“Did you talk to Susan?”
“Yes, I did. It turns out that for liability reasons, you’re a kid and you can’t work on the project.” Without a parent’s permission, which Elizabeth was not going to give.
“That’s not what she told me yesterday.” Brandon’s look was murderous.
“Then she misspoke. I talked with her again and she said—”
“You don’t know, Auntie.”
“I work there with these people, Brandon,” she said gently. “It’s my job to know.”
He leaned his forehead against the side window and said nothing more to her while they drove the remaining twenty minutes home, through the starts and stops of metro Boston traffic.
When at last she pulled into her parking spot at the condo building, Brandon opened the door as soon as it was safe, got out of the car and ran faster than she’d seen him run before.
“Brandon!” she called.
The wind had picked up, and some of the red and gold maple leaves were falling, swirling through the air. Elizabeth grabbed her purse and opened her car door. Standing there, watching Brandon run, she knew she was helpless to try to catch up. He sprinted across the parking lot and through the trees to an adjacent property. “Brandon!” she called again.
He kept on running. She had no choice but to toss her purse into the car and chase after him. Down a sidewalk, she struggled to catch up. But running wasn’t her forte, and she didn’t know her neighborhood well. She’d never once walked it. Pathetic.
Her heart pounding, she dashed up and down new-to-her side streets. She was wearing her hospital clogs, not exactly walking shoes, never mind running, and every now and then her ankle twisted slightly and she stumbled. But what could she do?
“Brandon!” she called out. “Brandon!”
She searched for him everywhere. There was a park two blocks over—who knew?—but he wasn’t on the slides or the swings or in the sandboxes.
Standing beside a row of empty garbage bins, hunched over with her hands on her knees and out of breath, she had to admit defeat. Tears rolled down her cheeks. Her lungs hurt from running through the cool autumn air. Her hair was snarled and her doctor coat was tangled.
She had failed. She had disappointed Brandon, and then she had lost him. Elizabeth was just so...unequipped. So poorly handling a situation that was so simple, something every parent in Brandon’s school could surely handle, no problem.
Yet again, there was that feeling of being a freak. A misfit. She could monitor a patient’s vital signs and put in a breathing tube like nobody’s business, but she had no idea how to relate to an eight-year-old kid.
Slumping, she walked back to her condominium building. She would have to call the police. It was making her panic, thinking it had gone this far. Ashley would be so upset. But the worst thing was that Brandon was gone, and Elizabeth had lost him.
What if he was kidnapped—snatched off the street? Or hurt? Or run over?
Oh, God.
She was wiping raw snot from her nose, fumbling inside her car for her purse where she kept her cell phone, but she couldn’t find the phone. Her house keys were clipped to the outside of the bag—all she could think was that since she didn’t have a landline of her own, she needed to get to Mrs. Ham’s telephone as soon as possible. What if she had waited too long to call the police already?
But when she ran into the building, the door to Mrs. Ham’s condo was open and the elderly lady stuck out her graying head. “Elizabeth? Please come here. There’s someone inside who would like to speak to you.”
Blindly, through her tears, Elizabeth saw Brandon. She’d never been so happy to see anybody in all her life. A raw sob tore through her as she rushed inside Mrs. Ham’s condo and pulled her nephew into her arms.
“I’m sorry!” she cried. “I’m messing this up! Please don’t run away from me again!”
Mrs. Ham looked at her with pity in her eyes. Elizabeth thought she might as well be stripped naked. But what could she do? She was responsible for this kid until his mom returned home. Three more weeks of life-altering, lack-of-privacy, no-instruction-manual torture, and all Elizabeth could do was navigate it day by day. Figure it out as she went.
She would just have to trust herself. Ashley already trusted her. Ashley had left her most precious thing, her son, with Elizabeth.
Jon was right. The only person who would be challenged by giving Brandon what he needed was her.
She clutched her nephew’s shoulders. “If I get you into that program, will you be happy then?”
“Y-yes, Auntie.”
“Explain to me exactly why you want to do it so I’m sure I understand.”
“B-b-because I like Jon. I w-want to be like Jon. And I l-like helping those little kids.” He put his arms around her. He felt warm and sweaty against her neck. “It’s what I can do, Auntie. I’m good at it.”
“Oh, Brandon.” A lump in her throat, Elizabeth squeezed him tightly. She wanted to help him. She would help him.
“Please get me in the program, Auntie,” Brandon whispered.
If he was in the program, then maybe she could have a little bit more time to relax, too. Yeah, that was a positive way to look at it.
“All right.” Before she could talk herself out of it, she smiled at him, said goodbye to Mrs. Ham and plunged up the stairs, leading Brandon along beside her. “I’ll need you to come into the condo with me so we can call the hospital and get you started.”
His face broke into an earsplitting grin. “I can do that.”
She would repair the bridge she’d burned. It was still her hospital, her home turf. “But in the future, you have to promise to work with me, not against me. Do you hear me, Brandon?”
His eyes were huge. He nodded at her, sniffling, his lashes still wet. The poor kid—she didn’t blame him, she was scaring herself. She would just have to take this step-by-step. Like the grown adult that she was.
Brandon clung to her as she unlocked her condo door. When they got inside, he waited on the couch and watched cartoons while she found her phone inside her purse and brought it into her bedroom. She shut the door and called Ashley’s treatment center.
“Please,” she said, once she had Ashley’s counselor on the line, “I know you prefer I don’t talk with my sister, but this is important.”
“Ashley’s doing well,” her counselor replied. “She’s very brave, and she’s making progress. But I’m sorry, I can’t have her talk with anyone on the outside just yet. It’s best for her treatment and her progress.”
“I see. When will I be able to talk with her?”
“Unsupervised? The Sunday night we send her home.”
Three weeks from this weekend. Elizabeth swallowed.
“Is there anything else?” the counselor asked.
“No. Just...tell her I love her. Take good care of my sister, please.”
When she hung up, Brandon stood in the doorway. “Can we go to the hospital now?” he asked plaintively.
“Not yet, sweetheart. Let me call them and ask first, okay?”
With her back to him, she called the switchboard and asked for Susan’s number. Susan picked up right away and Elizabeth immediately launched into her apologetic speech.
“I’m sorry, Dr. LaValley,” Susan said. “We found another former member of the Sunshine Club for the program, a college student. He’s a baseball player. Jon Farell found him, actually.”
Jon Farell. Great. For once, he had listened to Elizabeth and followed her wishes.
But Brandon was standing in her bedroom, looking at her, his lips trembling.
Elizabeth disconnected the call and took his hands in hers. “Sweetie, I have to see Jon, first. There’s...paperwork to be discussed.”
The look on Brandon’s face was of pure gratitude. And love. He clasped her around the waist and gave her a huge hug. “Thank you, Auntie,” he said in a small, muffled voice.
That meant more than if he’d begged and pleaded and crie
d.
And struck her just as forcefully.
* * *
JON WAS SITTING in the college trainer’s office watching video with Coach Duffy when, from across the room, the sound of tinny guitar music and finger snapping erupted, muffled inside his gear bag.
“Do you have a Spanish girlfriend?” Coach Duffy asked.
“No. Why?”
“Because that’s a ring tone. It sounds like a flamenco dancer is summoning you.”
Jon scratched his head. He didn’t use ring tones like that with his phone. Odd. But he was watching his fastball mechanics in slow motion on the video monitor, so he ignored the call. All he cared about was that Coach Duffy and he were pitching together again. Finally.
It wasn’t until Jon got home and, checking his missed calls, saw an entry for BRANDON!, all in caps.
The kid must have programmed his phone number into Jon’s phone. Jon stared at it lying in his palm. Thinking back, he recalled that there had been a few minutes yesterday when he’d asked Brandon to hold the phone for him while he signed a few autographs.
But there was no way he was calling Brandon back. Because there was no way to salvage this...relationship, if it could be called that, with the kid’s aunt. She was simply too closed off. Afraid to take a risk.
Worse—what Elizabeth had said to him in her parting shot?
It was irretrievable. He would not, could not, forget.
CHAPTER NINE
SHE LOOKED LIKE a hooker. At best, a lounge singer.
Elizabeth stared at her reflection and cringed. A bright red wrap dress gaped low on her bosom, tied tight around her waist. When she turned her back to the mirror, the spandex in the material clung tightly to her booty.
Ugh. She was even calling her derriere a “booty,” because that’s what her eight-year-old, cartoon-watching nephew called it.
Whatever the name for her overcurvaceous backside, it was the bane of her existence. She simply sat too much. Even the two ballet classes a week she took at work, in the hospital exercise studio, did not help. If anything, they made her “booty” even “bootier.”
“You look beautiful.” Brandon glanced up from playing with her cell phone long enough to give her a kid’s missing-tooth grin.
“Sweetie, thank you for saying so.”
“That red is the same color as is in the Captains uniform. Jon’s going to love it.”
She bit her lip to stop from laughing and glanced over her nephew’s shoulder at Mrs. Ham. The blasé babysitter stood in the doorway to Elizabeth’s bedroom, a turkey sandwich in her hand, and shrugged. “If you want to catch the attention of a professional athlete, that’s the way you need to dress.”
“So you said.” There were three other dresses tossed across Elizabeth’s bed—dresses already tried on and rejected by Elizabeth’s two beauty consultants. “Looks like a funeral outfit,” Mrs. Ham had said regarding the first dress. “I wouldn’t let my cat wear that one,” she’d said to the second. And “You should check out my mom’s closet. She has lots of dresses,” Brandon had replied to the third.
This red dress, the last in Elizabeth’s closet, had, in fact, been a gift from Ashley. And the tags were still attached to prove it.
“I don’t know,” Elizabeth mused, thinking of Susan Vanderbilt. “Maybe I need some nail polish, too.” Cinnamon-colored. She turned to Mrs. Ham. “Do you have any red nail polish?”
“Do I look like I own red nail polish?” Mrs. Ham took a bite from the turkey sandwich. Gluten-free bread, but Elizabeth didn’t have the heart to tell her. “Honey,” Mrs. Ham said, “stick with the dress. I brought up two sons—trust me, they’re not looking at your fingers.”
Elizabeth turned to the mirror and sighed. “I don’t have shoes to go with this outfit.”
“My mom does,” Brandon shouted from the bed where he was sprawled, checking Elizabeth’s cell phone once again for a potential voice mail from Jon. By the frown on his face, it seemed there were none. “I don’t see why Jon doesn’t answer my text messages. He must really be mad at you, Auntie.”
Brandon had sent Jon text messages from her phone? Elizabeth confiscated the phone from the boy and buried it in her purse. “Honey, why don’t you go to the bathroom and pick out a lipstick for me? Any color you want. They’re in my drawer by the sink.”
Brandon brightened. “Okay.” He trotted off to the bathroom, and Elizabeth thanked her lucky stars that she’d had a nurse anesthetist colleague who was also a Mary Kay sales consultant. Elizabeth didn’t normally wear makeup, but she liked her anesthetist, and her anesthetist was right, the makeup had come in handy. At some point in her life, no matter her occupation, every woman needed to put on the bling.
It was even sort of fun. Maybe. Okay, Elizabeth had no choice. She needed to convince a man to pay attention to her. To give her a second chance. And since he hadn’t been answering her phone calls all morning, and apparently was not interested in returning the voice message she’d left him, this was her last hope.
Elizabeth opened her jewelry box and pulled out her lucky diamond-chip earrings. Again, a gift from Ashley when she’d graduated from med school. She made a mental note to stop by Ashley’s house to pick out a pair of shoes from her closet. If there was ever a time she desperately needed her big sister to help her, this was it. An eight-year-old boy and a cranky neighbor didn’t make the greatest fairy godmothers. Then again, Elizabeth made a terrible Cinderella.
She looked in the mirror again. And winced at her reflection.
“Should I take Brandon with me?” she asked Mrs. Ham. “Jon relates better to Brandon than he does to me.”
“I doubt that. And did you know that every time Jon Farell gets a message from your phone number, it has Brandon’s name on it? He said he programmed it into Jon’s phone.”
“He did?”
“Jon Farell doesn’t want to talk to Brandon.” Mrs. Ham nodded at Elizabeth’s tight dress. “You’ll have to go in alone and change his mind. If you get my drift.”
That’s what Elizabeth had been hoping to avoid. “What do you think the odds are that a professional athlete is home, alone, awake and dressed at eleven o’clock on a Saturday morning?”
“He’s single?” Mrs. Ham asked. “And it’s the off-season?” She didn’t look hopeful.
Please, may Jon Farell be home, alone, awake and dressed at eleven o’clock on Saturday morning.
Regardless, at the rate Brandon was moping and complaining, Elizabeth couldn’t put off the visit much longer.
A half hour later, she was programming the GPS in her Prius for the Back Bay Towers, which is where Brandon told her Jon lived. She tried not to laugh hysterically. What was she going to do once there? Ask the doorman to call up to Jon’s apartment for her, and then beg him to let her in when Jon said no?
But Jon didn’t say no. Twenty minutes later, still shivering with cold from her lack of a coat, Elizabeth stared when the doorman in Jon’s lobby hung up the phone and pointed her to the elevator that served Jon’s penthouse apartment.
Upstairs, Elizabeth stepped out of the elevator to find a young man, exceedingly handsome and in his early twenties, waiting for her in the corridor beside Jon’s door. He smiled widely at her, his hands in his jeans pockets. “Hi. I’m Bobby.”
“I’m...Elizabeth.”
“Great to meet you.” He indicated the open door. “Come on in. My brother is getting changed.”
“Uh...” This obviously was a bad time. But if she left, she would have to go home and face Brandon’s disappointment. No, thanks. She followed Bobby inside the apartment...and immediately stumbled in the low kitten heels she’d borrowed from Ashley.
Holy cow, Jon’s place was awe inspiring. High ceilings with a solid glass wall that led to a balcony and a magnificent view of the Boston skyline and harbor in the distance. This was where Jon Farell lived?
“I know. Impressive, isn’t it?” Bobby said.
She nodded.
“I live in a new dor
m over at B.U. We’ve got great views, too, but nothing close to this.”
Elizabeth turned from the windows and smiled nervously at the second man in the living room. He appeared to be in his late twenties, stocky and somewhat balding. Also, cranky. He tipped a green plastic soda bottle to his mouth and lifted his hand to her in a silent greeting.
“Hello,” she said. “I’m Elizabeth.”
The man nodded and placed the bottle on a coffee table littered with a jumble of notebooks, pens and a laptop computer, not to mention the man’s crossed feet, wearing construction boots. The television was playing before him, some kind of sports talk show, but he kept his gaze glued to her dress. She tugged on it self-consciously.
“That’s our middle brother, Frank,” Bobby explained.
“Nobody told me Jon had a girlfriend.” A rough, smoker’s voice seemed to come from out of nowhere.
Elizabeth glanced around, confused. Frank hadn’t spoken and neither had Bobby.
“Turn me around and let me see her,” the voice insisted.
Bobby grinned at her. “That’s our dad. He’s here by videoconference.” Bobby reached for the laptop and turned it so Elizabeth could see the screen.
The glare from the sun made her squint. She could just make out a handsome man, an older version of Jon, but with very short dark hair. “Pleased to meet you,” Elizabeth said.
“Likewise,” he grunted.
And then everyone looked up, so Elizabeth turned, too. Jon had walked in wearing white baseball pants and not a stitch of clothing otherwise.
Oh, my. He had the most drool-worthy chest she’d seen in a long time—which was not saying much, since the only bare male chests she saw regularly were on the operating table, and even those were typically covered with drapes by the time she saw them.
She stared at Jon, slack jawed. Beneath a thin gold medallion on his neck, he had a fine sprinkling of chest hair, then a flat stomach, and then more sprinkling of hair below his belly button and into his...waistband. Embarrassed, she jerked her gaze to his face.
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