CHAPTER TWENTY

“DR. CARTER. PAGING DR. CARTER.”

Kneading away a crick in his neck, Rob saved a file on his laptop and went to answer the page. He had been working on a case involving a two-day-old term infant who had been rushed to the newborn intensive care unit in respiratory distress. The page was probably the coagulation studies he’d ordered.

As he took to the elevated walkway to the unit, the double doors at the end of the hall opened and a woman carrying an enormous bouquet of flowers came through. Colorful bursts of blossoms obscured her face, but he noticed immediately that she was wearing red shoes. A bright curl of red hair draped over her shoulder.

Before logic could take over, his heart leaped almost painfully in his chest and his mouth formed her name.

“Twyla?”

“Excuse me.” Veering to one side, the woman with the flowers passed by, leaving a cloying hothouse fragrance behind.

He caught a glimpse of a pleasant face—not Twyla’s.

“You’re losing your mind, pal,” he muttered under his breath, and continued down the hall to the nurses’ station. He had to concentrate on the case, nothing but the case.

In the unit, he passed through a gauntlet of visitors, personnel in scrubs, drug sales reps. One of his techs waited at the desk, a sheaf of documents in hand and a look of triumph on his face.

“You were right,” he said. “The coagulation results are consistent with your hunch. Too much heparin either in a line or the child.”

“Thanks,” said Rob, glad to have the problem isolated but not looking forward to sharing the results with the intensive care unit team. He grabbed the chart. “Did you page the baby’s doctor?”

“He’s with the team now. In C-Wing.”

Tying on a surgical mask, Rob found the physicians and nurses clustered around a clear bassinet. The chart identified the child as “Baby Girl Gardner.” Outside, the anxious parents paced, watching through the slatted blinds.

Rob and his team had worked overtime trying to figure out what the baby’s symptoms added up to, and at last he’d figured it out. He regarded the small, struggling infant, trapped like a fly in a web of tubing and monitor wire.

The others stopped talking and waited expectantly.

“This infant,” Rob said, “has been given an overdose of heparin.”

“I beg your pardon,” a nurse said, her voice hard with the iron of indignation. “This child has not been in the same room with a bottle of heparin.”

Rob flipped to a page in his chart. “I figured someone would say that, so I ordered a heparin assay.”

“Thank you, Doctor.” A neonatologist Rob knew vaguely instantly ordered fresh frozen plasma. “We’ll take it from here.”

“Sorry,” Rob said, trying to be polite. “That won’t correct it. The infused plasma will only be contaminated with circulating heparin. That’s your problem to begin with.”

“So what do we do?”

“Protamine sulfate will reverse the overdose.”

The neonatologist took the file from Rob. “Thanks a million. Good work.”

“Just doing my job.” Rob left the unit in a hurry, brushing past the nervous parents. His job was done. He’d just saved a baby’s life. Yet part of him wanted to stay and see the little girl recover, blink her eyes and cry, respond to her mother’s touch. That was what was missing from his practice, that vital connection.

It wasn’t merely ego. He had asked himself that. He didn’t crave the godlike adulation a primary-care physician got from his patients. It was the connection he wanted.

As he had so frequently over the long, hot summer, he pictured Twyla at the county hospital, combing out a patient’s hair, those hands touching, stroking, healing as she listened.

Seeing her like that had made him question the choices he’d made. Knowing her, even for a brief time, had transformed him profoundly. She’d made him remember so many other facets of medicine. Yes, the pathology was vital, and his work in the field had been important. But in the process of being brilliant in the lab, was he losing his humanity?

Maybe it was time to try something else. Maybe the next step for him was to move out from behind the microscope. Sure, it got rough when you encountered a patient who didn’t recover or wouldn’t cooperate, but that came with the territory. He had been avoiding it for years.

Back in his suite in the hospital annex, he let the tech know everything had worked out but declined the offer of going for a beer to celebrate. Closing the door to his office, he took off his lab coat, sat down at his desk and loosened his tie.

His paperweight was the horseshoe Twyla had given him. The one her father had declared a symbol of good luck. Rob didn’t know why he kept it. The thing was a constant reminder of that weekend, and how Twyla had come to mean everything to him.

He picked up the horseshoe. “Okay, work, damn it. It’s about time my luck came around.”

The phone mocked him, a silent witness to his troubles over the summer. Prior to the bachelor auction, he’d thought his relationship with Lauren was fine—but knowing Twyla had made Rob aware of a gaping lack of true intimacy and understanding between him and Lauren.

After driving away from Twyla’s house that day, he’d taken Lauren to see Lost Springs to show her where he came from.

“I don’t want to get into the deep psychological implications of your returning here,” she’d said, clearly uncomfortable as she’d fiddled with the latch of her designer purse. “You’ve triumphed over your circumstances. That’s all that matters.”

He used to believe that, but he knew better now. It wasn’t all that mattered.

It had taken a hairdresser from Hell Creek, Wyoming, to make him realize that.

Lauren had cried when he’d told her it was over, but she hadn’t tried to convince him to stay with her. She was no fool—she had probably seen the truth even before he had. She’d probably seen it the moment she’d walked up Twyla’s drive that day.

Now September set the aspens aflame with bright golden color, and he still hadn’t been in touch with Twyla. He’d tried calling, but she’d hung up. A hundred times more he had picked up that phone. But when he did, he wondered what he could possibly say to her that would convince her that, in one weekend, he had fallen completely in love with her, that knowing her had changed his life.

He knew damned well what she thought of him. Her face had said it all at their parting. He had betrayed her by not telling her about Lauren. Why should she trust him again?

A week after the reunion, a package had arrived. Rob’s hopes had soared when he saw the postmark, then plummeted when he discovered the heavily insured contents: the ruby necklace he had given her, and the picture Gwen had taken of them before their weekend together. No note, no explanation. She really didn’t need to explain. She had swept her life clean of him.

He knew he could go to her house, knock at her door, demand to be heard. But he wasn’t ready to do that, not yet. He couldn’t until he knew exactly what he had to offer her.

He turned the horseshoe over and over in his hands. He’d had all summer to think, to plan, to wonder, but when all was said and done, plans could take him only so far.

He glanced over at the fax machine to see that a message had come in while he was gone. Still holding the horseshoe, he looked at it—and his face broke into a huge smile. “Hot damn,” he said. “It’s about time.”

Holding both his good-luck talisman and the letter, he experienced a strange lightness in his chest. Up until this moment, his life had been all about goal-setting and planning. Now he was about to take a blind plunge into a future he almost couldn’t imagine. He was about to follow his instincts rather than his intellect. It was either the biggest mistake of his life…or the best move he could make.