Chapter 10 Lizzie #2
I nodded and took a bite of the garlic bread. “When she wasn’t at that airport, even though we confirmed plans the evening before, the first place I went searching was the local hospital. Doctors’ offices. Hotels. Anywhere she could have possibly been overnight.”
“Did you check with her parents?”
I tilted my head side to side. “It’s not really something that I think about.
I mean, she has her family and she keeps in touch with them, but she’s a bit estranged from them, like I am from mine.
Calling her family was a last-ditch effort to figure out what had happened, and when I realized that she wasn’t with them, either, they started asking questions. ”
“I can only imagine how hard that was for you to hear.”
“It’s why I went searching for her. I promised them that I would. That I’d figure out what happened to her. And I couldn’t let them down, you know? I couldn’t let her down.”
He reached over the table and placed his hand on my wrist. “You did good, Miss Elizabeth. You were on a trail you didn’t even realize you were on. I’d love to pick your brain sometime about how you ended up at that law firm.”
I smirked. “But not now?”
He shook his head and withdrew his touch. “No. Right now is for relaxation. We can dive down the lane of horrid memories another time.”
I searched his face for a moment, watching him take a few bites of food. But eventually, I couldn’t keep it inside any longer.
“Are you close with your parents?”
He paused the spoon halfway up to his mouth before settling it back down against his bowl. “I was, when they were alive.”
My heart shattered. “Geez, Doc. I’m so sorry. What happened?”
He gave me a sad smile. “Old age.”
“Oh,” I said softly.
“They lived good lives,” he said as he reached for his drink and took a sip. “My parents were older parents. Didn’t have me until Mom was forty, and then my sister was a surprise just before she turned forty-five.”
I whistled lowly. “Wow. That’s incredible.”
“Medical marvels, really, my sister and I. It’s not impossible, but hard, for women to get pregnant when they are nearing menopausal age. She struggled with both of us, but was determined to have us.”
I smiled softly. “She sounds like she was wonderful.”
He nodded as he leaned back in his chair. “And strong. My God, I never met another soul stronger than my mother. My father was a wreck after the pneumonia took my sister. My mother was the one who single-handedly pieced the family back together after burying her.”
I wanted to interject, but he seemed so focused.
I didn’t want to ruin it.
“My sister was the light of my life,” he said with a soft smile as he gazed up at the sky above my head, like he was reminiscing with an old friend.
“My best friend, hands down. She was such a spitfire, too. Always had a comeback. Always had something to say. Always had an opinion to be heard.” He chuckled softly. “Drove my father fucking nuts.”
I watched pain creep into his features. “She sounds like she was lovely.”
His attention came back to me. “You would’ve liked her.”
“Yeah?”
He nodded. “Yeah. She would’ve liked Anna because the two of them have a way with words.”
“That’s one way to put it,” I muttered.
He chuckled as he reached for his drink. “But I think the two of you would’ve liked each other, too.”
“Why do you say that?” I asked as I reached for my own drink as well.
He drew in a deep breath and shook his head as he took a swig of his drink. “I don’t want to say anything that will offend.”
Now I had to know. “No offense at all. Just be honest. Something tells me you don’t talk about her much, and you should.”
He stared at me for a while before he slowly nodded.
“My sister had a way with befriending loners. She’d pick out the person in the room sitting by themselves and just plop right down.
I always had to make sure I clocked where she was, because she’d run down an alley after a homeless person just to give them a hug in a heartbeat. ”
I couldn’t help but smile. “She sounds amazing.”
He chewed on the inside of his cheek as he picked up his spoon. “She was perfect.”
We ate in silence for a while and I kept stealing glances at him.
He was so… enigmatic, at times. And then other times, he was the easiest thing in the world to understand.
Here sat a big brother who still carried weight and guilt over the death of his sister that he had absolutely nothing to do with, and—
“I thought I killed her at first,” he said.
It was so soft that I almost missed it. “Wait, what?”
He sighed heavily. “My apologies, Miss Elizabeth, I shouldn’t have—”
It was my turn to reach over and rest my hand on his wrist. “Doc.”
His gaze fell to our connection. “Yes, Miss Elizabeth?”
I smoothed my fingertips up and down the veins along his forearm. “You’re not responsible for your sister contracting pneumonia.”
He gave me a sad smile. “I know that now. But at the time that she contracted pneumonia, I was battling the flu.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah,” he said with a soft head nod. “And for the longest time, even though I didn’t tell my parents, I thought that I gave my sister the flu and that it turned into pneumonia.”
I practically held my breath before he continued.
“But,” he said with a heavy sigh, “when I enlisted and got going with my medic training, it didn’t take me long to learn that even though pneumonia is a common symptom that develops if someone contracts the flu, that wasn’t what happened to my sister.”
I couldn’t help the question that flew out of my mouth. “How do you know what happened to your sister?”
He grinned. “I commissioned her medical records when I was granted that privilege.”
It clicked into place. “Did you become a medic because of your sister?”
His tongue darted out to lick his lower lip. “Yes.”
“Doc.”
“I wanted to make sure no one died of anything stupid ever again,” he said as he leaned forward, resting his arms on the table. “While I contracted the flu, my sister developed mono. Epstein-Barr, to be specific. It came about in the autopsy my parents apparently had done.”
“You didn’t know about it?”
He shook his head. “Even if they wanted to tell me about it, I would’ve probably just waved them off. I wasn’t quite nineteen before she passed. I had just finished basic. It was…”
“I’m so sorry for everything you’ve lost, Doc.”
I could’ve sworn his eyes glistened before he blinked it away. “After commissioning my sister’s medical records and figuring out what really killed her, I vowed to never let any sort of testing ever slide under the radar again. If someone came to me with symptoms, we test for the whole gamut.”
“So that’s why you’re so big on the blood testing regularly.”
He nodded and pointed at me. “Exactly. Things can develop later on or be masked by other things. Our bodies are incredible organisms, and it has its own methods of survival that modern medicine and testing has to work around. For my sister, it was less about what had developed and more about the symptoms she wasn’t showing.
Epstein-Barr is supposed to come with a host of symptoms, but my sister only had a couple of them because her immune system was working so hard to fight the damned virus off.
And when she became compromised to a certain point—”
“Pneumonia set in,” I finished.
He nodded. “Exactly.”
I wanted to stand and give him a hug, but I settled for squeezing his forearm one last time before I pulled away.
“You should eat, Miss Elizabeth,” he said as he picked up his spoon. “Brutus will kill me if he thinks I made you wait until the soup got cold before we ate.”
I giggled as I picked up my spoon. “I won’t tell him if you won’t.”
And when I peeked back over at him, he tossed me a cheeky little wink.
“Deal.”