He Secretly Married My Sister, So I Left Him and Started Over novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Wall of Names

The ER staff who loved Patsy take Hazel in and Ansel offers her a bed without mentioning her sister; her mother appears in the corridor with Darla behind her.

The automatic doors opened and the whole emergency department looked up.

I stood in the entrance with water running off my hair and a duffel bag on my shoulder.

For a second nobody spoke.

I had worked in this building for six years.

I had not walked through those doors since the eighth of January.

The triage nurse half rose from her stool. Behind her, a tech put down a clipboard.

"Dr. Coughlan?"

"I'm having contractions," I said. "I'm thirty-three weeks."

"I don't have insurance, and I don't have anywhere to be. I'm sorry."

I did not know why I was apologizing to a room.

Then I saw the wall by the staff entrance.

It was the memorial board the nurses had put up in the winter.

Photographs were pinned in a long row under a laminated sign that said We Remember Our People.

The photo in the middle was my sister.

She was in purple scrubs, grinning at someone off to the side.

She had a pen behind her ear and a smear of grape jelly on her sleeve.

I knew that sleeve. I had washed the jelly out of it myself, the week before.

My knees stopped working.

Someone caught me under the arms.

"I've got you," a woman said. "I've got you, Haze. Sit."

It was the night charge nurse, the one who ran the floor with a clipboard.

She had been Patsy's closest friend for three years.

She was still in her coat, and she should not have been in the building.

She pushed a wheelchair behind me and I sat.

"How did you know?" I asked.

"Triage texted the whole floor your name," she said.

She was crying and did not seem to care.

"Do you know how many people have been waiting for you to come back through those doors?"

I did not know. I had not wanted to know.

She wheeled me into a bay and drew the curtain.

Three nurses came in and out in the next ten minutes. Not one of them mentioned my sister.

They hooked me to the monitor and started a bag of fluids.

Someone found me a dry gown and someone else brought a blanket that had been warmed.

The monitor drew a slow green line and then a spike, and the spike matched the tightening around my back.

"Contractions every eight minutes," the charge nurse said, reading the tape. "Baby's heartbeat is perfect. One-forty-eight, strong."

I put my head back against the pillow.

"Don't worry about the money," she said. "The hospital has a fund. We will get this sorted."

"I don't want charity."

"It's not charity if you worked here six years," she said, and tucked the blanket around my feet.

The curtain moved again.

I knew who it was before I looked, because the whole bay changed.

Ansel Kerrigan stood at the foot of the bed in green scrubs, with his hands in his pockets.

He was the chief of trauma surgery. He had been my boss for four years.

He was also the surgeon who had worked on my sister for ninety minutes on the eighth of January.

I had not seen him since the funeral I wasn't allowed to attend.

"Hazel," he said.

He did not say anything about my sister.

He did not say he was sorry. He did not say he'd been thinking of me.

He looked at the monitor, then at me.

"Obstetrics is on its way," he said. "They'll move you upstairs tonight. You'll stay until the contractions stop."

"I can't pay for a room."

"You're still on the St. Brigid's roster," he said. "I signed the leave form myself. Staff courtesy covers it."

I did not know that. I did not know that anyone had been signing anything for me.

My bag was on the chair beside the bed.

I reached into it and found the white envelope with his department's name in the corner.

I held it out.

"This is yours," I said. "I don't read what comes from this building."

He looked at it for a long moment.

He did not take it.

"That's the fifth one," he said. "I stopped at five."

"You can keep it or you can burn it. It isn't going to disappear."

He turned to the charge nurse.

"Page OB. Get her upstairs."

Then he looked back at me, and his face stopped being clinical.

"Hazel, whatever you need tonight, I'll be down here," he said.

He pulled the curtain back.

On the other side of it, in the corridor, my mother stood in her navy cardigan with a hand pressed over her mouth.

An orderly was rolling my sister past her in a wheelchair, her face white, a hand on her belly.

The orderly said to the room, "BP is one-seventy over one-ten. Clinic sent her over."

My mother looked at me through the gap in the curtain.

"You followed us here," she said. "Of course you did."

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