Chapter 2 – Braelyn
brAELYN
Ican tell when my patient is going to code before they do.
It’s a sixth sense I have. A gut feeling and it’s never led me astray.
Not ever. And I have that feeling now as I look at my sixty-eight-year-old rule-out heart attack, or MI as we call it, who is seemingly stable except for some minor agitation she says is from arm pain.
“Hey,” I say to Wren, an attending physician here in the ER. “Can you keep an eye on my patient in room eight for a minute? She’s agitated, and I want to give her a bit more morphine.”
Wren gives me a look. She’s a new attending, but she did her medical school rotation as well as her residency here, and she’s known me for our entire lives since our families are friends.
“Why?” she questions warily, squinting slightly at me.
“Because if she codes in the next five minutes, I’d like to have a doctor nearby, and you’re standing here.”
“Shit,” she hisses. “You and these fucking intuitions. Yes, I’ll watch your patient.”
“Thanks. The code cart is right outside the door.”
She makes a noise that’s similar to a grunt and a groan, and I head over to the Pyxis machine to pull out the morphine and draw it up. The drawer isn’t even open when I hear “Code Blue, room eight. Code Blue, room eight.”
Shit. I fucking knew it!
I slam the door on the machine and race back down the hall, getting caught up in the swarm of doctors and nurses as they all enter the room at once.
Wren is already doing chest compressions. “You owe me an ice cream sundae for this,” she tells me.
I totally do. Damn.
A million questions shoot my way, and I explain how she’s a rule-out MI waiting on troponins, but her X-ray was clear, her vitals stable, and her EKG showed sinus tachycardia with no ST-segment changes that would indicate a heart attack.
“Let’s get her intubated,” Jack Kincaid, Wren’s husband and the chief physician in the ER, states. “Are the labs back, and do we have a shockable rhythm?”
“Checking labs now,” one of the nurses tells him. “Electrolytes are normal, but troponin is 0.12.”
“Pulseless V-tach on the monitor,” I call out.
“Push epi and stand by with Amiodarone. Charge to two hundred,” Jack orders. “Clear.”
Everyone steps back, and Jack applies the paddles to the patient’s chest and shocks her.
“Rhythm?” Jack throws at me.
I study the monitor. “Sinus brady at fifty-two.”
“Nice. And on the first try. Let’s make it the only one, but no more beta blockers until we get her out of bradycardia. Let the cath lab know that we’re bringing them up a hot one. Whatever her EKG showed on admission, she’s definitely having an MI now.”
Great. And up until now, it had been an easy shift.
We continue to medically code my patient, gradually dragging her back from the jaws of death. Once we stabilize her, I help bring her up to the cath lab so they can unblock her coronary arteries that are causing the heart attack. As crazy as this sounds, it’s all pretty standard procedure.
After I get her there and the cath team takes over, I head to the cafeteria to grab Wren her sundae and get one for myself.
I don’t do it with every code. Certainly not with traumas.
But every now and then, you need a little ice cream to remind you that not everything in this world is as fucked and scary as it seems here in the ER.
“Ah, you’re back,” my mother, Margot, the chief nurse, greets me, eyeing my sundae.
“Thank you!” Wren calls out as she swoops by me and grabs hers from my hand.
“Thank you!” I call back, then turn to my mom as I dollop the first bite of vanilla with caramel sauce into my mouth. “What’s up?”
“How would you like to go home early today?”
I snort a laugh and nearly choke on my ice cream. “Is that a rhetorical question, Mother Dearest?”
“We have two extra nurses on shift between three and seven, and you’re on day five in a row. Go home.”
“Really?” My eyes brighten, and I twist my wrist to check my watch. It’s just after three in the afternoon. I could do laundry and even make Adam dinner, which in my world consists of boiling water and adding pasta to it, but whatever. It still counts.
“Yes. Go home.”
“Ah! Thank you. I love you.” I give my mom a wet, sticky kiss that she grimaces at and wipes away.
“You’ve earned it. Oh, by the way, Rina told me her wedding invitation arrived.” A dazzling smile lights my mother’s face, and a giddy excitement fills my belly.
“Oh yay. Did she like it?”
“She loved it. You picked beautiful ones. Only seven more weeks to your big day.”
I do a small happy dance. “Seven more weeks. I’ll call you tomorrow.
” I blow my mother a kiss and eat my sundae as I head into the locker room to grab my stuff.
I’m too excited to leave to bother with changing, the taste of early freedom—and caramel—on my lips, so instead, I grab my bag of stuff and head out the door.
I call Adam, but it goes straight to voicemail.
He’s likely in a meeting or something. I jog up the steps for the train and see it already here at the platform.
Crap. I don’t want to miss it. I hightail it up the last steps and bolt for the doors as they start to close.
I shove my way through, pushing the doors and managing to get on just in time.
Phew. And look at this, there’s even a seat for me.
Totally my lucky day. My patient survived, I ate a delicious sundae, I got out of work early—something that rarely, if ever, happens—and I caught the train instead of having to wait for the next one.
I pop my AirPods into my ears and bop my head the entire way home, including switching trains to the green line and walking the three blocks to my apartment.
The door shuts behind me, and I do a twirl as the song ends and I remove my AirPods.
Only the music hasn’t stopped. It’s still going.
But it’s not Sabrina singing to me, it’s freaking Harry Styles.
And he’s doing it from my bedroom.
Along with the harmony of two people moaning over him.
I drop my AirPods back into my purse and set my bag down on the floor by the entryway. For a moment, I can’t make myself move. I just stand here, listening to freaking Harry while staring at the trail of clothes that leads from the front door toward the bedroom.
My eyes burn and the tip of my nose stings.
It’s funny. For how good my patient intuition is, clearly it sucks when it comes to myself because I never ever would have seen this coming.
Knowing that when I walk into the bedroom I share with my fiancé, I’m going to find him fucking another woman in it.
The bastard peppered me with hugs and kisses this morning, and we walked to the train together holding hands.
“I love you. Have a great shift,” he said to me as we got on different trains.
And now this.
Releasing a breath, I force myself forward. I have to see it with my own eyes, even though I know it’s going to rip me apart. I step over their clothes, wading through the sea of corporate attire until I reach the bedroom.
A woman with long blonde hair is sitting naked on top of my fiancé and faking her orgasm.
Her moans are loud and exaggerated as she bounces on his lap.
His face, meanwhile, is pinched up in pleasure—no faking for him.
As if the gods of irony are shining down on me at this moment, the song comes to an end just as they finish.
I start clapping, applauding both their efforts.
It breaks through perfectly before the next song starts.
The woman screams and races to cover herself with my favorite Egyptian cotton sheets, and Adam fumbles with his phone to turn off the music as another sweeping ballad starts. She looks familiar. I can’t place her, but I’ve seen her before.
“I didn’t think you liked Harry Styles,” I say to him.
He looks at me, blinking about six thousand times, and I can see his wheels spinning as he mentally questions, “What can I say that will get me out of this?” And when he realizes there’s nothing, he utters, “Um. I don’t.”
“Oh, it must be her favorite then. How sweet of you.” I look at her.
“Hi. I’m Braelyn. Who are you? Other than the woman fucking my fiancé in my bed?
” She opens her mouth to speak, and I wave her away.
“Never mind. Totally not important.” If she talks and gives me her name or says something stupid, I might kill her.
“It’s wild, though, because I can tell you knew about me when I knew nothing about you.
” I turn back to Adam. “You brought your Corporate Barbie hookup to our home? To our bed? What the absolute fuck?”
“Brae—”
I hold up my hand, stopping him from speaking because I’m about ready to kill him too. Only I decide I actually do want to kill him and race over to slap him.
“You lying, cheating, son of a bitch bastard. How could you do this?” My hands fly, hitting him repeatedly, anywhere I can get. “Our fucking wedding invitations landed in people’s mailboxes today. You’ve been one of my best friends since we were fucking kids!”
Like the coward he is, he covers his head with his arms to prevent me from wailing on him, and I can’t with this. I just can’t.
“I’m sorry. Ow. Shit. Stop! It was just sex. It didn’t mean—”
I punch him in the stomach, making him oomph.
I’ll have to thank Roman later for teaching me that move.
“Don’t you fucking dare say that to me!” God, why do cheating assholes always say it didn’t mean anything?
Like that’s supposed to make it better they were sticking their dick inside another woman?
I can’t be here anymore with them naked and uncomfortable like I’m the unstable one in all of this. It smells like sex, and the bastard still has the used condom on his shriveled-up dick.
“I fucking hate you!” I scream, rip my engagement ring from my finger, chuck it at his stupid head, and race for the door as the first of my tears come, pouring from my eyes like a broken faucet. He broke me. The bastard broke me because damn him! I’m not a crier!
I snatch my purse off the floor and fly out the door, slamming it shut behind me and practically tumbling down the stairs with how fast I move.
My feet hit the sidewalk, early rush hour brushing past in each direction, and a car horn blares, making me jump.
I don’t think about where I’m going. I don’t question it.
I just run because I know he’ll be there, and right now, the only person I want in the world after this is Roman. Everything is always okay when I’m with him. It’s his superpower. We’ve held each other up through the worst of the worst.
And we did it with Adam as part of that.
The March air in Boston is sharp and a little wet, but I don’t care. My feet pound the pavement, and I dodge a million people giving me a million different looks.
Let them look. My fiancé cheated on me. Likely has been cheating since I highly, highly doubt that was the first time.
No, Corporate Barbie wasn’t shocked by me, and she wasn’t mad at him.
They fucked there because I wasn’t supposed to be home until close to eight instead of showing up three hours early.
To think I would have crawled into bed beside him after they did that there makes me sick.
Uppercut, Roman’s steakhouse, is just up the block, and I breathe a sigh of relief. He has three restaurants in Boston as well as others across the world, and all have a boxing-related name to them.
I enter through the back door that leads to a back room, and I loop around toward the kitchen. It’s all hustle and bustle back here. The smell of cheese, garlic, wine, and meat permeates the air. Normally, I’d be drooling, but right now, it makes me want to throw up.
I spot Roman in front of a line of metal tables, talking to another chef.
He’s so tall and broad and formidable. Brown hair cut short and tight to his head, palest of pale blue-green eyes that make him look almost like a wolf, and arms swirling with tattoos hidden beneath his white chef’s coat but peeking out a bit on his hands.
I don’t want to disturb him. He’s busy, and suddenly, I think I need some time alone to process this.
Before he spots me, I walk through the back area to the main dining space.
The restaurant doesn’t open until five, and the bartender is busy setting up.
I slide onto a stool and pick up a menu when she notices me.
“I’m sorry, Miss, we’re—oh. Hey, Brae. I didn’t realize it was you. What can I…” She trails off when she notices my face, so I’m positive I look like ass as I always do after I cry. At least my tears have stopped. “Are you okay?”
“Oh, you know, just a shitty day. Can I get your strongest martini ever?”
She studies me for a beat, then says, “Sure. Of course. I have a bourbon that’s a hundred and twenty proof.”
“Sounds delicious. Add a splash of sweet vermouth and some bitters to that, along with a cherry, would ya?”
“You got it.”
“Thanks.”
She’s still giving me that questioning, unsure look, but I don’t care as long as she serves me alcohol. Right now, I’d drink antifreeze if it served my purpose, though maybe I should serve that to my ex-fiancé. Speaking of…
My phone vibrates in my purse. I don’t bother checking it. I know it’s him. The same way I also know this is the moment when everything starts to fall apart for me.