Page 18 of Free to Fall

Chapter

Eight

The sound of a sharp snap has me leaping from my chair, fear coursing through my veins—an instinctive reaction of a person who had been hurt, hunted.

Oh God! Is that a gun?

Whirling around, my fight-or-flight mode kicks in only to find myself face-to-face with an empathetic Alice. Even as my heart thunders in my chest, I mentally picture myself shrugging on a cool exterior as I try to compose myself. Berating myself, I refuse to give into the combination of embarrassment, fear, and abject terror that’s been going on for far too long.

It wasn’t your fault. I mentally chant the words everyone’s been drilling into my head these last few months. Intellectually, I know that.

But Alice wasn’t the one with the emotions riding on the razor’s edge as I attended funeral after funeral. I’ll never forget the pain in Karimat’s fiancé’s eyes the moment I stepped into the room to pay my respects. The fear that crossed across the two children’s faces who had lost their mother. Moser peering down his nose disdainfully as I fled both services. As if he was disappointed I couldn’t hack it.

Who the hell could?

Maybe what I need is to get back to work to heal the mental scars Paulie Tiberi inflicted on me. Repairs are almost complete to the ER and I can’t let the ones permanently affixed to me, as much a part of me now as my tattoo, destroy what’s left of who I was before that fateful day. Digging deep for the well of strength I took for granted growing up and I refuse to lose ever again, I coach myself, Don’t let what happened ruin your career, Laura. Don’t let him have one more victim.

I’d be a fool to deny I’ve changed. As much as I believed I understood the invisible chains pain wrapped around a heart, I learned I had no concept of the weight of them. But I square my shoulders and face Alice. I’m determined to turn my pain into power.

Like my mother, my aunts and uncles all did.

To that end, I’ve worked to locate the fortitude so inherently bred into who I was. Regain my ability to trust without question, my capacity to be open to strangers without reservation. But my biggest fear is will the capriciousness of the events of that day eventually make me a better doctor or continue to terrorize me forever?

Another item arrived at my parent’s home last week. This time, it was just a letter. Once the Italian was translated, I wish it hadn’t been. It insinuated just enough to spike my anxiety through the roof.

May the death of the consigliere be vindicated.

A buzz rang between my ears even as my father and Uncle Colby reassured me it was a scare tactic. “Laura, you have nothing to be worried about.”

“Right. You don’t have a vindictive mob blaming you for the death of their leader!” I shouted.

“Technically, the consigliere is the second in command.”

My father turned on him like a hungry dog faced with fresh meat. “Must you get so hung up on technicalities?”

Instead of gracing my father with a reply, my uncle consoled me with the fact, “Laura, do you think I’d let you move back home with Kalie and Grace”—he names my cousins—“if I suspected for a second this wasn’t just a scare tactic?”

That, more than anything, reassured me. “No.”

“Good. Now go home,” he ordered me.

So I packed my bags and returned to my home in Darien with Kalie and Grace. Determined to prevent my family from knowing how truly distraught the Tiberi psychological warfare had been wearing me down, I laid in my bed the first three nights with a kitchen knife clutched in my hands.

In fact, that final night, shaking, I broke down and admitted to myself what I couldn’t previously—that I’d never have the same confidence I did before.

I was irrevocably changed. I was one of the people I became a doctor to protect.

A victim.

Before, I believed my family had suffered the worst hell had to dole out. Now, I acknowledge hell is subjective, fluid, with a new level waiting to inflict the most suffering on its patrons. For me, it’s not the trauma, per se. It’s finding everything you believed—especially yourself—isn’t strong enough to survive the fall into the darkness.

I’m snapped back from my woolgathering when Alice flings open her lowest drawer. “Hello, Laura.” Inside is access to Willy Wonka’s secret garden—the stash of chocolate she keeps to boost the morale of her patients. Without asking my preference, she reaches in and tosses me a king-size packet of Reese’s Ultimate Peanut Butter Cups.

Catching them one-handed, I ask wryly, “Am I going to need all four?”

She chuckles. “It’s my last pack.”

Unwrapping the package, I slide out the first cup and chomp down.

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