She didn’t know why she’d come, only that she needed a sanctuary. After taking Brooke home from the hospital, she’d sat up the rest of the night while Brooke lightly dozed on the sofa. Over a breakfast neither touched, they talked. Or at least, Brooke talked, and mostly because Angie prodded her for every last detail, every shadowed corner of what she had been up to with this Karen Turner woman. And with each halting answer, each extracted confession, a part of Angie wished she hadn’t pressed. Wished she could walk away without knowing all the gory details. But that was not who she was. Walking right into the fire, right into the shitstorm, that was the way she rolled because she couldn’t imagine any other way.
Brooke said she met Karen five months ago at some real estate shindig—the kind, Angie knew from accompanying Brooke to a couple of them, with champagne and exotic meats and cheeses and elegant music playing in the background while people wearing expensive perfumes and makeup clustered together in small groups. The kind of event where the lighting was soft and the clothes were low cut and finely woven and every whisper was charged with something forbidden. A week later the two met for lunch (Brooke’s idea). A week after that it was cocktails at a piano bar while Angie was away on a field trip up north with her paramedic class (Karen’s idea). That was when the affair started, when they started sleeping together.
“But why…this?” Angie asked. “Why didn’t you just leave me if you wanted someone else?” It seemed logical, like a math equation, because one plus one plus one did not equal a couple. It added up to somebody being left out, and that somebody, clearly, was Angie.
“Oh, Angie, do you really think it’s that simple?” Brooke said in that way she had of making Angie feel like she’d just said the stupidest thing in the world.
“Yes,” Angie replied, because to her it was.
“Well, it’s not. I still loved you. We’d made a life together. This house, our finances. Four years together. It doesn’t disappear over—”
“Over a few fucks?”
Brooke’s face colored. “I was going to say it doesn’t disappear overnight.”
“Do you love this woman, Brooke?” Angie steeled herself for the answer. Not that it mattered, really, because she could never be with Brooke again. Not after what she’d done.
“Yes. I think so.”
“Jesus.” So it was worse than she thought. Not just sex. “How long did you plan to keep both of us, huh? Another five months? A year?” Anger rose through her, breaching the dam of her emotions, threatening to swamp her if she didn’t tamp it back down.
Brooke started crying, and Angie couldn’t take it anymore.
“I’ll stay at my family’s for a few weeks.” She looked around at the kitchen—white, expensive, contemporary—that had never been her style. “Then we can figure out what to do with this place.”
And now here she was outside her family’s farm, a couple of suitcases in her trunk and a smothering exhaustion that made even getting out of the car seem like a painful chore.
Her brother Nick’s orange tabby, tail arching in greeting, trotted out to her.
“Hi, Beau.” It was short for Beaujolais. “How’s my good boy?”
She scooped him up with one hand, popped the hatch on her SUV with the other.
“Hey sis.” Nick jogged to her, his face registering surprise. She’d not been around the winery since she’d returned to regular duties with North Flight EMS a couple of weeks ago. “What are you doing here? Jesus, you look like you haven’t slept in a couple of days.”
Angie winced. “I haven’t. Wanna help me with my suitcases?”
“Of course, but only if you tell me what these are for.”
Angie ignored him, hoping to delay an explanation for as long as possible. Truth was, she didn’t want to have to explain anything while she was in this state. Brooke had blown up their relationship, and the concussive effects were every bit as intense as if she’d been knocked on her ass by an IED attack. Fog, numbness, feeling like she was standing apart from her own body, then excruciating pain followed by denial, grief, anger. All of those things and more rolled in on her relentlessly, one after another and sometimes all at once. But she could think of nowhere else to go. Oh, she could have gone to stay with Vince and his wife for a couple of weeks, or Jackie, another friend from high school. But Vince had a houseful of kids and Jackie was in Petoskey, which was an hour away and too far for the drive back and forth to work.
Besides, family was what Angie turned to when times got rough. When she returned stateside after her first tour in Afghanistan and her second in Iraq, it was the family property that grounded her, restored her again for a few weeks. The smell of dirt on her fingers, on her boots, the shiny, stainless steel fermenting vats that were as big as a compact car, the heaping plates of food her mother and Nick’s wife Claire cooked.
“Where’s Dad?”
“In the barn working on a tractor. Why?”
“I only want to go through all this once. Mom and Claire, can you grab them too? I need to talk to you guys.”
Nick, thankfully, didn’t press her for more. She must have looked sufficiently like shit for him to realize something serious was going down. She set Beau back on the ground.
“All right. I think they’re in the kitchen.”
Of course they were. Her mom and Claire baked and cooked all the munchies the winery’s guests could order over a glass or bottle of wine in the massive tasting room or out on the deck that overlooked Grand Traverse Bay. It was Monday, prep day for the week ahead and the only day of the week the winery closed its doors to the public so the family and its gaggle of employees could get work done. Bad timing on her part, but it wasn’t like it could wait.
“Thanks, Nick. The kitchen’s as good a place as any to meet.”
* * *
Vic could think of no better antidote, no more effective cure for her broken heart, than work. Lots of it. Work was the only cocoon she could feel safe in right now, the only thing that could make her forget, at least for a little while, the images that swam through her mind like shadowy predators. The same predators that stole her sleep and shoved her into an abyss that left her staring at the walls at night and crying until she could hardly breathe. Being alone with her thoughts right now was the worst thing she could do.
Karen had moved into a hotel, even though Vic, against her better judgment, told her she didn’t have to. But that was before Karen had confessed that she was in love with Brooke Bennett. Vic couldn’t stay in the same house if her wife was in love with somebody else, because that kind of apocalyptic rejection she wouldn’t be able to live with. She tried to get more answers out of Karen, because Lord knew she had about ten thousand questions. But Karen didn’t want to talk about it anymore. Karen wanted to get the hell out as quickly as possible now that everything was all out in the open. Later they would talk, she promised halfheartedly. Some other time, which might mean next week, next month, or maybe never. Or maybe it meant any more talk would happen between their lawyers. Who knew?
It was her second day of working a double shift, and even though Olivia kept giving her the stink eye over this self-flagellation, Vic was the chief of the Emergency Department and she could work as many damn hours as she wanted. There was a serious car crash victim coming in, a man who wasn’t wearing a seat belt and had been thrown through the windshield of his car on Highway 31. A Priority One.
“You okay with this?” Olivia asked discreetly.
“Of course,” Vic snapped, not meaning to, but between her lack of sleep and the buckets of coffee she’d drunk, her nerves were in tatters. Olivia gave her that look she’d been giving her all week—sympathy, concern, admonishment—but Vic turned away and pulled on her disposable gloves to await the ambulance.
It was quiet moments like these, caught between tasks, when her mind wandered. Karen saying she loved Brooke. Karen saying she wanted a divorce and saying it in a way that left no room to negotiate a different outcome. Vic could feel, with
every word her memory summoned, the press of the shock against her chest, squeezing her, urging her now to replay it like some elaborate injury one has to relive over and over until its power to hurt diminishes. How can this be happening to me? To us? And then she remembered there was no us anymore. And that it had, indeed, happened.
She commanded herself to focus on the task at hand, allowed the sharp edge of nervousness to race up and down her spine. She was always a little nervous before a P-1. Which is the way it should be, she’d counseled medical students, interns, junior residents. It was good to be confident, vitally important to trust in your training and experience, but any good ER doc knew that doing everything right didn’t guarantee success in the treatment rooms.
Conversely, she often repeated the wise advice of a former med school mentor, who preached that you should never go into emergency medicine if you couldn’t live with yourself after killing someone. Vic thought she’d heard wrong at first. “You mean if you lose a patient?” she asked him. “No,” he said, “if you kill a patient, because you will. You’ll misdiagnose or miss diagnosing something altogether. You’ll be exhausted some shifts, harried, pulled in twenty different directions…and somebody, someday, will die because of it.” It was one of the most helpful pieces of advice, one of the most realistic things she’d ever heard, in her more than fifteen years in the business of emergency medicine.
The ambulance roared up and the sight of its dancing roof lights transported her back to the other night, when it was Karen on the gurney. Karen’s lover too. It was the moment her life had changed. The moment four lives had changed forever. She watched the first paramedic exit from the driver’s seat and scramble around to open the back doors, hoping to hell it wasn’t Angie Cullen in back with the patient. She hadn’t run into Angie since that night, which was exactly the way she wanted it. She didn’t even know if Angie was back at work, throwing herself headlong into the job the way she was or whether she was taking some time off. Nor was she about to ask anyone. The less she saw of Angie, the less it would remind her of…everything.
Her heart pounded and then settled when she saw it wasn’t Angie hopping out the back and sliding the gurney out.
“What’ve you got?” Vic said.
“Semi-responsive, possible internal injuries, possible head injuries too,” said the first paramedic. “Probable collapsed lung. Pulse has been dropping and is down to eighty-eight. He’s thirty-seven years old, alone in the car when it hit a transport truck. Wasn’t belted, went through the windshield.”
“I can see that,” Vic mumbled, taking in the bits of broken glass visible on the man’s suit. She could never fathom why anyone wouldn’t wear a seat belt. Some fool once told her he figured the airbags would be enough to save you. Nice try. Airbags didn’t keep you in the car when force and gravity sent flying whatever objects weren’t latched down.
Olivia and another nurse arrived, along with a burly young intern named Raymond, to help transfer the patient to the treatment bed, which was also mobile to make it easier to move the patient for tests or for transportation to another department such as surgery. The patient, mouth open, gave a gurgling gasp, and without being asked, the two nurses began cutting off his clothing.
“Get me a tube kit,” Vic said to Ray. She’d need to intubate before anything else.
The man’s eyelids fluttered closed one last time. He was unconscious, which would make things a little easier for Vic and her crew. Olivia moved to start an IV while Deb, the second nurse, hooked the patient up to a heart monitor and blood pressure machine. Vic listened to his chest. His lungs were definitely compromised.
“Ray, you want to trying tubing him?”
The intern hesitated for just a moment, and it was enough for Vic to decide she’d do it herself.
“Liv, give him twenty milligrams of etomidate and one hundred milligrams of succinylcholine.” She wanted the man’s throat muscles good and relaxed. “Ray, hand me the laryngoscope please. And Deb, get x-ray and ultrasound in here. I want him to have a head CT as soon as we’re done with the other.” He could have landed on his head or smacked it hard on the windshield.
“Right away, Dr. Turner.”
Intubating patients came easy to Vic after the thousands she’d done in her career. Steady and calm, she pulled the man’s jaw open and placed the L-shaped scope inside his mouth, pushed his tongue aside, spotted the vocal chords. Then she fed the hollow plastic tube into his trachea. “We’re in,” she said out of habit.
She stepped back to allow the x-ray tech to haul the portable machine in to take some pictures. A flat screen attached to the machine showed what came as no surprise to Vic and explained the man’s collapsed lung: three broken ribs. Then it was the ultrasound tech’s turn. On the screen of the portable machine, she saw the telltale swirling dark shadows of bleeding around the spleen, pointed it out to Ray, and ordered Deb to call Surgery. This man was going to need his spleen out because it’d been crushed in the accident, but first she needed to deal with his lung.
She handed Ray a scalpel. “Don’t worry, I’ll walk you through it.”
Her steady gaze seemed to settle him, and he made a two-inch slice between the man’s ribs where she’d circled with a Sharpie. She handed him the small, clear tube and told him to push it in a couple of inches until air hissed out, then watched as he connected it to a suction machine. It was almost miraculous to see the patient’s lung refill again, and Ray smiled his relief.
“Surgery’s ready for him,” Olivia announced. “You still want him to have a head CT first?”
“Yes, please. The transporters can take him up now,” Vic said in a voice thin with exhaustion. “Thank you everyone.”
She threw her disposable gown in the trash, pulled off her sterile gloves and trashed them as well. As the others hustled the patient out of the room, she leaned against the wall and rubbed her temples.
Olivia hung back. “Sweetie, why don’t you come over to our place for dinner tomorrow. It’s Saturday and your day off. Unless you’ve done something stupid and signed yourself up for work again.”
“Thanks, Liv, but I’d rather be alone.”
“You’ve had all week to be alone. Beth and I would love to have you over.”
“Thanks, but no. I’m terrible company right now.”
They hadn’t talked much about what had happened. Vic wasn’t ready to, and Olivia seemed to sense that time and space was what she needed right now.
“All right, but promise me you won’t spend the whole weekend moping around the house.”
It was exactly what Vic was planning to do, and yes, it was probably a terrible idea. She’d done a rotation in Psych a long time ago, was smart enough to know she needed to shake things up to pull herself out of this funk. And yes, Liv was right. She should do something enjoyable, go somewhere different, anything to break up this pattern of work and sitting in the dark at home between shifts.
“All right, all right. I’ll do something, I promise.”
“Good. Any ideas?”
“Wine. Something definitely involving copious amounts of wine.”
“Now you’re talking!”
Chapter Four
Of course her family would put her to work.
Angie shook her head at the thought, but inside she was secretly relieved. Her boss had forced her to take a couple of shifts off work this week, so she was happy to fill the void with working at her family’s business. It was therapeutic, distracting. And at the winery, there was always something to be done. There were 120 acres of vines (comprised of a dozen grape varieties) that needed regular monitoring and tending and equipment ranging from tractors to heating units to filtering systems in the distillery that required regular maintenance. The tasting room was always begging for another hand or two, which was where her mom, Suzanne, had assigned her today. Angie would rather be in the fields or in the barn with her brother Nick, mindlessly fussing with some piece of equipment or other, but Saturdays were the busiest
day of the week in the tasting room. And you didn’t say no to Suzanne Cullen.
Angie felt nowhere near as spunky and bright as her cobalt blue bow tie, matching vest, starched white shirt and black pants were—all part of the dress code of working the tasting room. What she felt like was a boxer who’d taken a thunderous blindside hit and was still down on the mat—dazed, bruised, trying to survive the ten-count. It was a wallop Brooke had given her, but she wasn’t willing to play the role of helpless victim any longer. She’d had a week to stew in the juices of self-pity and anger, and she was sick of it. Brooke could go fuck herself if she thought she’d dealt Angie a lethal blow, because Angie was done gathering up all her broken parts and was ready to fight back. Whatever fighting back might mean. That part, she hadn’t figured out yet.
“Ready for a tasting?” Angie asked a couple in their twenties who’d been meticulously studying the floor-to-ceiling oak shelves that cradled a variety of bottles of wine. If Angie had to guess, their careful consideration was more from ignorance than knowledgeable discrimination.
“This room is so beautiful, I might never want to leave,” the woman said, casting her eyes around in such a way as to take in all of the room at once.
She was right. It was beautiful, and sometimes it took a stranger’s eye to remind Angie. Oak floors, twenty-five-foot cathedral ceilings, a thirty-foot-long tasting bar finished with birds-eye maple and black walnut, stained glass windows high up that featured various scenes of water, vegetation and bird life, and on the walls that didn’t have built-in shelving, large windows looked out onto the rolling vineyards and the bay beyond.
It had been her sister-in-law Claire’s idea to give the room a library feel. There were leather wingback chairs the color of deep red wine, end tables with Tiffany lamps, a tan leather fainting couch from the Victorian era and leather-bound classic books interspersed on the shelves with the bottles of wine. Somehow, the room even smelled of leather and ink and old books. Many people commented that the room felt like one they could spend all day in…which was both desirable and undesirable. The Cullens wanted people to feel at home, spoiled, but constant turnover produced more wine sales.
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