Page 2 of Wrecked on the Mountain
"It's one of those spicy ones you said to get!"
"Brooke."
"Okay, fine. I may have googled Tyler's memorial service. But just once! And then I threw my phone across the room."
The silence stretches between us, filled with everything Piper knows I'm not saying.
How Tyler Matthews came in four weeks ago after a playground accident. It was just a routine head trauma that should have been a simple fix.
But I spent six hours in surgery fighting for a little boy with dinosaur stickers on his backpack. He took a turn and soon his parents kept asking if he'd wake up in time for his birthday party.
I had to walk into that waiting room and tell his mother and father that sometimes, even when you do everything right, it's not enough.
I slurp my coffee and stay silent on the line, shaking my head as if it will make the memory disappear.
I locked myself in a supply closet that afternoon and cried so hard I couldn't breathe. After ten years in the profession, I was used to losing patients, and it's never easy.
But this one… it hit hard.
"That's progress, babe," Piper says dryly, letting me off the hook like she always does. "What about the job? You start Monday, right?"
The job. My temporary position at Mountain Rescue that Piper found and basically forced me to apply for when I was too broken to make decisions for myself.
"It's just a small-town operation," I say, repeating what I've been telling myself since I accepted the position. "Basic emergency medicine. Maybe some rescue coordination."
"Exactly. Which is perfect for someone who needs to remember that medicine isn't just about life-or-death decisions in an Operating Room."
Piper's voice gentles, but it's been like this for weeks now. Gentle reassurance that life will get easier, that those dark regrets will heal.
But maybe the words hit harder than they should because they're true.
Every patient I've operated on, every parent I've had to deliver terrible news to… it all loops back to being nine years old and helpless while cancer slowly stole the most important person in my world.
My dad.
The man who taught me to ride a bike and read medical journals at bedtime. Who called me his "little doctor" and never once suggested I should dream smaller.
He fought his cancer battle for two years with the kind of brave courage that made me believe doctors could fix anything, that medicine was magic wrapped in science.
Right up until the day I sat beside his hospital bed, holding his hand while he whispered that he was proud of me and that I should never stop believing in miracles.
Even when the miracle I needed most was slipping away with every breath.
"That's very wise and therapeutic of you," I say, deflecting with humor like I always do. "Did you get that from one of those medical psychology journals you pretend not to read?"
"I got it from watching my best friend slowly destroy herself trying to fix something that was never her fault."
The gentleness in Piper's voice makes my throat tight. She was there during my residency when I worked twice as hard as everyone else, determined to honor my father's death by saving others. She held my hair back when the stress made me physically sick in our third year. She's the one who found me in the supply closet after Tyler died, destroyed in a way I had never been before.
"Three months," I say quietly into the phone. "The contract here is for three months. That's three months to figure out how to be a doctor without bleeding out emotionally every time."
"Three months to remember that you're allowed to be human," Piper corrects. "And who knows? Maybe you'll fall in love withsmall-town medicine. Maybe you'll meet some sexy lumberjack who chops wood… shirtless!Andmakes his own maple syrup."
I nearly choke on my coffee.
"Piper, this isn't a movie. I'm here to heal, not to find romance with some flannel-wearing—"
"Hey, don't knock flannel until you've seen it on the right man," she interrupts with a laugh. "Besides, when's the last time you got laid? And don't say that disaster with Dr. Richardson counts. Mediocre hospital sex absolutely does not count."
