Page 105 of Hold the Pickle

Mom glances my way, lifting her brows.

I’m not dumb. I know money comes with strings. “And what would you want your role to be in the organization for your investment?”

Uncle Sherman stares me down. “Silent benefactor.” He stands up. “Caprice, you got some champagne? Probably beer, if I know you outdoor types. Let’s drink to this. Get Axel over here. We’ll use his people to draw up some papers.”

I sit still, not sure I’ve heard all this right. This was just an idea two days ago. I haven’t hashed out how any of it would work. Where I would be based. Who I would hire.

Is he serious?

I follow him to the kitchen. “So, no Dougherty, then?”

Sherman shrugs, opening the fridge. “They’re doing fine. Follow your passions. That’s what I want for all the Pickles.”

“I’m an Armstrong,” I tell him.

He pulls out a bottle of beer, peers at it, and pops the top. He raises it to me like a toast. “Every Pickle’s a Pickle.”

For the next few days, I figure out where it makes the most sense to base my organization. California seems like a good place with its access to wealth, but when I look into the laws and licenses, I’m not sure.

Maybe I can create it in one state but have a secondary location in LA? One glance at real estate prices for an office makes me rethink that as well.

Plus, what am I going there for? Dalton? Is that even a possibility?

I’m not sure it is.

Besides, I should be here, near the rescue I love. When I told Emily my plan, she told me I could absolutely base out of their offices until I got on my feet.

I don’t know exactly what to do, so I do nothing. I keep the status quo, working in town, feeding my kittens, and slowly creating a corporate structure, bank accounts, and a business plan.

I’m not sure I’ll find a way to make LA work.

Maybe it wasn’t meant to be.

36

DALTON

The weeks become a blur. If I thought being an intern in emergency medicine meant long hours, I had no idea how much more of that I would have in maternity.

Here, when a high-risk pregnancy arrives, often in distress, we sit through labor, a c-section sometimes, and then the real neonatal work begins.

Unlike in the ER, where patients come and go quickly, with only a small percentage checking in and requiring follow up, our mothers and babies are here for days, sometimes weeks or more.

I learn to make decisions cold, but keep my words and actions warm. Bedside manner can completely change an outcome with a mother in distress. Unlike downstairs, where the ER interns are treated like imbeciles, which is fair, since the situations are so varied and vast, here, we quickly become indispensable.

Parents get attached to the doctors in this ward, and the nurses are cherished partners. The highs are very high, like when we get quadruples safely born and all can go home.

But the lows are worse than any I experienced in emergency.

Many nights, particularly the bad ones, I long to call Nadia, to hear her voice, to feel there is a tether to the regular world.

But the weeks keep passing, and the ties that bound us stretch farther and farther.

I question the bond I felt. How embarrassing to fall in love with her so quickly, so naively. We didn’t even date, or go to movies, or do any of the normal things couples do.

She feels like a far-off dream.

One day in early November, I meet up with Fitz and Harrington for coffee before our shifts.

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