Total pages in book: 144
Estimated words: 135382 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 677(@200wpm)___ 542(@250wpm)___ 451(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 135382 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 677(@200wpm)___ 542(@250wpm)___ 451(@300wpm)
Case’s wife Mia had called a few of the women she knew from Sanctum in to help corral the kiddos while the rest of the group had hastily gotten into street clothes and come running to the hospital. He’d been thankful to leave Nate behind with trusted watchers because he needed a minute to breathe.
He’d been ready to walk away. He’d been angry, so scared that he wasn’t sure he ever wanted to feel that way again.
But wasn’t that the fucking point of life? To have something you love so much it killed you to think about losing it, someone who could enrage you one minute and bring you to your knees with gratitude the next. As he’d watched the ambulance drive away, he’d remembered why he’d fallen in love with her in the first place. The very spirit that caused her to feel the kind of guilt she did was the same one that made her heroic.
He’d said he couldn’t fix her and he believed that, but maybe he hadn’t tried hard enough to make her want to fix herself.
For now they all waited. Avery was in the back with Steph and Li. They knew he’d been alive when he’d gone into the ambulance, but had heard nothing since.
Taggart held his wife and kissed her head. “Baby, he’s going to be okay, and now we know bees are like his kryptonite. Anytime he gets stung, I get to hit him with an EpiPen. That’s a huge plus. Li O’Donnell does not get taken down by a flipping bee.”
“Not while Doc Awesome is around, that’s for sure.” Theo held his wife’s hand.
Erin looked up at Brody. “You weren’t bad yourself, Carter. You were quite the nurse.”
He’d done everything Steph had asked him to from handing her the knife to wiping up blood so she could see properly. “It wasn’t our first time to work together like that. I was at that clinic with her for months, you know. I would help her when she went into the more remote areas. Wasn’t always an operating room, but she found a way to make it all work. She saved people I would have told you couldn’t be saved.”
“You were an amazing team,” Erin replied. “And I can’t thank you enough for that. I don’t think any of us knows what we’d do without Liam in our lives.”
Erin had been Liam’s partner for a long time, since she’d been hired on at McKay-Taggart. Li and Avery had been Erin’s support system when she’d thought she’d lost Theo and as she’d had their child on her own. As they would have been Steph’s.
He’d forgotten how good they were together when they didn’t let insecurities get between them. It had been natural to sit beside her and help her.
How could he leave her? But how could he stay when she showed no signs of changing?
“Brody, could I talk to you for a moment?”
He turned and Adam was there. He’d slipped on a T-shirt over his board shorts and looked surprisingly casual in a pair of flip-flops. “Sure. How can I help you?”
It would be nice to have a problem to work on, to get his mind off the fact that Steph was going to walk through those doors with news any minute and he wasn’t sure what he would do with her. If things had taken a turn for the worse with Liam, how could he not pull her close and comfort her?
“I think this is a case of me helping you.” Adam held up a mobile phone. “Serena told me you erased all of the doc’s voice mails.”
He had wondered if things would be different if he’d answered that first call. Hell, would they be different if he’d listened to the voice mail? He wasn’t sure, but he knew he’d missed something precious. “Yeah, I deleted them. It’s not something I’m proud of.”
“You do understand that you only deleted them off your phone, right?” Adam asked. “You see, nothing is ever really gone. You still have the same account and the same number. Those messages were all stored in the cloud. I hacked into your personal cloud and pulled them back out again. I put them together in an audio file. I think you should listen.”
“Why would you do that?” He wasn’t sure he wanted to know. There wasn’t anything he could do now.
“I think you should hear what she went through. It’s not always easy, you know. Our wives won’t tell us, but that motherhood thing doesn’t happen overnight or the way it does in the movies where the mom looks down and all the pain goes away in a rush and never comes back because there’s only room for love for your child. That’s all bullshit. Stephanie went through this alone but you can hear a little of what she needed from you in these messages.”