surely want me to encourage you to eat.”
She managed a small portion of the delicious supper, swallowing it past the lump of fear in her throat. Every time a person in a white coat or scrubs walked by the door, Mallory found herself tensing. Her mind simultaneously prayed they were coming to tell her something and hoped they would go past if it were bad news.
Then, as Andrew was helping her stack the food back into the cooler, the door opened. There stood the doctor, her phalanx of white-coated interns and medical students behind her.
Mallory froze. She felt Andrew take the plastic container of mashed potatoes from her. She turned and numbly accepted the doctor’s outstretched hand in its proffered shake. The woman sat in the chair across from her.
“Okay, well. She is...stable. It’s been a real battle, I won’t lie. We’ve got her on three pressors to keep her blood pressure up, and she’s continuing to need maximum support from the vent. We’ve assessed the burns to her legs and feet, and, as I told you before, we’re dealing with twenty percent of her body surface. The burns are...well, the majority of the higher ones are at least second degree, and she has third-degree burns on her feet. That is serious. Also...do you know if she came in contact with a live electrical wire? She has burns on her hand and torso that appear to be from electric shock.”
Mallory shuddered. “I—I wasn’t there—I—”
“No,” Andrew spoke up. “I was part of the responding fire department. The house didn’t have power. We always check and get the power company to shut it off. There’s no way she could have gotten an electrical shock. She was fine when I heard her—she was conscious and alert when I had to evacuate a fellow firefighter of mine. She got burned in the time it took for us to go back in after her.”
The doctor gave him a dubious look. “The burns on her hand and arm and torso are consistent with, say, a frayed extension cord. Maybe she came in contact with an exposed wire and it knocked her unconscious? It’s the least of her worries, but it makes me concerned that we may have missed deeper wounds.”
“I can assure you,” Andrew insisted. He was leaning forward now. “There was no power to that house, not that I know of.”
The doctor held his gaze, turned to take in the curious faces of her flock of junior doctors, and shrugged. “I’ve seen a lot of electrical burns in my time. And this? Despite what you say, it looks like one. We’ll treat it as we see it and keep an eye out for anything else.”
She rose from her chair and looked at Mallory. “Do you have any questions?”
“When can I see her?” Mallory husked. “And—and is she—she...” She couldn’t form the words.
“You can see her briefly in a few minutes, but I warn you, we have her in a medically induced coma. The next twenty-four hours are critical. Please rest assured that we are doing all we can. It’s a miracle that she’s made it this far, but...well, if it makes you feel any better, we’ve seen worse burns.”
Then she was gone, her coterie with her.
“That makes no sense,” Andrew muttered. “How could she get an electrical burn? She was fine—well, not fine, but—”
“I don’t understand.” Mallory managed to pull her focus back to Andrew’s words. “What happened?”
“It was—well, a little hairy. See, the guy with me fell through the floor.”
Mallory put her hand to her mouth. “Is—is he okay? Is he—is that why you’re here?” The idea that she’d not even thought of anyone else being injured shamed her.
“Oh, yeah—it was a scare, I tell you. I pulled him up, got him to the front porch. And he’s fine. A cracked rib, a bump to the head. He’ll be raring to go in a day or so.”
“Oh, well—that’s good.” Relief sluiced over Mallory.
“Yeah, so—well, just before my buddy went down, we heard her—your sister. We were in the foyer, right at the stairs. She was calling for help on the landing above us, running around like a jackrabbit. Instead of going out a downstairs window, she must have gone upstairs, maybe to escape the smoke? And then she panicked, maybe couldn’t find her way out? I know she was conscious and alert then, and the power was switched off. We always check. Anyway, I had to get Eric to the front porch. I got him out, let the EMTs check him out and then I told the Captain I’d go back in and look for her.”
“Wait...wait.” Mallory struggled to understand the timeline. “You heard her? Right above you? And...you left her? You left my sister in a burning house?”
“Well...yeah, it’s protocol.” Andrew shrugged one shoulder. “Order of priority. We go after fellow firefighters first, civilians second and property third—a really, really distant third. And she obviously had air—so that meant we had time.”
The warmth Andrew had given her with his reassuring smile and his care package coalesced into an icy block within Mallory.
“Protocol?” she choked out. “Why would your...protocol dictate that a civilian is saved after a firefighter?”
Andrew blinked. “A firefighter wouldn’t be down in the first place if it weren’t for having to go in after the civilian. And—I mean—he’s my buddy. I got his back, he’s got mine. He would have done the same for me.”
“You’re saying...that since my sister is a—a civilian, she gets left in a burning house?” This blindsided Mallory. It didn’t square with her idea of firefighters running into houses that were aflame or rescuing cats up trees. It didn’t sound in the least heroic.
“I guess you could say that,” Andrew said slowly. He had a wary look on his face, as though he realized all of a sudden that he had said the exact wrong thing.
“I am saying that!” The ice grew inside her, a cold fury that rivaled the chill outside. “You took the time to help your buddy to the front porch, and you ignored my sister?”
“It was a bad injury, and the stairs were too much of a risk for us to go up that way, so Captain said we’d use a ladder—”
“You just said your buddy was fine—a broken rib, a bump on the head—didn’t you? Did I hear that right?”
Andrew stood up, took a step toward the door. “Uh, maybe it was a bad idea, me coming here. I just—felt bad. You know. For Katelyn. Because she—” He broke off, ducked his head.
“Because you left her. All this—” She swept her hand at the cooler, the blanket. “It’s because you feel guilty, right? You knew you shouldn’t have left her.”
Andrew passed a hand over his hair, not meeting her eyes, his mouth grimacing. “I didn’t want to leave her. I do feel bad. But—I mean, my buddy. I had to take care of him.”
“Your buddy is fine! And Katelyn—Katelyn may die.” Split-second decisions—with no thought to the consequences—like the guy in the eighteen-wheeler who’d thought he could make the light and instead T-boned her parents’ car.
And now another decision just like that—another one was going to cost her the last bit of family she had left on this earth. “You were there,” Mallory sobbed. “In the house. And you heard my sister
