“I’m done with my shift in twenty-nine minutes. You’re not well enough to return to work and I don’t think you’re in any condition to drive home either. I also don’t think you should be alone the rest of the night.”
“What? Why?” Angie wasn’t buying it, but it didn’t matter. She either did as Vic said or she could stay overnight in the hospital. And likely on a bed in a busy hallway because the place was crammed with patients tonight, every room occupied.
“Because, as I said, you may have a concussion and you’re hypothermic. You need monitoring and you need to stay warm.”
Angie clutched the blanket tighter around her, resentment hardening on her face. “Look, all right. I’m cold and wet, but that’s it. And I’ve got a scratch on my head. Other than that, I’m fine, I swear.”
Vic was used to patients trying to negotiate with her and she smiled at the futility of it. “Sorry. Not changing my mind no matter what you say. Look, Angie, it’s important that you have someone with you for the next six or eight hours. If not me, then I can call someone else for you.”
“I’ll go straight home.”
Vic shook her head. “No, no driving with a concussion. Are you still staying with your folks at the winery?”
“Yes. I’ll get a cab.”
“And wait for an hour? Maybe longer? Besides, your family is probably all in bed and you should be under observation for a few hours.”
“I could sit in the waiting room for a couple of hours. The nurses could keep an eye on me.”
“That’s not how the protocol works around here and you know it. Besides, the nurses have better things to do than to pop in and out of the waiting room keeping an eye on you. You also need more than a couple hours of monitoring, so nice try.”
“I…” Angie shifted uncomfortably. By the defeated look on her face, she knew there was little point in continuing to resist. “Look, I appreciate the offer, but for the record, I don’t think it’s a good idea.”
Vic sat down on the exam table beside Angie. Good idea or not, the offer had been made and she wasn’t about to retract it. “Angie, I know things aren’t exactly comfortable between us. And for good reason. But you did help me out of a bind, in case you’re forgetting.”
The tremble in Angie’s voice was barely audible, but it surprised Vic. “You don’t owe me anything, Vic. Especially since you can barely stand the sight of me.”
Vic gasped. Barely stand the sight of her? Where had that come from? It was Karen and Brooke she couldn’t stand the sight of. She and Angie were collateral damage. Two unfortunates stranded on the same island of betrayal and pain. They weren’t friends, no, but they were hardly enemies. Had no real reason to dislike each other.
Quietly, she said, “Where did you get the idea that I can’t stand you?”
“Forget it. Forget I said anything.”
Vic thought back to the last time she’d seen Angie. It was last week, the choking child Angie and her partner brought in. She had been curt to Angie. Rude. Even angry. But she’d chalked it up to the stress of the situation. Reaching back further, she remembered how ungrateful she behaved the afternoon Angie drove her home from the winery. She could no longer deny the pattern, because whenever Angie was around, something in her wanted to snap, wanted a place to lay some blame, and it was wrong of her.
“I…” Vic had to swallow to keep her voice from breaking apart. “I’m so sorry, Angie. It’s just…I don’t know what to do about…what happened. I don’t quite know yet how to live with it.”
They sat for a couple more minutes before Angie broke the silence. “Me either.”
Chapter Seven
Angie wasn’t given a choice of what she wanted to drink, though whiskey would have been her first choice, given the circumstances. You need liquids, warm liquids, Vic had emphasized, and now she set two mugs of herbal tea on the coffee table, one for each of them.
It was hard to get her mind around the fact that she was in Vic’s house. Again. “We seem to be kind of stuck with each other lately,” she conceded, her mug steaming in front of her. The tea smelled of wildflowers. Or maybe weeds. Something she wouldn’t normally drink and that didn’t hold a lot of appeal. Coffee was her hot drink of choice. Thick, strong coffee with a healthy dollop of cream, no sugar. It always cleared out her cobwebs.
Vic, at the other end of the sofa, wouldn’t meet her gaze. The only light was from a Tiffany lamp in the corner, its colored glass like fine, dazzling jewels.
“I never saw it coming,” Vic said so quietly that Angie had to tilt her head to hear clearly. “Did you? See it coming, I mean.”
“Nope.” She sipped her tea, knowing exactly what Vic was referring to. The tea still tasted like the weeds that grew along the edges of the vineyards at her parents’ farm, and her brain was no less foggy because of it. “Too stupid to, I guess. Or blind. Or maybe I didn’t actually give a shit.”
“I like to think we were trusting, not stupid or blind, and that we did give a shit.” Vic’s eyes glistened with unshed tears and she studied her mug like it was a Picasso. “All of those things—it’s how you’re supposed to be in a relationship. Isn’t it?”
“Tell that to them.”
Vic laughed bitterly. “I would, but I can’t seem to get Karen on the phone. Her lawyer, however, seems to have all the time in the world to talk to me.”
“Figures. I’m sure Brooke put her on to one of her power-tripping lawyer friends. But you know what? I say ‘Sayonara, baby!’ Good riddance to them both. Let your lawyer talk to her lawyer. That’s what I’m doing with Brooke. Hell, you couldn’t pay me a million dollars to talk to Brooke right now.” What was done was done. There was no sense in rehashing something that was over. Brooke and Karen had insured they’d be granted the last word. And they could have it.
Vic not only wasn’t on the same page, she wasn’t even reading from the same book. She looked at Angie as though she’d done something as reprehensible as poke a pin in a voodoo doll likeness of their exes—which come to think of it wasn’t such a bad idea. “Well, I’d prefer to keep the lawyers out of it. I’d like to just talk to Karen. Find out what’s going through her mind, why she…why they…how this happened. I’d like to know what went wrong. Between Karen and me. Don’t you want some answers from Brooke?”
Anger swamped Angie like a massive wave pushing her under its surface, rolling her over, pounding her. “Answers? The only answer I need is that Brooke fucked around on me and supposedly fell in love with somebody else. I don’t need the whys and hows to know that it’s over between us. I don’t need to know the reasons for her shitty behavior.”
“But sometimes solving a mystery like this detracts from the pain. Makes it easier to heal.”
“Maybe for you, but I’ll tell you what. On the battlefield, you don’t have time to ask why the enemy hates you. Why they’re trying to kill you. You have to survive, and to do that, you have to shut everything else down and focus on only that, because nothing else matters but what’s happening at that very moment.”
Vic’s lips parted in astonishment. “Angie, this isn’t a battlefield.”
“Really? Could have fooled me.” God, Vic was being naïve. Too many psychology classes in med school. Too much just-talk-it-out-and-you’ll-feel-better training.
“And hating them won’t make the pain go away.”
“The fuck it won’t.”
Vic drank her tea as though she too found it distasteful, her face twisting into something unpleasant. “Well, hating Karen won’t make it any easier for me. What would make it easier is figuring out what happened, what went wrong, how Karen feels—felt—about our marriage. You don’t just throw ten years out the window because of…because of…”
“Because of fucking around with somebody else for months? Falling in love with someone else? Or lust, or whatever the hell they think it is? Jesus, Vic, they probably screwed right here in this house while you were working nights and I was out of town. You ever think abo
ut that? You ever think about them making their little plans to be together? Getting their lies straight? You think they gave two shits about us?”
The words were like darts, poison ones, and Vic’s tears were proof they’d hit their mark. Ah crap, Angie thought. Her head pounded again, and not from the concussion this time. It wasn’t easy to make an ER doc cry. Wasn’t easy to make a soldier or a paramedic cry either, come to think of it. Well, she certainly wasn’t going to cry over Brooke and Karen. They could go fuck themselves before that was going to happen.
“Look, I’m sorry.” For Vic’s sake, Angie tried to soften her voice. “I know being angry like this isn’t, I don’t know, the healthiest way to handle things. But it’s what works for me. At least right now.” The anger was the only thing keeping her from breaking apart.
“Is it?”
“What?”
“Working for you?”
She picked up the warm mug again and cradled it between her hands. At least she wasn’t shivering anymore, thanks to this dreadful tea and probably because of the quilt Vic had made her wrap herself in and the hot water bottle snugged within.
“Honestly, I don’t know if anything would make me feel better right now. But I do know I can’t stand the thought of seeing Brooke right now. Or talking to her.”
Vic’s tears had dried in streaks down her face, her expression unreadable as she gazed blindly into the dim light. Was she feeling regret? Nostalgia? Grief? Hope? The sudden haze of calm about her brought instant alarm to Angie.
Oh no. “Don’t tell me you want Karen back?”
Vic took one look at Angie with her short brown hair sticking up at every possible angle and nearly laughed out loud. She would be cute if she wasn’t, well, Brooke’s ex.
“How are you feeling this morning?”
“Like a truck ran over me.”
Vic frowned and took a step closer. “Maybe I should get you back to—”
“No.” Angie held up a forestalling hand. “I don’t want to go back there. It’s only like a pickup truck ran over me, not an eighteen-wheeler. I promise, I’m fine.”
“Coffee?” Vic directed her to the kitchen table for two and at Angie’s nod began pouring for each of them. “Cream?”
“Yes, please. Thank God you’re not forcing me to drink those melted weeds again.”
Vic laughed. “It was only chamomile. Not exactly some kind of witch’s brew, you know.” She placed a small pitcher of cream on the table before Angie. She sat across from her and took a sip of her black coffee while Angie added cream to hers and stirred slowly. “Tell me about your life as an army medic. You were deployed overseas?”
“Twice. Afghanistan and Iraq. Worked out of the main hospital in Kandahar on my first tour. After that I trained as a flight medic. Got tired of doing medevac flights to Landstuhl, Germany, so on my second tour in Iraq I was attached to an Airborne unit doing helicopter medevacs in the field.”
Vic couldn’t help wincing. “Guess you saw a little bit of everything over there.”
“Yup.” Angie sipped her coffee and stared at nothing, her eyes opaque shields.
This woman was an enigma, full of shadows, dark corners, bright lights, fury and serenity in constant battle with each other. It was Vic’s first clue as to why Brooke might have strayed. Perhaps she’d gotten tired of chipping away at the emotional barriers that Angie had undoubtedly constructed early in their relationship. Ex-soldiers were not the easiest nuts to crack, not the most emotionally available people.
But then neither were front-line emergency medical personnel, Vic knew. How much had she ever revealed to Karen about her work life? About the losses, the near-losses, the heartbreaks or even the successes? She rarely ever talked about her work with Karen, not in any emotional way, because she preferred to shut it off by the time she left the hospital parking lot. It was the only way to separate work from the rest of her life, to keep the drama and pain of the ER from swamping her—or so she’d always told herself. Perhaps what she’d thought was so necessary to her own well-being was the very thing that killed her relationship with Karen.
She thought back to the Karen she’d first fallen in love with. The young, uncomplicatedly ambitious, completely transparent Karen. Then the Karen who grew more distracted, more distant, more self-involved. And more recently, the Karen who, it was obvious now, was merely going through the motions, pretending to be satisfied with her life, with their marriage. All of these versions of Karen rushed at her, reaching through the fog of her grief and misery until she realized she didn’t know her wife at all anymore. And by extension, she wondered if she even knew herself very well. After all, hadn’t she too grown more distant, more cynical, more self-involved, less emotionally available over the years? Had they both driven each other away without intending to? And then there was Angie, whom Vic had secretly and high-handedly been blaming for driving Brooke into Karen’s arms, because she hadn’t wanted to acknowledge her own shortcomings as a partner.
“I think I owe you an apology,” Vic said on a long sigh.
“For what? I’m the one who owes you my thanks. For taking care of me last night.”
“It was the least I could do. Because I don’t think I’ve been treating you very well.”
Angie raised her eyebrows but said nothing.
“I think,” Vic continued, carefully setting down her mug, “that I was looking for somebody to blame. I wanted it to be your fault that Brooke got involved with Karen. But that’s not fair to you, and it doesn’t explain Karen’s part in it.”
“Maybe we’re both the bad guys and got what we deserved.”
Vic studied Angie’s eyes, could see right away that she was playing devil’s advocate. “You don’t believe that.”
“You’re right. I don’t.”
They sat in silence for a few minutes, sipping their coffee, each immersed in the bitter brine of their failed relationships. Vic knew better than to expect a simple, solid, sensible answer for why Karen had done what she did, yet she grasped for one like a lost hiker searching frantically for a trail marker.
Angie broke the silence first. “One thing I learned on my tours is that blame is a waste of time, a waste of resources, a waste of emotional energy. Over there, you didn’t always know who your enemy was, because they usually hid in plain sight so that you couldn’t tell if someone genuinely wanted to help you or kill you…The market vendor who wouldn’t meet your eyes, for instance. I mean, what was he planning? Or was he just scared? And even if the enemy did present himself, it was always a mystery to me why he wanted to kill me. I mean me, Angela Cullen. Killing is a very personal thing, you know? Why me?”
She shook her head before continuing. “It was personal to me, but it wasn’t to the guy who wanted to kill me. Sometimes it was for ideological reasons, sometimes the killer was being paid to lay down a bomb or coerced into wearing a suicide vest. You did what you could to survive over there and you didn’t waste time trying to figure out the whys and hows. And I’m sorry I didn’t explain that very well last night.”
“So Brooke and Karen, it was more about them and not us? That it wasn’t personal? Is that what you’re saying?”
“Oh, it was personal, all right. Or at least, the result was. But, yes, the more I think about it, the more I think that what happened was more about them and not about us.”
“Huh.” Vic finished her coffee. Maybe Angie was right. Maybe Brooke and Karen answered something in one another that had nothing to do with her and Angie.
“Can I use your shower? And wear these scrubs home?”
“Of course.”
“I should get going. If I have medical clearance, that is.” Angie winked to undoubtedly smooth the bumpy road their conversations last night and this morning had taken.
“You do, but I don’t want you to go back to work for a couple of days.”
“I don’t know about that. Work is kind of my salvation right now.”
“I hear you. It is for me too,
but you need to rest for a couple of days, make sure you don’t have headaches before you go back, all right? And if you develop a fever, I want to see you right away.”
Angie turned to head up the stairs but halted before the first step. “Vic?”
“Yes?”
“Do you think we’re becoming friends?”
The question came as a surprise. Were they? And if so, was it such a terrible idea? They’d both been deserted, left behind to pick themselves up and lick their wounds, a couple of soldiers in a foxhole who’d have to make their own way out across the minefields and back to friendly territory.
“I think,” Vic said, “that I could kind of use a friend.”
“Me too.” Angie’s smile was a revelation; Vic didn’t remember if she’d ever seen her do it. Her whole face relaxed into it, even her eyes, until it made her look kind, loyal, as though she were fully prepared to pick you up and carry you to safety through enemy fire, if that’s what it took. Vic found that her breath had stalled somewhere in her chest, so slammed was she by this new side of Angie.
“So,” Angie continued, “since we’re friends and all, are you available Monday to come out to the winery for a private tour? We’re closed to the public that day, but I happen to have the keys to the place.”
“I’ll make myself available.” Vic grinned, feeling a tinge of embarrassment in her cheeks. “If I’m welcome back there, that is.”
“Of course you are. Make it noon.”
“All right. And I promise I won’t need you to drive me home this time.”
Angie laughed. “After last night, I’d say we’re even.”
Chapter Eight
Angie wasn’t surprised her luck had run out. She’d managed to tour Vic around a couple of the fields on a two-seater ATV and then into the storage room where the red wine was fermenting. They were about to head to the tasting room when her sister-in-law Claire rounded a corner and practically collided with them.
Claire had the good grace to quickly hide her shock at seeing Vic again. Her slick manners were one of the reasons why she was the company’s unofficial ambassador and public relations whiz. But Angie should have known better than to think she’d get away with squiring a woman around the premises. Especially when that woman was Victoria Turner.
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