My Sister's Baby Was My Husband's, So I Wed Beside Them novel · Chapter 15 of 24

Chapter 15: The Strip

Hamish's POV

I did not sleep.

At six I stood over Marina in the gray light and watched her breathe, one arm flung over her face.

I wrote a note and left it on the pillow.

*Gone to see the nurse. Back by noon. Lock the deadbolt.*

I had told her I wouldn't hide anything from her again.

I meant to start with that.

The nurse lived in a yellow ranch house on the east side, with a plastic deer on the lawn and a wheelchair ramp at the door.

Her husband opened it before I knocked.

He was a big man in a bathrobe, and his face was shut.

"She said you'd come."

"I'm not here to push her."

"Everybody's pushing her."

Behind him the nurse sat at the kitchen table in a cardigan, holding a mug in both hands.

She looked tired and frightened, nothing like the woman in the hospital hallway.

"A lawyer came last night," she said. "Not the hospital's. A man in a camel coat. He put an envelope on my table and said it was a gift for my years of service."

"What was in it?"

"I didn't open it. I put it in the sink." She pointed with her chin.

It was still there, soaked, under the faucet.

I sat down across from her.

"Mrs. Pflueger needs you at nine tomorrow morning. A judge is going to ask what time her sister stopped bleeding."

"They'll fire me."

"Yes. They might."

She looked at me for a long time.

"My husband says I should stay in the kitchen and be quiet."

"Your husband's right," I said. "It's safer."

Nobody spoke.

Then she stood, went down the hall, and came back with her handbag.

She took out a folded strip of white paper, thin and ribbed, with a blue line running across it.

"When the machine started beeping at two-twenty-eight, I tore the strip off the printer," she said. "I always do. It's habit. It shows her pressure going up, and the time. It shows the bleeding stopped before two-thirty. There's a copy in the chart, but Dalton Pflueger's lawyer says the chart is going to be corrected."

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