Page 7 of Gravity of Love
Liam cleared his throat, trying to infuse his tone with clinical detachment. “No spark,” he said, his voice so flat it could’ve belonged to a different man.
Phoebe’s jaw literally dropped. Her mouth hung open with cartoonish exaggeration. “Nospark?!” she repeated with the same disbelief most people reserved for hearing someone tell them they were abducted by an alien.
Bristol began fussing at the same time Phoebe’s phone started ringing. She pushed the baby at him and began digging for her phone. As soon as he took Bristol, she instantly melted into his arms and rested her head on his shoulder.
“Did you miss Uncle Liam?” he cooed quietly against her head as he patted her back.
He’d always loved kids. Adults, not so much. But babies and kids were great.
Phoebe answered the phone. He knew it was Poppy, from the side of the conversation he could hear. His older sister was asking if everything was okay and saying that she could wait and then saying that it was fine, but she sounded worried.
By the time the phone call ended, Bristol was sound asleep.
“Is she okay?” Liam questioned.
Phoebe shrugged, concern brimming in her eyes. “She said she is running late for an appointment, so she had to take a raincheck, but I could tell she’d been crying.”
“An appointment here?” Liam had seen her truck in the staff lot.
Phoebe shook her head. “No, she’s not here, that’s why she said she’d take a raincheck.”
She lied. Why would she lie? What could she have to lie about?
Phoebe shook her head, as if to put it out of her mind. “You are a natural. You’re the baby whisperer. Duane can’t even get her to settle like that. And it’s not just Bristol, you’re great with all the kids! Speaking of the kids, you’re coming to Finley’s birthday on Saturday, right?” She pointed at him in an accusatory fashion.
“Yes.” Phoebe’s oldest daughter was turning eight on Saturday, and he wouldn’t miss it for the world.
His pager buzzed, and he saw he was getting paged to trauma bay two. His patient was ready to be discharged, and his ride was there.
“I have to go.” He gently handed Bristol back to Phoebe. As he did, Bristol woke up and reached for him. He kissed her sweet head and told her he’d see her Saturday.
“See, you need to have your own babies,” she stated as if a baby reaching for him was proof he needed to procreate. “But you’re never going to do that if you don’t have asparkwith a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model.” His sister followed him as he left the room and stood in the doorway calling down the hallway. “You’re not getting any younger. If you want to start a family, you need to figure out how to spark!”
Hedidwant a family of his own, which was the reason this was his last week. That wasn’t going to happen if he worked sixty to eighty hours a week. Between his department and covering other departments, that was what he averaged. Pine Ridge General was nestled in the Sierra Nevada. It was a relatively small hospital that served a large area of rough terrain populated with a dozen or so towns that attracted high volumes of year-round tourists who flocked to the mountains, eager to partakein activities like skiing, hiking, and water sports, some of which they weren’t qualified to do. In those cases, it inevitably ended in gnarly injuries and fatalities.
If he remained living in Pine Ridge and working at the hospital in the emergency room, he would be on a hamster wheel that he’d never get off. So he’d made big changes. He’d bought a house. He was opening afamilypractice in a small town, because that’s what he wanted, afamily.
There was only one problem: the only person he’d ever seen himself having that family with was engaged to his brother.
Clearly, he didn’t have itallworked out.
3
“He probably doesn’t havehis phone, Yaya.” Frankie glanced at the passenger seat. Yaya had the phone held to her ear as she waited for Mr. Santino to pick up and stared out the front windshield.
“Maybe he’s talking to the press. He’s a hero,” Frankie suggested, hoping to take her mind off the fact that he was shot and focus on the fact that he was indeed a hero. “It sounds like he saved Taylor’s life.”
“Mmmhmm.”
The call Yaya had gotten when they were leaving the house was from Cindy. She told Yaya that Taylor, a woman who Frankie had met a few times over the three weeks she’d been in town and liked, was cleaning out a cottage she’d lived in next to the retirement home. She was packing up her final boxes when her abusive ex showed up with a gun and tried to abduct her. Arthur apparently not only stopped him, he held him there until the cops came. Unfortunately, he ended up taking a bullet to his shoulder.
When Cindy was relaying the information on speaker as they drove to the hospital, Yaya hadn’t said a word, it was Frankiewho asked questions and then thanked her for letting them know before they said goodbye.
In twenty-nine years as the only granddaughter to Lydia Calliope Costas, Frankie had heard her grandmother talk through weddings, funerals, baptisms, movies in theaters, memorials, recitals, and even televised tragedies. Yaya’s running commentary was so constant, the absence of it was more alarming than an air raid. But for the twenty-five-minute drive up the highway, she’d been silent as a Trappist monk. Not an anecdote, not a complaint, not a single backseat correction of Frankie’s driving, despite the fact that she was clearly exceeding the speed limit through every mountain curve. It was a kind of silence that gathered mass and pressed in on Frankie’s eardrums, making her acutely aware of every tick of the blinker and the rumble of the air conditioning blowing in through the dash.
Frankie had tried to fill the silence with small talk about the latest episode ofThe Housewivesfranchise they’d watched, the river flowing beside the highway and even the gossip from Yaya’s weekly canasta group she’d heard at Brewed Awakenings, the local coffee shop. Each attempt had fallen flat, with Yaya offering no more than a distracted “mmhmm” or vague nod. She gripped her phone the entire way, flipping it over and over in her hand, obsessively double-checking the ringer was on, sometimes just staring at the locked screen as if she could manifest Mr. Santino’s call or text into existence by sheer force of Mediterranean willpower.
By the time they pulled into the hospital parking lot, Frankie felt like she’d spent the past half hour with a ghost riding shotgun. Yaya’s face was pale, lips pinched, and her silver-gray hair pulled back so tight it seemed to yank the lines of her face even sharper. She said nothing as they climbed from the truck, crossed the pavement, and entered through the sliding glassdoors into the disinfected whoosh of air of the ER waiting area. Yaya and Frankie approached the front desk and were met with the indifferent gaze of a nurse in teal scrubs that nearly matched her eyes and complemented her honey blonde hair, worn in two Dutch braids.
