Page 2 of Code Trauma

Penny followed her, but it was busy right at shift change. “Hey, Holly, Penny. Good morning.” The greeting came from Sylvia Blackmon, one of the flight nurses who often picked up other shifts in the ER when she wasn’t working on the chopper.

“Morning, Sylvia,” Holly said while Penny waved.

Once the woman had slipped out of the room, Holly opened her locker and Penny leaned against the one next to it.

“Who’s threatening you?” her friend whispered.

“I don’t know. If I knew that, I wouldn’t be so stinkin’ jumpy.”

“Tell me more.”

Holly glanced around. No one was paying them any attention. “It started a couple of weeks ago. Someone on my social media page sent me a private message telling me to leave town or else. I didn’t recognize the name, and when I clicked on the profile the person had no friends or even a picture. I think it was a bogus account set up to specifically target me. The sheriff thinks so, too. He tried to track it, but the IP address ended up being from a local coffee shop that tons of people use every day, so there was no way to trace it.”

“You’ve been to the sheriff. That’s good, because all of that is so weird. And scary.”

“Tell me about it.” Holly quickly locked up her personal items and headed to the computer so she could clock in.

“I wondered why you hadn’t posted anything lately,” Penny said, following her. “What are you going to do?”

“I mean, what can I do?” Holly shrugged. “The sheriff knows.” She paused. “Then again, I’m not so sure how hard he’s working on it. He’s retiring in a couple of months, and right now, there’s no one stepping up to take his place.”

“Have you called Andy?”

Andy. Holly could no more stop the skip of her heart any more than she could will it to stop beating. She and Detective Andy McKittrick had reconnected from their elementary school days and had been seeing one another on the weekends. She thought he might have been close to asking her to marry him, but then two months ago, his partner had been killed in a nightclub shooting.

Their romance had come to a screeching halt, and no matter what she did, she couldn’t seem to reach that place inside him where he’d gone to deal with the trauma. “No. I can’t call him right now.”

“What? He’s practically your fiancé. I can’t believe you haven’t told him about this.”

Holly groaned. “It’s complicated.” She hadn’t told anyone Andy had basically ghosted her. When the subject came up or when someone asked where he was, Holly just said they were taking some time to make sure their relationship was what they both wanted.

“Complicated or not, he’ll want to know—and being a police detective, he’ll know what to do, too.”

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“He’s asked me for space, Penny. I promised to give it to him.”

Penny’s eyes went wide. “Wait a minute. He asked you for space?”

“Yes.”

“Oh.”

“Right.” Holly swallowed the sudden tightness in her throat. How she missed him.

“I still think you should tell him.”

“No. I want to, but no. He’s dealing with the death of his partner, and I don’t want to ... infringe on that.”

But Penny was shaking her head. “I think you’re making a mistake.”

“Sometimes I think I am, too, but for now, I’m going to honor his request.”

Her friend frowned. “Just how much space does he need? Is there more to this than just him trying to work through the death of his partner?”

“Yes,” she said, working to keep the tears at bay, “there’s more.”

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