needed to call on those skills again now.
To protect Grace. He could imagine the devastating effect if the spotlight was turned on her. If someone thought to find images of what mastectomy scars looked like, perhaps, and coupled it with headline bait like Is this why her husband left her?
He couldn’t let that happen.
He wouldn’t let that happen.
He had to protect his boys, too.
They weren’t just old enough to appreciate this parade now. They knew—and loved—the new person who had come into their lives. Someone who was as happy as he was to stand in the cold and watch them run and climb in a playground. Who baked cookies with them and fell asleep on the couch with them cuddled beside her.
He wouldn’t be the only one to be left with a dark place if she vanished from their lives.
What about that different perspective he’d found the day after the twins’ birthday, when he’d known that he wouldn’t want his boys growing up without a dad, if the tragedy had been reversed? That he wouldn’t have wanted Nina to have a restricted, celibate life?
It was all spiralling out of control. His feelings for Grace. How close they had suddenly become. The threat of having his private life picked over by emotional vultures, thanks to media interest and having important things damaged beyond repair.
Yes. He needed to remember lessons learned. That control could be regained eventually if things could be ignored. He had done this before but this time he could do it better. He was responsible and he was old enough and wise enough this time around not to make the same mistakes.
He had to choose each step with great care. And the first step was to narrow his focus to what was most important.
And he was holding that in his arms.
‘Show’s almost over, guys. Want to go to the playground on the way home?’
* * *
‘There’s something different about you today.’ Helena looked up as she finished scribbling a note in a patient file on the main desk in the ER. ‘You look...happy.’
Grace’s huff was indignant. ‘Are you trying to tell me I usually look miserable?’
‘No...’ Helena was smiling but she still had a puzzled frown. ‘You never look miserable. You just don’t usually look...I don’t know...this happy. Not at this time of the morning, anyway.’
Grace shrugged but found herself averting her gaze in case her friend might actually see more than she was ready to share.
She’d already seen too much.
This happiness was seeping out of every cell in her body and it was no surprise it was visible to someone who knew her well. It felt like she was glowing. As if she could still feel the touch of Charles’s hands—and lips—on her body.
On more than her body, in fact. It felt like her soul was glowing this morning.
Reborn.
Oh, help... She wasn’t going to be as focused on her work today as she needed to be if she let herself get pulled back into memories of last night. That was a pleasure that needed to wait until later. With a huge effort, Grace closed the mental door on that compelling space.
‘I have a clown in Curtain Three,’ she told Helena.
Helena shook her head with a grimace. ‘We get a lot of clowns in here. They’re usually drunk.’
‘No...this is a real clown. He was trying to do a cartwheel and I’ve just finished relocating his shoulder that couldn’t cope. I want to check his X-ray before I discharge him. He has a clown friend with him, too. Didn’t you see them come in? Spotty suits, squeaky horns, bright red wigs—the whole works.’
But Helena didn’t seem to be listening. She was staring at an ambulance gurney that was being wheeled past the desk. The person lying on the gurney seemed to be a life-sized tin soldier.
‘Oh...of course...’ she sighed. ‘It’s the Macy’s Thanksgiving parade today, isn’t it?’
‘Chest pain,’ one of the paramedics announced. ‘Query ST elevation in the inferior leads.’
‘Straight into Resus, thanks.’ Grace shared a glance with Helena. This tin soldier was probably having a heart attack. ‘I can take this.’
Helena nodded. ‘I’ll follow up on your clown, if you like.’ She glanced over her shoulder as if she was expecting more gurneys to be rolling up. ‘We’re in for a crazy day,’ she murmured. ‘It always is, with the parade.’
Crazy was probably good, Grace decided as she followed her tin soldier into Resus.
‘Let’s get him onto the bed. On my count. One, two...three.’ She smiled at the middle-aged man. ‘My name’s Grace and I’m one of the doctors here at Manhattan Mercy. Don’t worry, we’re going to take good care of you. What’s your name?’
‘Tom.’
‘How old are you, Tom?’
‘Fifty-three.’
‘Do you have any medical history of heart problems? Hypertension? Diabetes?’
Tom was shaking his head to every query.
‘Have you ever had chest pain like this before?’
Another shake. ‘I get a bit out of puff sometimes. But playing the trumpet is hard, you know?’
‘And you got out of breath this morning?’
‘Yeah. And then I felt sick and got real sweaty. And the pain...’
‘He’s had six milligrams of morphine.’ A paramedic was busy helping the nursing staff to change the leads that clipped to the electrodes dotting Tom’s chest so that he was attached to the hospital’s monitor. His oxygen tubing came off the portable cylinder to be linked to the overhead supply and a different blood pressure cuff was being wrapped around his arm.
‘How’s the pain now, Tom?’ Grace asked. ‘On a scale of zero to ten, with ten being the worst?’
‘About six, I guess.’
‘It was ten when we got to him.’
‘Let’s give you a bit more pain relief, then,’ Grace said. ‘And I want some bloods off for cardiac enzymes, please. I want a twelve-lead ECG, stat. And can someone call the cath lab and check availability?’
Yes. Crazy was definitely good. From the moment Tom had arrived in her care to nearly an hour later, when she accompanied him to the cardiac catheter laboratory so that he could receive angioplasty to open his blocked artery, she didn’t have a spare second where her thoughts could travel to where they wanted to go so much.
Heading back to the ER was a different matter.
Her route that took her back to bypass the main waiting area was
