Total pages in book: 107
Estimated words: 103141 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 516(@200wpm)___ 413(@250wpm)___ 344(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 103141 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 516(@200wpm)___ 413(@250wpm)___ 344(@300wpm)
“You’d laugh at me right now,” I say softly to my dead wife. Staking out a hospital because I got fucking neck tingles is a Moira O’Shea thing to do—not a Rian one. She believed in weird stuff like fate, destiny, that what’s meant to be will always find a way, and that kind of thing. I used to tease her about it, tell her I make my own fate, that no one controls me but me, and again, she’d just give me a knowing smile, one that made me feel like she was in on a secret that I wasn’t—like maybe she was right and the universe had shared more with her than what I knew.
I sit in the cafeteria so long my coffee goes cold, shifting in the uncomfortable seat, the room having emptied—one person left about an hour ago, then another forty-eight minutes ago, and another a few minutes later, on and on, until they left me alone.
I’ve learned over the years to always pay attention to my surroundings, to know who’s in a room with me, where all the exits are, how many windows and doors, because you never know when you’ll need that information.
Which is why I hear the soft sound of footsteps before the person enters the room. My gaze flickers toward the door, and just as he rounds the corner, I shiver. That motherfucking feeling back at my nape—one second, two, three, four…and then it’s gone.
But I know it was there. Why the fuck was it there?
I watch as my doctor walks over to one of the fridges and pulls out a sandwich. He gets a bottle of water next, then walks over to the lone employee standing at the register.
As the two of them talk, I stand, pick up my paper cup, and then amble over, lingering by the premade food as though I’m going to buy any of it.
“Busy night?” the cashier asks.
“Yes, it was a busy one. I just have to finish my dictating, and then I can go home, though. How about you?”
I listen as the cashier replies to him, the doc asking questions and holding a conversation with him as though he cares what the man has to say. You can tell when people just talk to a person because they feel like they have to—or at least I can—and that’s not the situation here. He’s asking because he’s interested—this man, who is up in the middle of the night, after performing surgery, is curious about this man’s daughter going off to college and his wife having hurt her back.
When they say goodbye, I set the pack of gum in my hand back on the shelf, as though I’ve changed my mind, then follow behind the doc as he leaves.
His hair is slightly messy, like he’s run his fingers through it a few times.
I toss my coffee into the trash. His shoes make a soft clicking sound with each step he takes.
When he gets to the sliding doors that lead into the surgery department, my gaze flicks toward him again while he presses a code into the keypad.
I don’t know how long it will take him to dictate, or what I expect to gain by continuing to follow him tonight, but I’m going to. I just…need to understand what’s going on, why my body is misfiring the way it is around him.
I sit in the surgery waiting room. It’s over an hour later when the sliding doors open again, and I can tell by the cadence of the walk that it’s him. He passes by, and I wait until the sounds of his footsteps turn around a corner before I get up and head in that direction.
He moves toward the ED, which I think has the only doors open at this time, making it easy for me to keep a distance from him.
He stops to talk to someone outside the emergency room, making me wait by the bathroom, pulse speeding and showing my irritation.
She’s a woman, an emergency doctor by the sounds of it, and she asks about a patient from a car accident earlier that he operated on. He speaks to her the same way he did the man in the cafeteria, despite the fact that he’s been up all night and likely just wants to go home. There’s not a drop of impatience to his tone, nothing to suggest he doesn’t want to have either of the two conversations I’ve witnessed from him.
I’m impatient, though, and it takes everything inside of me not to step in before they’re saying goodbye and he’s leaving…again.
He’s parked farther than I would have thought—the surgeon not looking behind him, or checking his surroundings at all.
It would be so easy to…well, do whatever the fuck I wanted to do to him right now, if I were the kind of man to do something like that—hold him up, hurt him, kidnap him.