Love Another Day

by Lexi Blake

  Tears fell and Nate started to wriggle as though he could feel her anxiety. “Yes.”

  “And never once did it occur to you to take my hand and ask for help? How would you feel if I had a disease of some kind and didn’t bother to ask you to help me because I thought if it kills me, then I probably deserved it? How would you feel? Would you feel loved? Would you feel like I was a partner to you?”

  “It’s not like that.”

  “But it is. It’s exactly like that.” Brody sounded wretchedly weary. “I would spend the rest of my life worried about you. And I would spend it knowing you didn’t love me enough to live for me, enough to take a little time and see yourself the way I see you.”

  “It doesn’t sound like you see me in a very good light right now.”

  He chuckled, a humorless sound. “That’s the funny thing. I practically see you with a halo most of the time. But Steph, we can’t work. I’m not the man who’s going to fix this for you. That’s another thing I’ve learned. I can’t fix you. You can’t fix me. But the minute I had the chance, I decided I had to fix myself. Do you think I didn’t understand what Nate’s birth meant? His birth gave me another shot at you and I’ve been a completely different person. That wasn’t merely about Nathan. I knew when I found out about him that I got another shot at you. I wanted it bad, wanted you so badly. I’ve indulged you all this time. I haven’t been thinking about the bloody present. In my mind we were already practically married and having a second kid. I always wanted us to have a future, but the first chance you got, you traded it in.”

  She hadn’t. Had she? “Brody, I wasn’t thinking in those terms. I wanted to save you.”

  “But you didn’t care about saving us. There has to be an us in the equation.” He scrubbed a hand over his head. “Look, we’re not going to get this settled today and I need rest. Bloody chest hurts like a train hit it.”

  She stepped closer to him. He hadn’t let her help him when they were in the field. “Can I see it?”

  He put a hand up. “I’m fine. Anya looked at it when we were on-site. It’s bruising, nothing more.”

  “But I could help.”

  “I’m not your patient, Steph. Tomorrow, why don’t we sit down and we can talk about what to do with Nate. I’m not willing to only see him on holidays. In fact, I think if you’re going back to the clinic, he should come home with me.”

  She shook her head. “I can’t let my baby go.”

  “Why not? You left him with me last night and you never thought you would see him again.”

  Why was he being stubborn? “That was different.”

  “I don’t see it that way.”

  The door flew open and Charlotte Taggart was standing there, her face flushed. She wore a bathing suit and it was clear she’d run from the pool. “Stephanie, I’m sorry, we need you outside.”

  “I can’t right now.” She needed to talk to Brody, had to make him see that she’d been wrong, but now she wanted to try again.

  Charlotte looked back outside. “It has to wait. Please, it’s Liam. Something’s happened. We don’t know what to do.”

  Brody didn’t hesitate. There was no disappointment in his eyes, mere acceptance that this was her job and everything else had to wait. “Give me the baby, Steph.”

  Steph passed Nate to Brody and finally really looked at Charlotte. She was a pasty white. “What happened?”

  She walked through the door and saw something terrible. Liam was on the ground with Avery at his side, trying to hold his hand. She could hear that someone was already on a cell, talking to 911. Steph ran across the lawn.

  Avery looked up, tears running down her face. “I don’t know what’s wrong. One minute he was swatting at a bee and the next he collapsed. Please, Steph. Please. I don’t think he can breathe.”

  She dropped to her knees. Liam O’Donnell’s handsome face was red and swollen. His eyes were barely visible. There was no question in her mind what was happening. Severe anaphylactic shock. Liam was hyperallergic to bee stings. “Does he have an EpiPen?”

  Avery shook her head. “No. I didn’t know he was allergic to anything. Please, baby. Please hold on. The ambulance will be here soon.”

  His face was rapidly becoming a monstrous mask and Steph knew if it was this bad on the outside, that terrible swelling was happening inside, too. It was happening inside his throat, cutting off his air supply.

  “No, they won’t,” Taggart said quietly. “Steph, there’s a huge fire downtown. They’re having to bring an ambulance in but traffic is blocked coming out of the city. They told me it would be a while.”

  “Does anyone have an EpiPen?” She tried to get her hands to stop shaking. This wasn’t a random patient dying on the ground. This was Liam.

  This was Avery’s husband and she couldn’t lose another.

  “No, we don’t have one.” Adam shook his head. “I can try the neighbors.”

  It would be too late. His airway was closing. He couldn’t breathe. This was the kind of freak accident that usually ended with the patient dying because there was nothing anyone could do.

  Unless there was a trained surgeon who happened to be close by.

  Unless that surgeon was used to working in the field where she had very little equipment.

  Unless that surgeon had trained all her life to be cool and calm and to do what she’d promised that day when she’d stood in Avery’s hospital room.

  You owe me two lives.

  Time seemed to stop and the truth of her life lay out in front of her. Now she could look back and see the path that had led her to this moment, to this man dying on the ground. Perhaps she’d always been on this path. Perhaps from the moment she’d been born this was where she’d been going.

  If she hadn’t been on the road that night, she would have been a plastic surgeon somewhere, happily fixing noses that didn’t need fixing and making plenty of money. She wouldn’t have been standing in Serena’s kitchen pleading with Brody. She wouldn’t have ever gone to Africa where she’d learned how to save a man without an operating room.

  “I’m going to need a knife, something sharp with a smaller blade.” She tilted Liam’s head back. “Sterilize it please. I’m also going to need a plastic tube. Serena, get me one of Tristan’s sippy cups. The biggest one you have.”

  Serena ran off.

  She looked down at the man who’d become a big brother to her and the world shifted into place. Meaning. Kai had told her to find meaning in what had happened to her. This was her meaning. Yes, this was worth the pain. This was worth the years of guilt. She would do it all again so she could be here. Something lifted in that moment and she was lighter than she’d been before.

  And she knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that she would win this battle.

  “Liam, I’m going to perform a tracheotomy. I need you to understand one thing. I will not let you die. That doesn’t happen today. Not on my watch.”

  “Here you go, luv.” Brody passed her a knife. He must have given Nate to someone else because he was alone and seemed ready to help her any way he could. Like he had several times in Sierra Leone. “Ran it over a flame and doused it in vodka. Works in the field. How can I help you?”

  She felt him kneel beside her, giving her strength. “Do what I tell you to. Let’s begin.”

  Steph took a deep breath and did what she’d been born to do.

  * * * *

  Brody paced, unable to sit down. He was anxious, his hands shaking a bit now that the initial rush of adrenaline was gone, and he had to wonder how Steph was doing. He could still see her, see how frightened she’d been, and then something had happened. A calm, cool competence had taken over. She’d relaxed and started issuing orders like a general in the midst of battle.

  She’d been the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.

  “What a crazy fucking day.” Taggart passed out coffees before he slumped into the waiting room chair beside his wife. The entire room was filled with McKay-Taggart people. They
milled around, comforting each other as they waited for news. “First we have to wage war in the middle of a downtown factory that smelled an awful lot like feet and then Li gets killed by a bee.”

  Charlotte slapped her husband’s chest. “Don’t even joke about that. He did not die.”

  He put an arm around his wife and hauled her close. “You’re right, baby.” He glanced up at Brody and whispered. “We’re never letting Li live this down, but dude, your girl is a badass.”

  “I’ve seen a lot of stuff in my time,” Case said with a shake of his head. “But that was some heroic shit. I have no idea how she did that. It was amazing.”

  Even the EMTs had been shocked at what she’d managed to do. She’d gotten in the ambulance with them, unwilling to let go of her patient for a moment.

  Case’s wife Mia had called a few of the women she knew from Sanctum in to help corral the kiddos while the rest of the group had hastily gotten into street clothes and come running to the hospital. He’d been thankful to leave Nate behind with trusted watchers because he needed a minute to breathe.

  He’d been ready to walk away. He’d been angry, so scared that he wasn’t sure he ever wanted to feel that way again.

  But wasn’t that the fucking point of life? To have something you love so much it killed you to think about losing it, someone who could enrage you one minute and bring you to your knees with gratitude the next. As he’d watched the ambulance drive away, he’d remembered why he’d fallen in love with her in the first place. The very spirit that caused her to feel the kind of guilt she did was the same one that made her heroic.

  He’d said he couldn’t fix her and he believed that, but maybe he hadn’t tried hard enough to make her want to fix herself.

  For now they all waited. Avery was in the back with Steph and Li. They knew he’d been alive when he’d gone into the ambulance, but had heard nothing since.

  Taggart held his wife and kissed her head. “Baby, he’s going to be okay, and now we know bees are like his kryptonite. Anytime he gets stung, I get to hit him with an EpiPen. That’s a huge plus. Li O’Donnell does not get taken down by a flipping bee.”

  “Not while Doc Awesome is around, that’s for sure.” Theo held his wife’s hand.

  Erin looked up at Brody. “You weren’t bad yourself, Carter. You were quite the nurse.”

  He’d done everything Steph had asked him to from handing her the knife to wiping up blood so she could see properly. “It wasn’t our first time to work together like that. I was at that clinic with her for months, you know. I would help her when she went into the more remote areas. Wasn’t always an operating room, but she found a way to make it all work. She saved people I would have told you couldn’t be saved.”

  “You were an amazing team,” Erin replied. “And I can’t thank you enough for that. I don’t think any of us knows what we’d do without Liam in our lives.”

  Erin had been Liam’s partner for a long time, since she’d been hired on at McKay-Taggart. Li and Avery had been Erin’s support system when she’d thought she’d lost Theo and as she’d had their child on her own. As they would have been Steph’s.

  He’d forgotten how good they were together when they didn’t let insecurities get between them. It had been natural to sit beside her and help her.

  How could he leave her? But how could he stay when she showed no signs of changing?

  “Brody, could I talk to you for a moment?”

  He turned and Adam was there. He’d slipped on a T-shirt over his board shorts and looked surprisingly casual in a pair of flip-flops. “Sure. How can I help you?”

  It would be nice to have a problem to work on, to get his mind off the fact that Steph was going to walk through those doors with news any minute and he wasn’t sure what he would do with her. If things had taken a turn for the worse with Liam, how could he not pull her close and comfort her?

  “I think this is a case of me helping you.” Adam held up a mobile phone. “Serena told me you erased all of the doc’s voice mails.”

  He had wondered if things would be different if he’d answered that first call. Hell, would they be different if he’d listened to the voice mail? He wasn’t sure, but he knew he’d missed something precious. “Yeah, I deleted them. It’s not something I’m proud of.”

  “You do understand that you only deleted them off your phone, right?” Adam asked. “You see, nothing is ever really gone. You still have the same account and the same number. Those messages were all stored in the cloud. I hacked into your personal cloud and pulled them back out again. I put them together in an audio file. I think you should listen.”

  “Why would you do that?” He wasn’t sure he wanted to know. There wasn’t anything he could do now.

  “I think you should hear what she went through. It’s not always easy, you know. Our wives won’t tell us, but that motherhood thing doesn’t happen overnight or the way it does in the movies where the mom looks down and all the pain goes away in a rush and never comes back because there’s only room for love for your child. That’s all bullshit. Stephanie went through this alone but you can hear a little of what she needed from you in these messages.”

  “Steph rarely needs anyone.” That was the entire problem. She never reached out or asked for help. The only reason he knew about his child now was the fact that she’d finally found a problem she couldn’t solve on her own. Even then, she hadn’t come for him. She’d come to ask Liam for help.

  “Oh, she needs you. I think she needs you more than she knows. Listen and tell me if you still think the same thing.” Adam offered him the mobile. “Hell, listen because this is a piece of the story you don’t know yet. Listen because you weren’t there and you owe her.”

  “You had no right to listen to these.” He looked at the mobile like it was a snake that could bite him, injecting him with noxious venom.

  Adam shrugged. “And yet I did. Someone should. Someone should know what she needed, how she cried out, how she didn’t stop hoping you would answer. Someone should know what she went through.”

  He placed the phone in Brody’s hands, turned, and went back to sit with his wife, who threaded her fingers through his while Jake held her other hand.

  They were a family. He was surrounded by them, happy couples who had found each other and managed to get through all the trials life gave them to make it to the point that they were more than the individuals they’d been before. For a moment today everything had fallen away and it had been clear to him that being a family with Stephanie Gibson was his natural state.

  So why was he afraid that it would all fall apart?

  It took bravery to love someone, really love someone. He’d told her he was worried neither of them was brave enough to do it right, but bravery was a choice. It was the conscious action a man took when he realized life was worth the pain, that no matter the cost, he had to try.

  He touched the screen where Adam had queued the recording up and put the mobile to his ear.

  “All right, so you’re not answering and you were serious.” She sounded deeply irritated, her voice flat. “Fine. I know I wasn’t supposed to call you. I get it, but we have a problem, Brody. I don’t know what went wrong. I am a damn doctor and still this is happening to me. Damn it. Okay, here it is. I know we were supposed to have our fun fling and walk away unscathed, but your sperm met my egg and they had different plans. I’m pregnant. Call me.”

  He felt his lips curl up. She sounded annoyed and he could almost see her frowning at him, her brows creasing. She was adorable when she was frustrated, though he tended to not tell her that because those words would take her from frustrated to mad.

  “Okay, so it’s been a week and you haven’t called. I’m going to pretend something went wrong with your voice mail.” Her tone was bland as though she was simply trying to get through this call with as little emotion as possible. And yet he knew that when her voice went monotone, she was usually roiling on the inside. “I’m going to handle this
in a professional manner. Let me see how I can explain this to you without dragging a bunch of emotion into it. I know you don’t like that so here goes. We are two human beings who engaged in a biological function that has produced a result. That result is rapidly forming a fetus in my uterus and I would like for you to contact me in order to discuss this situation like rational adults who both have a stake in the outcome. Thank you and I look forward to your call.”

  Yes, there was the anger he’d expected. He couldn’t blame her for it, either. The recording switched to another voice mail.

  He grimaced because Steph knew a whole lot of swear words and she wasn’t holding back. He was relieved when that particular one ended and another began. Her tone was softer this time.

  “I don’t know why I’m calling you. You don’t care. I do understand that, but I thought since it had been a while, you might be…I don’t know…curious at least. I’m six months along. I thought about whether or not I should go through with this, but I couldn’t see myself ending the pregnancy. I’m still not sure if I’ll keep the baby. I would be a pretty crappy mom. I should talk to Avery about it, but I’m ashamed to call her. Anyway, I had a sonogram today. I went into Freetown and saw an actual OB. He’s nice and seems knowledgeable. His equipment isn’t top of the line, but it’s better than anything I have.” There was a pause on the line before she continued, her voice softer now. “I got to see him. Yeah, I said him. It’s a boy. I thought you might like to know. I’ll call again and let you know what I decide to do with him. I’m trying to make the best decision I can for his future. If I put him up for adoption, I might need you to sign some papers. Good-bye, Brody. I miss you.”

  He stopped, leaning against the wall, his heart aching at the dull sound of her voice. She’d considered ending the pregnancy? Of course she had. Steph looked at all options and he hadn’t been there to weigh in. He’d been traipsing around Europe while she’d been alone and pregnant.