Stepping-Stone for Mia novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Locked Door

Her brother locks his office behind her with Mia safe inside, Sarah faces the widower alone and is cut, Tim tackles him off the elevator, and the man shouts that three hundred people heard his wife ask for Dr. Harwood.

Behind me, the lock clicked.

I knew that sound. I'd heard it my whole life, from the other side of Bennett's bedroom door.

I turned my head.

Through the glass panel beside the door, I saw my brother pull Mia off the couch and back toward his desk.

He didn't look at me.

He looked at the man with the knife, and then he looked at his phone.

The hallway was thirty feet long. The elevators were at the far end.

The man was halfway to me.

I could run back along the wall to the stairwell. I could pound on the locked door and beg.

I did neither.

My legs wouldn't have carried me, and anyway, I wanted him to hear me.

"Kelly," I said.

He didn't slow down.

"Kelly Beal," I said louder. "Your wife was Kelly. Your daughter is June."

He stopped six feet away.

Up close he was huge, and he smelled like motor oil and three days without a shower.

A patch on his jacket said Dundalk Comfort Heating and Air.

The knife was the kind men use to dress a deer. The blade shook.

"Don't you say her name," he said. "Don't you say my baby's name."

"June's in the NICU. She's yellow, but she's fine. I saw her yesterday."

"You don't get to see her!"

"I know."

"She asked for you!" His voice cracked straight down the middle. "She kept asking for you, and you didn't come!"

"I came at two o'clock," I said. "I came the second I could. I was in surgery across the hall. I wasn't the doctor she was asking for."

"Liar."

"I'm not lying to you."

"They told me your name! They wrote it down for me on a card!"

He pulled a card out of his pocket with his free hand.

It was Harbor Point letterhead, with my name on it in blue ballpoint.

Somebody in risk management had handwriting like a schoolteacher.

"Mr. Beal," I said. "Please put that down. Your daughter needs you to walk out of here."

For one second, I thought he would.

His face folded. He looked at the card in his hand.

Then the elevator dinged at the end of the hall.

He flinched at the sound and swung.

I put my arm up.

I didn't decide to. Fifteen years of my mother saying "protect your hands, Sarah, you're going to be a surgeon" decided for me.

The blade went across my left forearm, just below the elbow, and came out the other side of the cut warm.

It didn't hurt.

That was the strangest part.

It felt like someone had drawn a hot line on me with a marker.

Then my sleeve went dark red, fast, and I knew exactly how deep it was by how fast.

He stared at the blood.

He stared at it.

"Oh God," he said.

He raised the knife again anyway, and I don't think he knew he was doing it.

Something blue hit him from the side.

Tim Brogan came off the elevator in his scrubs and his stupid crab-print cap and took him at the waist.

They went down together into the secretary's desk. A cup of pens exploded across the carpet.

The knife skidded toward me.

I put my foot on it.

"Sarah, are you cut?" Tim was on the man's back, both hands locked on his wrist. "Sarah!"

"Yes."

"How bad?"

"Brachioradialis, I think. Not the artery."

"You think?"

"I'm fairly confident."

"Press on it!"

I was already pressing. I sat down against the wall because the wall was there.

Two security guards came pounding out of the stairwell.

One of them knelt on the man's legs. The other got the cuffs on.

The man didn't fight. He'd stopped fighting the moment Tim hit him.

He lay with his cheek on the carpet and cried with his mouth open.

Tim crawled over to me.

He pulled off his cap, folded it into a pad and pressed it over my sleeve with both hands, harder than I had.

"Hi," he said.

"Hi."

"You talked to him."

"He was going to hear it from somebody."

"You're insane."

"You tackled a man with a knife."

"I'm Irish. It's genetic."

His hands were shaking on my arm. His voice wasn't.

Behind us, the lock clicked again.

Bennett's door opened.

My brother stepped into the hall with his phone held up.

"Is everyone all right?" he said, loud, for the secretary and the guards and the people now peering out of every office door. "Sarah, thank God."

Mia stood behind him with both hands over her mouth.

Not a hair out of place.

Tim looked up at Bennett.

He didn't say anything. He just looked, for a long time, and Bennett was the one who glanced away.

The guards hauled the man up to his knees.

He turned his head and found me against the wall. His eyes were swollen almost shut.

Then he saw the faces in every doorway, the phones coming up.

He dragged in a breath.

"She was streaming!" he screamed at the whole hallway. "Kelly was streaming the whole time! Three hundred people heard her ask for Dr. Harwood!"

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