Page 30 of Piece You Saved

Kade’s finger hovers over the play button. “So if this fucker makes the mistake of showing his face here again, you know how to drop him with one bullet.”

See? He always finds a way to make me feel stronger than I am.

CHAPTER 9

HARLEY

“Harley, a guy is asking about your patient who disappeared.” Tricia’s bright voice pulls me from the focus of my attention. The metal clipboard in my hand.

I flash the curly blonde in her late forties an easy grin. It feels like it was only yesterday she was treating Simon and me like two ducks she had to take under her wing. It hadn’t seemed to matter to her that we were both in our twenties and weren’t looking for a mother figure. She was determined to nurture any new hire who stepped foot into the hospital.

“Cop?” I ask.

We notified security, not that they can or would do anything. If a family wants to refuse medical treatment for whatever reason, and it doesn’t involve a child, there’s nothing they can do save file a report for the hospital records.

In this case, Aden Shaw doesn’t need help from the hospital. He’s not going to wake up the same person he was yesterday, and that’s not going to be an easy thing for anyone to face, especially when they had no say in the decision.

But he’ll live.

“No cop. Just a guy in a smart suit,” Tricia says with her eyes on me, the wall chart, and her ear pointing down the hallway in case any of the ICU patients need her. Because that’s Trish. If I wasn’t what I was, and someone rushed me into this hospital, I’d want her watching over me.

My eyebrow rises higher. “Curious.” After signing my last patient chart, I hand it over to Grace, the nurse occupying the seat beside me at the nurses’ station, with a tired smile. “Thanks, Grace. I’ll see you tomorrow night?”

She smiles back. “See you tomorrow, Harley.”

My knees creak as I rise, reminding me that between notifying the security about our ‘mysterious’ missing patient, retrieving a spare white coat from my locker, and adding a few last notes to my patients’ medical charts, this is the first time I’ve sat down since informing Aden Shaw’s “family” about his condition a couple of hours before.

Lifting a hand, I massage a little of the tension from the back of my neck. “How did he get up to this floor?”

Tricia frowns and shrugs. “I overheard him telling Shelly that he’s a family member.”

“Family member, huh?”

Why am I having a hard time believing that?

A heavy frown creases Trish’s brow. “Do you think we should call security?”

I give her a reassuring smile. “Not necessary. I’ll go see what he wants.”

“Are you sure?” Trish glances at her watch. “Wasn’t your shift over thirty minutes ago?”

I grin at her. “With beauties like you to work with, why would a man ever leave?”

She shakes her head, smiling. The phone on the desk rings, and she moves to answer it while making shooing motions at me. “Go home, Harley.”

“Sure thing, Trish.”

I’m in no hurry to go home to an empty apartment, where voicemail upon voicemail messages have piled up. They’re all from Simon’s parents wanting to know when I’ll see them, something I haven’t done since Simon’s funeral a week ago.

They aren’t family, but it isn’t as if they didn’t do everything they could to make the teenage boy who’d stolen their son’s backpack and lunch money feel as if he were.

A long time ago, I’d wanted a family after mine threw me away, but I’d accepted I could never have one. Simon didn’t know what I could do, but even if he had, I doubt he’d have treated me any differently.

I hadn’t needed to try very hard to convince the teenage boy with the expensive-looking blue jeans, sweater, and backpack on his way to school all those years ago to hand the bag over.

He’d blinked big brown eyes at me, his nose twitched as if he could smell my stink from where he was—he probably could—and shrugged out of his bag and handed it over. I’d been backing away, ready to run, when he stuck his hand in his pocket and pulled out a small bundle of folded notes.

“It’s not much,” he’d said wryly. “I don’t usually buy lunch on a Wednesday, but here. You look like you need it more than I do.”

---