ALTHOUGH TONY BRADSHAW had taken them to winter hours only a couple days prior, after a day of nonstop injuries while maintenance crews worked to prepare the station to overwinter he had decided to keep the clinic and hospital open for a second shift. And, because he’d felt ill, had asked Lia to stay on and pull a double shift.
She’d said yes—not just because he was ill, but because it kept her busy and not obsessing over the final email that had arrived last night while she was holding hands with Weston MacIntyre under the aurora. The one that said her father had turned up at a Barcelona hospital. The one she hadn’t seen or responded to until there was no signal, leaving her to only queue it up for the next moment her device could catch some bandwidth.
“All right, Mr. Hansen,” she said to the man who’d most recently entered, wheeling the breathing machine into one treatment area and getting the liquid medicine dispensed into the breathing apparatus. “Have you done this before?”
He nodded, his breathing still labored. “More...and...more...frequently.” He breathed shallow and fast, his speech broken as she started the vaporizer and held it over his mouth.
“In deep. If you can, try to tuck your tongue to the side or press to the roof of your mouth and breathe around it. This stuff is dreadfully bitter, but it works like magic on swollen airways.”
He took over holding the mouthpiece, and she watched as, over no more than half a minute, his breathing became deeper, less labored.
Mr. Hansen wasn’t a complicated patient, so she might even be able to pop out and get some dinner to bring back and eat here once he was hooked up.
The station had gone into some kind of carnival atmosphere, a party in the galley with nonstop food rolling, drinks and music. There were two bars at the station that had their own farewell parties going. The coffeehouse was full of folk music and desserts, or so she’d heard. Made sense. Buffet your way through dinner, then finish up in the coffeehouse with cake and pastries. Not her, she couldn’t be gone that long, but the galley wasn’t terribly far way.
And West would probably be there.
Okay, maybe she wouldn’t go. Although, with twenty minutes before her emails might finally get a response, a trip might keep her from obsessing and worrying about the email that had arrived while she was outside, holding hands with West under the aurora.
Her father had turned up in a hospital in Barcelona.
Hospital.
Now she couldn’t stop herself running through possible scenarios to turn him up in a hospital. Accidents. Illnesses. Things just bad enough that a normal person would seek the comfort of family over... Then she felt guilty for almost hoping his hospital visit was serious enough to make him reach out, while still being recoverable.
Hansen didn’t need her. The crews must also be on dinner break, or they were all injured and the work was no longer getting done, because her steady supply of distractions just dried up in the eleventh hour.
She went to tell him she was going to dash to the galley, when a man’s alarmed voice sounded from the entry, and got her moving that direction.
Two men carried a woman who had a massive slice open down the side of her calf. They tried to hold a compress and stop the bleeding as they carried her, but it still dripped rapidly enough to switch off every other thought in her head.
“In here.” Lia flipped on the lights in the trauma room, and they carried in her patient, placing her on the table while Lia washed her hands and shoved them into gloves. “Someone tell me what happened.”
“Fan blade,” one man said. “Came off. We were trying to fix one of the in-loaders.”
In-loader? No clue. But fan-blade accident made sense. She grabbed several packets of gauze pads, ripped them open and wheeled them on a tray with other implements toward the woman. “What’s your name?”
“Gossen,” her patient said, pale around the mouth, her brows a deep, angry red that could’ve been from crying, or just the ferocity with which her brows crammed together. “Eileen Gossen.”
“Okay, Eileen. I’m going to need to look at this.” She took over holding the compress. “I want you to lie back and relax as much as you can. The harder your heart beats, the more blood pumps, the more comes out the wound, okay? Lie back.”
She didn’t take time to warn, just grabbed the fresh compresses, and got a quick peek at the wound as she switched them out. Not spurting. But deep. “Do you want me to tell you what I saw, or do you just want me to fix it?”
“Both,” Eileen said, voice strained.
“All right. The blade hit veins, that’s why you’re bleeding so freely. It did not hit an artery—there was no spurting. That’s good news.” She pointed to the one man who’d continued lingering after the other who’d helped carry in Eileen had left. “I need some help. I want you to go to the galley and look for either Dr. Flynn or Dr. MacIntyre. MacIntyre will probably be easiest to find—he’s the tall, broad-shouldered Scot with the black beard. Always wears a navy knit cap.”
“You can’t do it alone?” Eileen asked, sounding more worried that she needed backup.
“I’m a trained surgeon, Eileen. I can stitch this up so beautifully that, in a couple years, people will have a hard time believing you were ever injured. But I don’t want to remove my hands from where I’m placing pressure in order to do the other things I want done to make sure you’re as well taken care of as possible.”
“What things?”
“Monitoring your blood pressure. Setting an IV and getting saline hung just in case you’ve lost more blood than I can see from this. I don’t want you losing more while I try to make sure you didn’t lose too much. Okay?”
Eileen nodded, and when Lia looked back to the man, he was already gone. She should’ve asked if he even knew Jordan or West. If worse came to worst, she could call for Tony. The medical director’s cabin abutted the clinic, but with the way that man had shuffled around and slurred his speech, she didn’t want to take a chance on him. It might even be better to go for it alone if Jordan or West failed to materialize. Was this how things would be over the winter? She might have to do a survey of all who remained behind and see if there was any medical training at all among them. CPR, firefighting, anything. Or make some learn. For emergency situations. Something about Tony’s manner tonight unsettled her.
But she didn’t have time for that. She needed to keep Eileen calm, so Lia kept talking. Asking questions. Where was she from? What was her job in the station? Was this her first tour in Antarctica?
It didn’t take long for the man to fetch West, but her gentle, friendly, nonemergency questions helped Eileen relax. Her breathing leveled out. Her pulse, which Lia kept monitoring with one hand on the woman’s ankle while she maintained pressure with the other, had slowed.
“What’ve we got?” West asked before his feet even crossed the threshold into the trauma room.
“This is Eileen. She has an overachieving slice on the right side of her right calf, and it’s bleeding freely. Can you get a cuff on her and then a line in? We’re also going to need anesthetic—that’s the third thing.”
“BP. IV. Anesthetic. Can do.”
She kept pressure on until he’d given her a BP reading that let her know her blood loss wasn’t yet to threatening levels, but that didn’t mean she was going to change her mind on the IV.
“Do you want me to hang saline?” he asked, setting and flushing the line to make sure it was clear before taping it down.
“Yes.” Lia and West never really worked together in a trauma situation. She’d assisted him in surgeries when her fellowship surgeries got light and he was in regular rotation as a general surgeon at their hospital, but they’d been more the usual surgeries than something dialed to emergency levels.
They fell into a kind of unspoken coordination. He monitored everything—blood pressure, pain management, the patient’s emotional state—and she cleaned the wound and stitched, starting with the nicked vein, then moving on up. Eileen was lucky—the cut was remarkably clean. Fan blade sounded scary, but did less damage than she’d seen in some knife-wound repairs. Or, God help anyone, what bullets did once they entered the body and began weaponizing bone fragments.
In the middle of all that, she heard her phone go off, but had to ignore it. And not hurry just because she didn’t want to miss the window, even though missing the window would mean she’d have another twenty-four hours to sweat out a response.
By the time it was over and she’d bandaged everything, Eileen had actually dozed off from the pain medication.
“We should move her into one of the patient beds,” she said to West. “And let her sleep it off.”
Her phone chirped again and she winced. “Actually, can you just put the railing up on her bed and let her sleep here for a few minutes while I go? I have to get this. I’ve been waiting for an email—kind of an emergency, too.”
“Emergency at home?” West asked, doing as she asked and putting the rail up before following her out.
“Yeah...” she answered, then flipped on her phone. The three-word subject line hit like a truck.
Vitor Monterrosa located
“If you can, maybe peek in on Tony? He’s... He’s unwell. But only if Eileen is well and truly out. I’ll hurry. I just... I...”
“Go.”
She flew out of the clinic and off to a corner of a nearby lounge to pore over news from home.
West watched the doorway long after Lia had gone. It shouldn’t have made him feel good that she’d sent for him when she’d needed help, and he hated that it did.
The tension in her forehead when she’d asked him to stay had done a lot to undo that good feeling. The news that Tony was sick enough to call off had burned through the rest of it. If his health was going the way it seemed the past few weeks, she’d effectively be locking herself into a dangerous winter prison for eight months without access to any other doctors. Not a fan. Not for her.
Her hands had twitched when her phone pinged, telling him everything he needed to know about how serious the emergency was. Twitching hands were a big deal for surgeons, and she was usually steady enough he’d trust her with the life of anyone—family, if he’d had any left. As steady and predictable as his inability to be there for the people who needed him.
He hovered in the door of the trauma room with one eye trained on Eileen and the rest of his attention split between the short hallway to Tony’s quarters, and the main lobby doors for Lia’s return, or the arrival of more patients.
Eileen woke shortly and he had things to do, a legitimate, healthy way to clear his mind of the worry and guilt snapping at his heels, but not long enough. It took practically no time to transfer her to one of the four patient beds in the hospital ward, explain everything, ask a couple of questions and give a much longer-lasting shot for pain management.
When he was done, and Lia still hadn’t returned, he broke off to seek out Tony.
He wanted to be flip about how emergency it could be, just to steady his own nerves. From all of Lia’s descriptions, there was so much quaint and peaceful about the medieval walled village attached to her family’s ancestral estate it was hard to even picture any real, modern emergencies there—whether it was a mess, as she’d recently stated, or not.
Fire and acts of God seemed like the extent of what could happen. But believing that would mean believing she was overreacting now, and that seemed less likely.
He knocked upon reaching Tony’s door. Checking on the medical director was one thing he could quickly do to help Lia and occupy himself.
What he saw when the door opened did nothing to soothe his worry.
Sweat dripped off the man, as if he’d just run a marathon at the equator. His hair stuck up in all directions, except for the pieces around his face, which stuck to his forehead and overly defined cheekbones. Most disconcerting was how pale he was, even in that obviously sweaty, overheated condition.
“I was going to ask if you were all right, but I see you’re not,” West said, instead of greeting him. “I’ll be right back. I need some tools.”
“I just picked up a bug,” Tony called behind him, words meant as a weak argument, but West didn’t stop until he’d retrieved the nurse on a stick, a stethoscope, and pulled up his new patient’s record on his device.
He didn’t even bother knocking when he had returned, just let himself in as if it were a patient’s room.
He’d actually been after Tony about increasing his caloric intake for about a month, but not doggedly enough. The man was a physician; he knew symptoms when they were plaguing him, one would think.
“If this is a bug, you have an immune system problem.”
“I don’t.”
“You’ve had a few bugs lately, then?”
“Lia complaining?”
“No. Worried. She’s like that.” West wasn’t there to fight; he was there to help, and would force his help on Tony whether he wanted it or not.
“You two knew each other before, right?”
“Yes. But that’s not what we’re talking about.”
“I’ve noticed tension between the two of you. Everyone has.”
West folded his arms. “If you’re overwintering, you need to be checked now. Blood work, vitals. I respect you, I don’t want to be a jerk, but I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t force the issue when you clearly need help.”
That earned him a wince. With the way Tony had been fighting all mentions of whatever was going on with him, West had a feeling he already knew something serious and was doing his best to ignore it. Not a great feeling to start an examination with.
“I understand not wanting to think about bad things, but sometimes you have to. Sometimes it’s the best option. So, sit here and I’ll get vitals and some blood. Start simple, do a CBC. If you’ve got an infection, it’ll show. Then we can go from there.”
When he turned to fetch the phlebotomy tray, Tony said quietly, “I have some swollen lymph nodes.”
West looked back to see the man gesturing at his collarbone.
In his head, he went spinning through the symptoms he’d been mentally cataloging. Swollen lymph nodes alone could be anything, usually something that would resolve on its own, but when combined with the fatigue, weight loss and night sweats... Not a great string of symptoms.
“Anything else?” he asked.
Tony listed a couple more and increased West’s alarm.
“I’ll grab the ultrasound, too,” West said, but asked first, “Are they sore?”
“No.”
“Movable?”
“I don’t know...” Tony said, but his tone said he did.
It was never comfortable for colleagues to examine one another, but when the possible diagnosis was such a dire one... West left the door open and went to check on the suspicious nodes indicated, but found two other smaller, unmovable nodes around Tony’s clavicle.
Fixed. Hard. Not sore.
Damn.
“I’ll get the cart.”
“Tell me,” Tony said, interrupting his flight.
West was a surgeon by specialty. He didn’t usually diagnose cancer—he was the guy who cut it out once another doctor had these awful conversations.
“One of medium size and two smaller ones under the jaw.” West explained what he’d felt. “Let me get the card.”
Tony knew those symptoms; they could be benign, but when unmovable, hard lymph nodes got involved...
Once in the lobby, he paused long enough to check that Eileen was still asleep, then scribbled Bradshaw on a note for Lia, and headed back.
Still not back. And he didn’t have time to think on it, or go find her.
A quick scan confirmed the solidity of the nodes, and added a fourth deeper one he hadn’t felt before. The likelihood that this was benign plummeted.
“You think lymphoma?” Tony said the question with an astonishingly calm tone.
Stress made these things worse, and West didn’t want to lay that extra weight on him. Didn’t want to have this conversation, like so many bad conversations, especially when he couldn’t say for certain without a biopsy. “I’m worried. It needs more than we can provide here.”
Sweat continued rolling off Tony, but the calm persisted. “If it is, I won’t be able to stay.”
“Sorry, man. I’ll run these labs now. You take some acetaminophen to try and lower the fever.”
West returned to the lobby and found a red-eyed Lia leaving Eileen’s room. The second time he’d ever seen her actively crying, and was starting to realize she could never hide it.
“What happened?” he asked immediately, wheeling the ultrasound to the side of the room and grabbing the blood samples in one hand and Lia’s hand in the other to pull her into the lab with him. “Something with the vineyard?”
“O pai,” she answered in Portuguese, her voice thick and froggy—something he liked in bed, but not like this. “He was in the hospital in Barcelona. But he’s not now. Why did you need the ultrasound?”
“Tony.” He answered that first, but moved back to the subject of her father. A hospital visit didn’t sound worthy of tears, unless the outcome had been bad. “Is your father all right?”
Her slender shoulders crept up. “I don’t know. I guess. He’s been gone so long. The only time we get a lead on him is when he pops up to withdraw money at a bank, right before he immediately leaves that city. They emailed to say that they thought he was in Spain, and then they needed family to contact them, and by the time the email came, it was too late.”
Family emergency. Nothing to do with the anachronistic village that had no motor vehicles inside the wall.
One emergency at a time. He got the CBC started while she explained.
The idea that her father had stayed gone didn’t make sense to him, especially knowing what a chauvinist the man was—not leaving the vineyard to her. It also made it seem a little more reasonable that as soon as she found out where one of them was, she’d gone. He didn’t sigh, wouldn’t sigh, or walk out on another important conversation with her. Sometimes you had to talk about bad things. When there were no other options.
“What was he admitted for?”
“Observation.” She croaked the word, focusing on him like he’d have an answer, or anything that could ease her worry. “But they wouldn’t say more, except to tell me where he was staying. I rang the investigator, who’s still in Barcelona, and sent him there, then waited for a response, but my father was already gone. Checked out this morning. Yesterday morning? Tomorrow? Time zones. Whatever. He was gone and...” She finished her statement with a helpless shrug.
“It doesn’t sound like he wants to be found, love.”
Her bitter, incredulous laughing shrug shamed him. She might as well have said, How does this keep happening to me?
“The whole point to finding him is to know he’s all right, and to tell him not to worry about the vineyard. My tour here will be over two months before reconstruction is projected to finish. I’ll be staying there forever. The welfare of the village or the people there who rely on Monterrosa Wine is no longer on him, and he truly never wanted it to be passed to him to start with. He doesn’t have to keep running. Just let me know he’s okay. But now? Under observation? That could be for anything. Injury. Illness. Am I supposed to just stop looking?”
All the things she said, when broken apart into singular elements, didn’t add up to alarming. But with his own history of having an addict brother, it did. It definitely did.
“No,” he said immediately, and then, “Lia, I know you don’t want to hear this. I know I sound like a stuck recording, but you should go home. Having this time lag between sent and received communication isn’t helping. Listen to me. I’ll stay. I’ll take the winter. Tony is leaving. He’s...”
“What was the ultrasound for?”
“Looks like lymphoma. He has to go home for a biopsy at the least, and probably treatment. So they’re going to have to get another doctor down here for that NASA project. You’re going to be on your own for a while, maybe a couple of weeks until they get someone else. Say the word, and I’ll take your spot. If your father is in trouble and you’re here, you’ll hate yourself if something worse happens. I know what I’m talking about.”
She stilled, her damp eyes growing sharper beneath a pinched brow as she searched his face. “Did something happen to Charlie?”
Damn it. He really sucked at keeping secrets suddenly. She was in pain and he needed to help, so he just blurted things out.
“Yes,” he answered quietly, because he couldn’t see a way out of it. “Life is short, sometimes people need help holding on to it for a while longer. You don’t get past that kind of failing.”
“But you never said...”
“No reason to.”
She stilled, her brows screwed to incredulity for several seconds, and he could see her doing the mental calculations. She knew. She might not know the details, but the sudden compassion on her face said she knew that Charlie’s death was the thing that had happened while she was gone.
“West...” She breathed his name, and as soon as his hands were free of the computer interface to get the CBC started, she took his nearest hand in both of hers. “I’m so sorry. And I’m sorry I wasn’t there. What happened?”
“I don’t want to talk about it with you.” The words came in a rush. She couldn’t be the one offering comfort. His trauma was in the past, hers was here now, currently middeath spiral. He pulled his hand free.
The retreat did the trick, and she stepped fully back from him, but the sympathy and concern he saw written plainly on her face didn’t budge, even when she nodded, and she softly said, “Okay. I’ll...just... Thank you for your help with Eileen.”
She was leaving. And he’d left their conversation on a note that would keep her from hearing what he’d said. After today, he wouldn’t have any more chances to help her through this.
“Wait.” He set the second vial of blood in the caddy of the next machine, and followed her. “Lia.”
“I need to check on Eileen.”
Not allowing her to dismiss him, he waited in the lobby for her return, letting her have a moment to catch her breath without him crowding the air. But the second she stepped back out of Eileen’s room, he asked, “Your father...did he deliberately start the fire?”
He saw her shutters coming down as she looked at him for a long, heavy moment, trying to decide if she was going to answer. He’d just told her he didn’t want to talk to her about Charlie, but here he was, digging into her own personal business.
She handled it with far more grace than he had. “I don’t think he did it on purpose. My father didn’t want me to inherit the vineyard, but he didn’t want to run it, either. He had these great dreams about having a son to pass it on to, and didn’t manage to pull that off before retirement age, even with three wives.”
She watched him cautiously as she answered, telling him more about her life at every turn now than when they’d been together. Even than when they’d been planning the wedding. He’d guarded information about his past, and done everything he could to keep her eyes on the horizon, and where they were going, not where they’d come from. And now that he wasn’t trying to keep from having to repay her information with his own, he let her speak. He wanted her to speak.
“He wouldn’t burn it down rather than give it to you?”
“I don’t think he hates me...” she said, but it didn’t sound like she was sure. He had to remind himself that this was the man whose disappearance still caused her tears. “If he’d done it on purpose, he wouldn’t have run. Running from failure is more like my father than running from guilt.”
“How do you set a whole lot of land and a castle on fire by accident if there are no other problems exacerbating the situation?”
“It’s not a castle,” she argued, then sighed. “But if he was drinking, that doesn’t mean—”
“It doesn’t mean he did it on purpose, it doesn’t mean he’s a drunk,” West filled in. “But it might mean there is a bigger problem than simply ‘my father doesn’t want to run the vineyard anymore.’”
“He’s not an alcoholic,” she reiterated, one hand waving, her head about to shake off her shoulders. “You have a travel day tomorrow. Go. Get some sleep. Thank you for your help.”
Still trying to dismiss him, and still upset.
He should go, just as she suggested, but he couldn’t ever sleep through alarm bells. And there was Tony Bradshaw still to deal with, but he didn’t want to leave it on that note. Especially when one of them would definitely be leaving for real in the morning.
“I could stay and let you get some rest—you’re taking over the station tomorrow.” Pathetic offer, which he knew she wouldn’t accept any more than she was yet willing to accept his offer to winter in her place.
“I probably slept more last night than you did.”
“Did I keep you awake?”
“You can’t sniff without me hearing it.”
But that would all end tomorrow, and the simple thought churned his stomach. “At least I didn’t prowl the corridor like a lion.”
She didn’t even try to smile until he’d mimed her snarl and slow-witted claw swipe of the air, then she managed a little one.
“I’d best go sleep, then,” he said, but his feet didn’t move. He couldn’t look away from her. Looked too long, too hard, too fraught...
“What?” She gave another little sad sniff that pushed him over the edge.
Without letting himself think it through, West grabbed her by the back of the neck and hauled her against his chest, wrapping his arms tight about her.
She didn’t fight him an ounce, just buried her face in the crook of his neck and snaked her arms around his waist, then leaned.
He’d wanted to comfort her, but with her pressed to him, her breath fanning the side of his neck, the chaos of the station, of the world, seemed to fade away. It wasn’t relief, though it was something like that. It wasn’t lust, but that was always there, too, when he touched her, when he even looked at her. He just felt better, touching her. Like hope was a thing that could still exist.
He could feel her fists balling in the back of his shirts, a light tremble shaking her whole body. But she wasn’t going to let him save her, even if she clung on to him for dear life. That steel spine he loved was still there even if it was occasionally washed by tears. Still fighting for people she loved. Even when they repeatedly let her down.
He squeezed a little tighter, dipped his head to breathe her in and suddenly realized the low-level headache he’d been nursing for months was gone, and it had left a strange kind of euphoria in its wake.
“If you change your mind, say the word. I’ll stay.” He whispered the words into her ear, and although it could’ve only been taken as a repeat of the offer he’d made to let her go home, that wasn’t even what he’d meant. And that was exactly what he’d been afraid of: reaching that point where he would abandon his plans and principles to be with her. If she didn’t keep pushing him away, the entire drive that had him telling her ugly lies.
She nodded; he already knew she wouldn’t say the words. And he was lucky she wouldn’t.
He’d be leaving tomorrow, and that would be the end of it. He’d go wherever the hell he was going to go, take the first connecting flight out of Dallas to parts unknown and be forced to email her daily to check in, make sure another doctor had arrived, that she was okay...
Not a clean break.
Maybe there never could be a clean break with her. She didn’t know how to give up on people she loved. Even when they really didn’t deserve her compassion.
He held her until she relaxed enough for the trembling to stop, and she was the one to pull away. He would’ve kept holding her, even standing there, in the middle of the clinic.
“Go to sleep,” she croaked, but added sincerely and resignedly, “Thank you for all your help tonight. Safe travels. I hope you find what you’re looking for.”
Not just good night, but goodbye. This goodbye was a true goodbye, and he heard it for what it was this time. Not a Charlie goodbye—she wasn’t going to push poison into her veins when he left—but a goodbye he still might never get over. She’d never track him down again, or maybe even email. Probably wouldn’t have asked for his help at all tonight if she’d had other options.
He’d pushed, and she’d backed off, as soon as she understood. Or as soon as she’d accepted the lie he’d told her. She might have just shared one hell of an emotional load with him, but she didn’t expect anything from him. This time was real, and he felt the difference in his marrow.
And in his empty, aching arms as he walked away.