, something that hadn’t made sense until my former boss had let it slip that one of the family members had requested me specifically.

  From there, a close friendship had grown between all of us, and I had friends now instead of just work acquaintances. I had a place to go for Thanksgiving, and they’d even invited me to join them for Christmas – if I was still alive by then, that was.

  But in the four months that had passed, I’d gotten to know Levi the most. He was a close friend, and I spent a majority of my free time with him, hanging out, crossing off items on my list, and laughing so hard I couldn’t breathe.

  My feelings for him weren’t just platonic, though, and that sucked because we were friends - that freaking friend zone - and he’d never given me any sign that it could ever change.

  And let’s not forget the what ifs - I didn’t exactly have a lot of time if things between us did change. So maybe I was better to keep him friends, and if the opportunity to have sex with him ever came up, then he’d have helped me with both of my lists.