Chapter Seven #2
“So, here’s a question for you. Can you think of anyone who might want to hurt you, Ms. Wilhelm?” Charmbers leaned forward, hands folded on his desk. “Because if Ms. James was somehow mistaken for you, then maybe we’ve been staring up the wrong tree for a motive.”
*
Emma was not dead. Not yet anyway.
In fact, she was in the OR, having the surgery to mend her broken leg which, apparently, they’d been waiting to do until her condition had stabilized. Or stabilized enough to withstand surgery.
Connor stood to one side of the operating table watching the surgeon work on the other Emma.
Beside him, his Emma turned her face away and focused on the music piping through the room, an upbeat mix of pop songs, apparently chosen by the surgeon.
While the anesthesiologist kept an eye on her oxygen levels, the surgeon placed pins in her shin as he teased his surgical nurse about her football-player fiancé.
“If you can’t invite us to the wedding, Gabi,” the surgeon told her, “at least get us a couple of autographed pictures. You know I’m a fan of Washington football. I’ll get mine framed and hang it right there on that wall over there.”
“Oh, okay,” Gabi quipped. “I’ll make sure to do that so I can feel Kelvin watching me at work twenty-four seven.”
Laughter rippled through the room. Gabi blushed behind her mask. “You don’t see me all up in his business on the field. So, if you don’t mind, please keep that autographed photo in your own screening room, Doctor.”
“Fair enough.” The surgeon chuckled. “But if I got you a football for him to—”
The nurse gave him the evil eye.
“Okay, okay,” he said, still laughing. “Pin, please.”
Feeling slightly offended by their lighthearted banter, Emma grimaced. “This is why they put you out during surgery,” she told Connor. “So that you don’t have to hear how much fun your surgeon is having patching you up.”
As they teased one another under the hot lights, they worked with quick efficiency and, no doubt, immense skill. Though to Emma, they might as well have been working on an automobile or a broken fax machine, not a human being who genuinely hoped to use that leg again one day.
Emma caught Connor’s look as he watched her. “’Tis no’ personal. They mean nothing by it. ’Tis just their way. If they allowed themselves to get too close, they couldn’t do what they do.”
“And you have personal experience with twenty-first century surgeons, do you?”
“Ye forget, their thoughts are no’ private from me. As a guardian, I’ve taken my share of them. They are only human, with all the frailties that come with the title.”
“Right,” she said, forcing away the sadness that had just descended on her. “ Grey’s Anatomy is proof of that.”
“Grey’s what?”
Emma rubbed her temples, leaning against Connor’s strong shoulder. “I’m feeling a little nauseous right now. Can we get out of here, please?”
His hand stroked her arm with an unexpected gentleness, one that made her want to lean into him for comfort. “You go, lass. I’ll stay here a bit and keep an eye.”
Keep an eye?
The icy fear that had been hovering beneath her skin since the accident surfaced again.
Did he know something she didn’t know? The nausea at the back of her throat was the very thing she’d steadfastly refused to look at or completely acknowledge.
She stood on some precipice, somewhere between living and not living.
The real pain was behind her. Death, per se, was not what she feared.
It was the leaving behind. That’s what she feared.
All the people she loved. All the things she’d left undone.
All the bravery she’d never mustered. The hope she’d relinquished time and time again that her life could be everything she’d wanted it to be.
Now perhaps those choices were out of her hands.
Perhaps they’d already been made for her and this…
this in-between place was simply to allow her to get used to the idea.
But it was more than that. It was this moment in time with Connor, to know him, to help him, maybe, in letting go of…her? It was what he wanted. It seemed the least she could do for him, considering she’d clearly not learned the lessons she’d been sent here for.
But even separating herself from him now, walking down the hospital corridor without him, she felt exposed. Alone. Bereft without him at her side. That couldn’t be good.
Her feelings for him had taken a shift somewhere between showing her his wings and catching Nathan in his arms. For all his gruff bitterness toward Violet, there was another part of him that was equally gentle and kind. The way he looked at her, cared for her. Kissed her.
“Dinna think I haven’t imagined this every day for centuries. Dinna think I haven’t wanted to taste ye again. And now I have.”
Even now, she felt those words cut her. She’d wanted him to kiss her.
Wanted to taste him, too. To feel what his Violet must have felt in his arms. Had he imagined that kiss all these years?
Had it lived up to his memories? She supposed not since he hadn’t kissed her again.
Either way this went, he would go his way and she would go hers.
But what if that kind of thinking was exactly what she regretted most about her life?
What if chances were simply out there in the universe, waiting for us to take them?
Emma shook her head as she passed people in the hallway. But seriously, how screwed up did the universe have to be to send her soul mate to her as an angel?
Aubrey and Jacob were in the waiting room. Aubrey was pacing around the chairs.
It was obvious she was upset. At first, Emma thought it was because of her surgery.
But Jacob walked up beside her. “You can’t blame yourself,” he told Aubrey.
“There’s nothing you could have done to change things,” he said, pulling her up against him.
“I’m glad it wasn’t you. I don’t know what I’d do if it had been you. ”
Emma moved nearer, confused by this.
“I’m younger than her,” Aubrey argued. “Maybe I would have fared better in the accident. I mean, Emma’s almost middle-aged.”
“Hey! I’m only thirty-three!” Emma protested. But what was Aubrey talking about? What should she have known? Why on earth would she want to trade places?
“Don’t do that to yourself,” Jacob told her. “We just have to figure out who it was that hit Emma and how they knew she—or you—would be on that road that night.”
“It’s the ‘why’ I don’t get. Why would anyone want to hurt either of us? What were they looking for?”
“I don’t want to sound nuts,” Jacob said, “but the only thing that seems to be missing in all this is your necklace.”
“That’s… No.” She shook her head. “I told you. My mom gave it to me as a little good-luck charm right before she…before she and my dad went missing. I didn’t even get it in the mail until after we heard about their disappearance.
That necklace was only special to me. No one else could possibly want it.
Certainly no one would try to kill me for it.
It’s probably just somewhere out in the field where the accident happened.
Emma did flip the car twice. It could have landed anywhere. ”
Emma squeezed her eyes shut as fleeting snippets of memory of that night suddenly crashed through her: the grassy ditch careening toward her in the cone of her headlights; the rain-slicked blacktop; the washing-machine spin cycle she’d found herself in; and, most importantly, a shadowy figure leaning over her through her car window, tugging at her clothes.
Emma spun wide-eyed to find Connor walking toward her.
“What?” he asked her with a frown.
“I remember.”
*
As Emma relayed her memories of how the accident happened, Connor glanced down at the dial on his wrist: +22 percent.
Now they were getting somewhere. If luck was with him, he’d get out of this assignment with Emma unscathed and move on to what he was supposed to be doing.
Forget that the feelings she was stirring in him had no place to go.
Or his very un-Celestial impulse to pull her against him, touch her.
and protect her from whatever pain she was about to encounter, be that a continuation of her life or… her death.
“That other car kept bumping mine from behind. I was so scared,” Emma said, shaken by the memory. “Maybe he wanted me to pull over, but there was zero chance of that happening. But then—”
“Did ye get a good look at the driver?”
She shook her head. “Only in the rearview mirror, but their headlights were in my eyes and it was pitch dark.”
“If ye saw them again?”
“I don’t know.”
“But ye remember someone leanin’ over ye in the car? Do ye remember him speakin’ to ye? Sayin’ anything?”
“Not…I can’t really remember that. I couldn’t make out their face, but something was in my eyes.
Blood, I suppose.” She shook her head. “That’s all until everything went black.
The next thing I knew, I was standing on that hillside in the rain.
It was like I was…feeling so separate from the woman in the car. From me. And everything was…blank.”
Connor nodded, remembering. “So, we’re no closer.”
“The detective was right. It was an SUV. But that doesn’t help things, does it?
” She glanced around the waiting room, at Aubrey and Jacob, huddled together on the couch waiting for word of her surgery.
“If Jacob is right about the necklace…if that’s what they want, which I can’t imagine, maybe it’s somehow tied into Lizzy and Daniel’s world.
Their deaths? That old necklace was just a piece of costume jewelry from Lizzy. She’s worn it since college, I think.”
Connor pulled the necklace from his pocket where he’d stuffed it after finding it at the scene of the accident.
“You kept it?” she asked, reaching for the necklace. But of course, she couldn’t hold it. Frustrated, she flopped down onto a lounge sofa, sprawling backward. “Ugh. This is impossible.”