They Buried My Mother Quietly, So I Married the Son She Saved novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Sitter
Megan arrives at the Corliss house as the help, and when the heir is pinned under his wrecked car she cuts his chest open on the gravel; he claims her as his wife in front of the family.
The Corliss family paid for my whole education, and the first thing their housekeeper did was hand me an apron.
"For the tray work," she said. "The lady of the house likes the help to look like help."
I put it on over my gray cardigan.
I had come to the big stone house that afternoon as Megan Dell, private-duty nurse.
The agency had hired me to sit with an old woman of eighty-four.
Everything on my application was true.
I just hadn't mentioned that I was also a trauma surgeon on three months' unpaid leave.
And nobody in that house knew that fourteen years ago, my mother had died on the roof of their hospital's parking deck.
The hospital called it a fall.
The town called it a jump.
I was eighteen, and they sent me to college on a scholarship.
Their name was on its ledger, and I didn't see it until two years ago.
I wanted to know what that money had been for.
At seven the housekeeper sent me to the dining room to stand behind the old woman's wheelchair and feed her.
The family called her Gran.
The table was set for five and there were only three of us.
She was a small woman with a long white braid and glassy eyes.
Her hands shook on the armrests, and her pupils were pinpricks.
I filed that away.
Across from her sat Adelaide, her daughter-in-law, in pearls and a cream silk blouse, with a smile for everyone and no warmth in it.
Beside her sat a tall, stooped man with thin gray hair and one hand buried in his jacket pocket.
"Dr. Osgood," Adelaide said, "this is the sitter. Megan, is it?"
"Megan Dell," I said.
"Is she qualified?" Dr. Osgood asked Adelaide, and then he looked at me and smiled, tired and kind.
"She's an RN. The agency says she's quiet."
"Good. Old Mrs. Corliss has worn out four sitters, Nurse Dell, so pace yourself."
Then something hit the front of the property, and everyone looked up.
It was a crash, a long scrape of metal on stone, and a sound I knew from work.
A car had hit something very hard.
"That's Rafe," Adelaide said, and went white.
I was already running.
The stone gate pillar at the end of the drive had a gray sedan folded around it.
A deer lay in the road behind it, dead.
The driver's door was crushed in.
The man inside, Gran's grandson, Adelaide's stepson, the head of the whole Corliss hospital empire, was pinned against the wheel.
His mouth was open, and no air was going in.
His lips were blue.
I got my hand through the window and pressed it flat on his chest.
The left side did not move.
His neck veins stood out, and his windpipe had shifted toward the right.
He was drowning in his own chest.
"Ambulance?" I shouted.
"Called," Adelaide said. "Twelve minutes."
He didn't have twelve minutes.
"I need a hollow tube and a very sharp knife," I said.
The housekeeper had followed us out. She stared.
"Now!"
She ran.
Dr. Osgood reached the car and took my arm.
"Step away from him. That's a patient."
"His left lung is collapsed and the air is crushing his heart. Let go."
Osgood's grip tightened on my sleeve.
"You're a nurse. You will not touch him."
"Then you do it."
His hand stayed in his pocket.
He didn't move.
The housekeeper came back with a paring knife and the barrel of a ballpoint pen she had pulled apart in the kitchen.
I took them.
I found the space between the second and third ribs, below the collarbone, and I cut.
"Stop!" Adelaide screamed.
I pushed the barrel in.
Air hissed out of Rafe Corliss's chest in a long, rough rush.
He dragged in a breath.
Then another.
The blue went out of his lips.
His eyes opened and found me, dark blue and wild.
"Don't talk," I said. "Breathe."
Behind me, Dr. Osgood was shouting about licenses.
"She had no authority! She cut him with a kitchen knife! Adelaide, I want her arrested!"
I kept my hand on the pen so it wouldn't slip and did not look back.
The paramedics came up the drive with their lights turning.
The first one knelt, saw the pen, and then looked at me.
"Who did this?"
"I did," I said. "Needle decompression, left side. He'll need a chest tube."
"You did that with a Bic?"
"It was what I had."
They cut Rafe free and laid him on the stretcher, and Adelaide stood over me with her pearls shaking.
"You will be out of my house tonight," she said. "And you will be charged with practicing medicine without a license."
A hand closed around my wrist.
It was Rafe's.
His grip was weak but it did not let go.
"She stays," he said. His voice was raw. "Anyone touches her, they answer to my wife."
"Rafael," Adelaide said. "You don't have a wife."
His eyes didn't leave mine.
"I will by Friday."
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