They Buried My Mother Quietly, So I Married the Son She Saved novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Terms

In the ER of the hospital where her mother worked, Rafe proposes a one-year marriage to take back his own medical power, and Megan says yes for the badge that opens every door but one.

Corliss Memorial at four in the morning smelled of floor wax and burnt coffee.

It smelled the same as when I was sixteen and brought my mother her dinner in a plastic tub.

I hadn't been inside it since.

I stood by Rafe Corliss's bed in a curtained bay on the emergency floor with my back to the wall.

A chest tube ran from his left side to a clear box on the floor.

A bag of sedative hung over his head and dripped into his arm.

"Who ordered that?" I asked the nurse at the foot of the bed.

"His father called in. Next of kin. He wants him kept under until Monday."

"Why?" I asked.

"Observation."

"He's not concussed. His scan is clean. Stop the drip," I said.

"I can't take an order from the sitter," the nurse said.

"Then page the ER attending and tell him the sitter says a clean-scan patient shouldn't be sedated for three days."

She looked at me for a long moment, and then she went to find the attending.

Twenty minutes later the bag was gone.

Rafe woke slowly.

He found the ceiling, then the tube, then me.

"You're the one with the pen," he said.

"Megan Dell."

"Rafe," he said.

"I know. Your family has said it about forty times."

That got half a smile, though it cost him a breath.

"What did I miss?"

"Nine hours," I said. "And your father signing you into observation until Monday."

His face changed.

It didn't get angry. It got very still.

"Monday is the board review," he said. "Competence."

"Of you?" I asked.

"My father has told the board I'm medically unreliable since the transplant. He's been waiting for a reason to call the vote. Tonight I handed him one."

"What does a competence review do?"

"It hands the CEO chair back to him." He turned his head. "My medical proxy is my father. He signed me in tonight because he's the one on file. Until that paper changes, he decides when I wake up."

"Change it, then."

"I've tried. The only person who outranks a parent is a spouse."

I understood a half second before he said it.

"No," I said.

"You haven't heard it," he said.

"I heard it. No."

"One year. A contract. You sign as my wife, you hold my proxy, and nobody sedates me again without your signature."

"You met me five hours ago," I said.

"You put a pen in my lung."

"That's not a reason to marry someone."

"It's the best reason I've had all year." His eyes were steady. "Everyone in that house stood and watched. You walked up and did it. I want that person holding the paper."

I looked at the curtain.

Outside it, the hospital was waking up.

Somewhere above me, on a floor I'd been shown only in photographs, was the place my mother had worked for sixteen years.

I had been in this building for one hour, and I already knew I would never get in as a sitter.

I would get in as a Corliss.

"I have terms," I said.

"Name them."

"One year, and either of us can end it with thirty days' notice."

"Fine," he said.

"I hold your proxy. You hold nothing of mine."

"Done."

"We sleep in separate rooms," I said.

His eyebrow lifted. "You've thought about that fast."

"I think fast. Three. You don't ask me about my past. Where I trained, who I knew, why I'm here."

"A nurse who cuts like that has a past," he said.

"That's why it's a term."

He studied me.

"Four?"

"I want a Corliss Health badge. Every door in every hospital. And you don't ask which doors I open."

That one he took longer over.

"Why?"

"That's four."

"Is it a man?" he said.

"What?"

"The doors. Is it a man you're after?"

"No," I said, and that was the truest thing I'd said to anyone in that building. "It's not a man."

"All right." He breathed out. "Every door."

A wheelchair squeaked at the edge of the curtain.

Gran came in her wheelchair, pushed by the driver, her white braid over her shoulder, her cane across her knees.

Her eyes were still glassy but she looked straight at me.

"Is she taking it?" she asked her grandson.

"She's thinking."

"Take it, girl," Gran said. "There's nobody else in that house worth being married to."

"Gran," Rafe said.

"Don't Gran me. I'm old, not dead." She turned the chair to me. "He's a good boy and a fool. Fix one of those."

I almost laughed.

"Draw it up," I said to Rafe. "I'll sign on Friday."

He pulled his wallet from the bag at the end of the bed and held a plastic card out to me.

It was black with a red stripe and his photo.

"Use mine until they print yours."

I took it.

At five I told him I was getting coffee.

I rode the elevator alone, up and down, pressing every button on the panel and touching the card to the reader.

One through nine opened.

Roof opened.

Basement opened.

The last button on the panel, marked B, glowed red and beeped.

ACCESS DENIED.

When I came back, Rafe was awake and watching me from the bed.

"B-wing," he said. "It's been shut fourteen years. My father says mold."

I kept my face still.

Fourteen years.

That was the spring my mother died.

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