Page 73 of Last Chance Love

“Hey, I can…yeah, no, I can see it. I mean, murder means you’re trying to kill someone. You have a reason. I mean, a shitty reason if it isn’t saving your life or someone else’s, but it’s a reason. There’s an intent there. But if it was just him being sloppy and greedy, that’s just fucked up. There’s no rhyme or reason, just fucked up.”

“He didn’t see the signs of the addiction going too far with one of the patients we shared.”

“Wait, I thought you worked in the ER?”

“I did, but there were clinic hours we had to take, like most doctors. Her name was Dawn. She always had these little things wrong with her and liked to ask for me, but I couldn’t always be there. I guess he took her on when I was gone.”

“What was wrong with her?”

“I didn’t know. It felt like as soon as we got rid of one thing, another would pop up. Maybe it was hypochondria brought on by a severe case of anxiety. Or maybe she had already been self-medicating with pills. Opioids can wreck the system if they’re used for too long, and I just…point is, she overdosed. An accidental one. But when her younger brother found her, well, his overdose wasn’t accidental.”

His eyes widened. “Jesus.”

“Two people dead,” I said with a sigh. “And it’s funny. You think you’re used to death. Working in the ER, you feel almost numb sometimes. People roll in, their guts in their laps, and you try to shove them back in and get them through the night, but you don’t have hope. Or they come in filled with enough heroin to kill a moose, and you shove the Narcan into them and wonder if the Grim Reaper will take them or let them go back out onto the street, maybe get their lives back on track, or more likely, do it all over again.”

And then there were the gangbangers and lifelong criminals who always found their way into the ER, holes in their bodies from the gun or knife fight. People with half their faces missing from an ugly car accident, people with bars sticking out of them, making them look like human pincushions because workplace safety was more of a suggestion for some companies. So many lives in your hands, and at the end of the day, it was death you expected the most.

“What was the worst?” he asked. “Kids?”

“At first,” I said with a sad smile, rubbing my fingers with my other hand. “You think it’s the worst thing you can ever see. Then you stop feeling it as much. It just doesn’t affect you the same way anymore. You wish for so long that you could stop feeling so heartbroken and useless when you can’t save this kid from the car accident he was trapped in or that kid because Mommy or Daddy was a little too aggressive with their ‘punishment.’ But you do, and when you realize it,thatis the worst thing imaginable. Realizing you just don’t feel the hurt anymore, not like you used to.”

He reached out suddenly, taking my hand in his and squeezing it. “Reed…of course that happened. I mean, how could you keep up like that?”

I shrugged. “Sometimes it felt like I was failing at my job, you know? Like, it wasn’t just to save people, which I always tried to do, but to care about them too.”

“Look,” he said, a firmer tone in his voice. “Where I grew up? You got used to seeing all sorts of fucked up shit. A parent smacking their kid across the face was considered mild for my block, and you heard people screaming all the time, usually in anger, but terror too, and sometimes they went silent. You got used to seeing people drugged out of their heads, and sometimes you found them slumped against a wall, puke in their laps. You…when you’re surrounded by horrible things all the time, your brain has to learn how to deal with it so it shuts down. It has to block out the horror otherwise, your whole life is just one big horror show.”

“I used to think of you a lot on those days.”

“The horrible ones?”

“It’s not like you hadn’t told me some rough stories from your neighborhood. I used to think about those stories and how you were surrounded by so much shit. And yet, at the end of the day, you never let it change you or make you worse. If anything, it made you throw yourself all the harder into trying to help your brothers, improving their lives and giving them something you never had from others. It was like…inspiration, I guess. If you could manage that while living in the middle of it, I should be able to do something good or be better with what I was surrounded by at work.”

“Well, you said yourself, you still tried to save lives.”

“I did. I fought like hell some days, even when people told me to leave it and let it happen. And sometimes they were right. Most of the time, actually. But sometimes, oh that sometimes, they were wrong, and I could tell myself I hadn’t given up yet, and that hope and sheer stubbornness was worth it….sometimes.”

He bent down to peer into my face, his eyes searching my expression, mouth twisting downward. “Those two people who died, Dawn and her brother?—”

“Mitchell. Dawn and Mitchell Fassen, the only two children of Joyce Fassen, who had raised them on her own since her husband passed after a long battle with cancer about ten years before. Dawn was nineteen, Mitchell was seventeen,” I recited, but there was so much more about them that I had come to find out.

Mitchell had been a track star, and Dawn was a capable musician. Both had been incredibly close and despite Dawn having graduated and going to college, she always made sure to drive home and spend time with her mother and brother on weekends. Perhaps no one knew how close they had been, not until Mitchell found his sister’s body and decided life was no longer worth living without her in it.

“I’ve seen so many people die, I can’t even keep track of how many there really are,” I told him softly. “And in its way, that’s a horror on its own. All those lives, and they’re just…numbers.”

“Wasn’t there a dictator who said something about that?”

“Stalin. A single death is a tragedy, but a million is a statistic. And how depressingly true that was for my life. All those deaths, but it was these two that drove home the horror of everything. I don’t know if I was too scared to shake the boat, too trusting in my coworker, or simply too disconnected from everything to care enough to see the danger of what he was doing. Whatever it was, it cost two people their lives.”

In addition to our jobs and freedom, other people were caught in the mix, but we got the worst of it. The number of signs I’d ignored were enough to weigh on my conscience, but as far as the law was concerned, I was complicit. It hadn’t helped that I hadn’t fought the charges much. Even now, I thought I was just as responsible for their deaths as my greedy coworker.

“I notice you haven’t mentioned his name. The coworker.”

I snorted derisively. “He doesn’t deserve to be named. I failed at my job, my goddamn oath, but he outright betrayed it. You can look him up if you want, you could probably use the computers in the library. He’ll be serving another five years on good behavior, most likely, but he needs to go the next eight instead.”

Leon surprised me by laughing. “See?”

“See what?” I asked, staring at him in confusion.

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