“Yeah, but she’s pretty.”
And then, safe in her own room, Sarah had cried herself to sleep.
By the time Matthew went off to premed in Seattle, he and Elizabeth were officially a couple. Sarah had immersed herself in her own studies and, for the first time in her life, days and weeks, then months went by when she didn’t think about Matthew. But never, ever, did she stop loving him.
The night he married Elizabeth, Sarah had wandered away from the reception out to the small patch of beach just past the hotel. Matthew had found her sitting on a piece of driftwood, staring out at the water. Allergies, she’d said when he’d asked about her red eyes. And then she’d hugged him. “I hope you and Elizabeth will be very happy.”
The following year, she’d gone off to medical school herself and met Ted, a fellow student. Ted, a gentle dreamer who wanted only to help. His death still haunted her dreams.
CHAPTER FIVE
LUCY CALLED just as Matthew was leaving the house to pick up Sarah.
“Daddy.” A pause. “Can I come with you to Frugals?”
“I didn’t think you liked it,” Matthew said. “You never want to go when I suggest it.”
“But I do this time.”
“How about tomorrow?”
“Daddy.” Her tone turned wheedling. “I’m hungry now.”
He laughed. “Well, I’m sure you can find something in the house to eat.” He glanced at his watch. “Listen, Lulu, I’m running late.”
“To see Sarah?”
“Right.”
“Why can’t I go?”
He frowned. “Lucy, what’s this about?”
“Nothing. I just want to go with you.”
“Not this time.” He could almost feel the sullenness of the silence on her end and, although she’d never shown any interest in the women he occasionally introduced her to, he sensed something different. “But I do want you to meet Sarah. You’re going to like her a lot.”
“Yeah, right.”
“Lucy?”
“What?”
“Come on, honey.”
“I gotta go,” she said.
He heard the disconnect, debated whether to call back, then decided against it. No real reason she couldn’t come along, but it had been years since he’d seen Sarah and, he reasoned, Lucy would be bored listening to them play catch-up.
THE TEST OF A TRUE FRIENDSHIP, he later decided was how easily you could slip back into a natural rhythm. Sarah looked like a slightly older version of the Sarah he’d always known. Skinny bordering on scrawny, the small triangular face and shrewd gray eyes that seemed to bore right through any kind of dissembling. Hair always dated people, but Sarah wore her reddish brown hair just as she always had, in a thick, heavy braid that came halfway down her back. The row of small silver hoops in her ears were new, as were a few lines around the eyes. He could imagine her squinting into the bright sunlight. No sunglasses for Sarah. He’d teased her about the sprinkle of gray and she’d done the same to him.
After they picked up the burgers, they’d driven out to the end of Forbe’s Hook, found a spot on the rocks and watched the sun dissolve into the water.
“So what are your plans now?” he asked as the sky turned to shades of pink and red. “Are you going to stick around for a while?’
Head down, Sarah picked at the threadbare knee of her jeans. “Actually, I am.”
He waited a moment. “And?”
“I have a plan.”
Matthew grinned. “You’ve always had a plan.”
“This is different. This is a grown-up plan. A huge plan. And it involves you.”
As Matthew dug around in the paper sack for more fries, he felt the shift in her mood. Whatever Sarah’s huge plan turned out to be, he wasn’t in the right frame of mind to hear it. Her presence had been a welcome distraction from the looming Compassionate Medical Systems crisis, and he felt a reluctance to be drawn into more serious discussion. He also knew that Sarah in full-steam-ahead mode could be nigh on impossible to stop.
She shot him a glance. “You want to hear it?”
“Do I have a choice?”
“You sound tired, Matthew.”
“I am.”
“Work?”
“Essentially.” In the gathering darkness, he saw the glimmer of a smile flicker across Sarah’s face. “Don’t tell me, your plan is the solution.”
“It could be.”
He gave in to the inevitable. “Tell me.”
“Okay.” She drew in a breath. “Remember when you first started medical school, you used to talk about the kind of medical practice you wanted to have? Not just treating disease and patients who were already sick, but patient-centered care that promoted wellness with traditional healing arts, home mind-body therapy—”
Matthew groaned.
“What?”
“Tell me I was never that hopelessly naive.”
Sarah turned to face him. Eyes gleaming, body tensed, she seemed a cat poised to pounce. He braced himself.
“Matthew,” she said, “listen to me. There’s nothing naive about that. It’s exactly what I want to do. What I want us both to do. An integrated approach that doesn’t abandon mainstream medicine. I mean, kids are still going to break bones or need surgery…”
Presumably where he came in, he thought, as he listened to her describe the practice they would set up together along with herbalists, hypnotherpists and an assortment of other practitioners.
“Ted used to talk about establishing that kind of practice,” she said. “And when he died, I thought that his dream died with him, but then—” her voice softened “—it was the strangest thing. I was going through a box of old letters that you had sent me when you were in med school and I found this one that almost spelled out word for word the same thing Ted and I were planning to do. That’s when I knew I had to come back.”
Matthew looked out at the water. The ferry from Victoria appeared on the horizon, its lights punctuating the darkness. “Sarah, I don’t know how to say this—”
“Please don’t tell me it won’t work, because—”
“I wasn’t going to say it won’t
