laughed. “Cookies are in the staff room down the hall if you need a sugar push to get you through the night. Canteen’s shut and the vending company forgot to fill up the machines, so there might be a brawl over the final bag of chips come midnight!”
“Count me in! I love a good arm-wrestling session. Especially if the chips are the crinkly kind. I love those.”
“I can guarantee you’ll have a fun night...at least with most of us.” She shot a furtive look down the corridor to ensure Katie was out of earshot and scrunched her face and shoulders up into a silent “oops” shrug when Josh raised his eyebrows in surprise.
“You two don’t know each other or anything, do you?”
“We’ve met.” It was all Josh would allow.
It was up to Katie if she wanted to flesh things out. He’d been the only crossover she’d allowed between personal and professional and he doubted she had changed in that department. She was one of the most private people he had ever met, and when news of what had happened to them had been all but Tannoyed across Boston General, it had been tough. Coal-pit-digging tough.
Jorja giggled nervously and flushed. “Sorry! Dr. McGann is great. We all love her. The ER always runs the smoothest when she’s on shift.”
Josh just smiled. His girl always strove to achieve the best and ended up ahead of the game at all turns. Except that night. She’d been blindsided. They both had.
He shook off the thought and waved his thanks to Jorja. First impressions? Young to be a charge nurse. Twenty-something, maybe. She struck him as a nurse who would stay the course. Not everyone who worked in Emergency did. She was young, enthusiastic. A nice girl if first impressions were anything to go by.
He’d gone with his gut when he’d met Katie. Made a silent vow she would be his wife one day. It had taken him a while, but he’d got there in the end. And today the vow still hit him as powerfully as the day they’d made good on a whim to elope. Five years, two months and fourteen days of wedded... He sighed. Even he couldn’t stretch to “bliss.” Not with the dice they’d been handed.
He thought of the divorce papers stuffed inside his duffel bag. There was only one way Katie could ever convince him to sign them. Prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that she felt absolutely nothing for him anymore. He gave a little victory air punch. So far he’d seen nothing to indicate she would be able to get him to scrawl his signature on those cursed papers tonight.
Just the shift of her shoulders when she’d heard his voice had told him everything he needed to know. She could change her name, her hair and even her dress sense if she wanted to—but he knew in his soul that time hadn’t changed how his wife felt about him. No matter how bad things had become. She couldn’t hate without love. And when she’d finally turned round to face him there had been sparks in her eyes.
* * *
Katie stuffed her head into the stack of blankets and screamed. For all she was worth she screamed. And then she screamed some more. Silent, aching, wishing-you-could-hollow-yourself-out-it-hurt-so-bad screams. There was no point in painting a pretty picture in these precious moments alone.
Seeing Josh again was dredging up everything she had only just managed to squeeze a lid on. Just. In fact, that lid had probably still been a little bit open because, judging by the hot tears she discovered pouring down her face when she finally came up for air, she was going to have to face the fact there was never going to be a day when the loss of their baby didn’t threaten to rip her in half.
What was he thinking? That he could saunter into her ER as if it were just any old hospital on any old day? With that slow, sweet smile of his melting hearts in its wake? She’d not missed the nurses trying to catch his eye. Jorja’s giggles had trilled down the hallway after she’d stomped off. Josh did that to people. Brought out the laughter, the smiles, the flirtation. The Josh Effect, she’d always laughingly called it. Back when she’d laughed freely. Heaven knew, she’d fallen under his spell. Hook, line and sunk. If only she’d known how far into the depths of sorrow she’d fall when she lost her heart to him, she would have steered clear.
She swatted away her tears and sank to the floor of the supplies cupboard, using her thumbs to try and massage away the emotion. Her patient was going to be wondering where she was, so she was going to have to pull herself together. Shock didn’t even begin to cover what she’d felt when Josh had walked into her ER. Love, pain, desire, hurt...those could kick things off pretty nicely.
“Of all the ERs in all the world, he had to walk into this one.”
Talking to herself. That was a new one to add to her list of growing eccentricities. Maybe she should have fostered some of those friendships she’d left behind in Boston.
“Sounds like the start of a pretty good movie.” Josh’s legs moved into her peripheral vision as his voice filled her ears.
“More like the end of one.”
“No, that’s the start of a beautiful friendship.”
“Well—well...” She trailed off. Playing movie quotation combat with Josh was always a bad idea.
She huffed out a frustrated sigh. Couldn’t she just get a minute alone? She should have gone to the roof. No one went there in the winter, and she relished the moments of quiet, the twinkle of Copper Canyon’s Main Street. She swiped her hands across her cheeks again, wishing the motion could remove the crimson heat she felt burning in them. Against her better judgment she whirled on him and tried another retort.
“Should I have said ‘of all the stalkers in all the world’?”
“Oh, so going to the supplies cupboard to track down some mandated holiday scrubs has turned me into a stalker, has it?” he asked good-naturedly.
The five-year-old in her wanted to say yes and throw a good old-fashioned tantrum. The jumping-up-and-down kind. The pounding-of-the-fists kind. The Why me? Why you? kind. The Katie who’d shored up enough strength to finally call their marriage to a halt knew better. Knew it would only give Josh the fuel he wanted to add to a fire she could never put out.
She wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of knowing how much she still cared. That had been his problem all along. Too trusting that everything would be all right when time and time again the world had shown him the opposite was true. Who else had become an adrenaline junkie after their daughter had been stillborn? Hadn’t he known how dangerous everything he’d been doing was? And she’d always been the one who’d had to pick up the pieces, apply the bandages, ice the black eyes, realign the broken nose... Trying her best to laugh it off like he did when all she’d wanted to do was curl up in a corner and weep.
Couldn’t he see she had to play it safe? That losing their daughter had scared her to her very marrow? If she were ever to feel brave enough to move forward—let alone try and conceive again—he needed to call off his game of tug-of-war with mortality.
She scratched her nails along the undersides of her legs before standing up, using the pain to distract herself from doing what she really wanted.
“Large or extra-large?” she bit out.
“Guess that depends on if you need me to play Santa later.” He grabbed a pillow from a shelf and stuck it up his shirt.
Without bothering to examine the results, Katie yanked a pair of extra-large scrubs from a
