Chapter 34 – Braelyn
brAELYN
My heart pumps faster as I take in the lines of Anne Sharpe standing in the hall of the patient area outside the women’s locker room.
It’s just past change of shift, the night nurses and doctors are hard at work, and the day staff are already gone.
But all that means is that no one is back in this part of the floor.
Except for us.
“How did you get back here?” I press since she didn’t answer my first question.
“I requested you as my nurse, but they told me you were busy with other patients.” She gives me a disdainful once-over. “You don’t look busy.”
I swallow thickly. “I’m off for the night now. And you shouldn’t be over here.”
She makes a sardonic noise. “What is it with you medical people always wanting to kick patients and their loved ones out? I got discharged to follow up with a cardiologist. This hospital is such a waste of time. I could have died. I could be having a heart attack right now.”
“Except you’re not, so how about you tell me why you’re here?”
She shrugs, pushing her blonde hair back over her shoulder. “I told them I was having chest pains.” She takes a step toward me. “That gets you in the door quickly. Whether they keep you here or kill you is another matter.”
“Are you here for me?”
“Yes,” she answers, her tone neutral. Almost conversational. But her eyes tell a different story. Reflexively, I take a step back toward the locker room.
She doesn’t seem to care about my uneasiness. “You don’t recognize me, do you?”
The way she’s saying that I know she’s not talking about how I found her faking her orgasm on top of my ex-fiancé.
She takes my moment of hesitation and continues.
“I think that’s part of what’s so frustrating for me about you.
No matter what I do, I can’t seem to catch your attention.
To you, he was just another patient, and I was simply the wife.
To me, you’re the monster who said my husband was going to die minutes before he did.
It was like you knew it was going to happen and made it so. You’re the angel of death.”
I blink at her, studying her face, and it comes racing back to me.
The dreams I’ve been having. The feeling I haven’t been able to shake.
It was her who triggered it. I knew she looked familiar when I saw her with Adam, but I was a bit too preoccupied at the time to try to place it.
When she showed up in Vegas, I never saw her face.
She talked to Roman, and that was that. But perhaps subconsciously, I recognized it was the same woman. Who knows.
“Your husband was a patient here a year ago, Christmas. He had a heart attack. He was only thirty-four.”
“Thirty-three,” she corrects, her posture so still it’s eerie. “Do you remember his name?”
“I don’t,” I admit. “I’m sorry.”
Her lips twist, and her expression turns mocking. “You’re sorry? That’s laughable. You told me it didn’t matter what my name was.”
The urge to cock an eyebrow or be a bitch is pervasive, but I tuck it in. “That’s because you were fucking my fiancé.”
“Because you killed my husband. I had to make you hurt somehow.”
I glance to my left and see the ER way down the hall moving around as it always is on a Friday night.
Busy as hell. I’m technically not alone in this hall, and if I needed help, I’d have it.
There’s a button on the wall not too far from me, and even a good old-fashioned scream will get attention.
There should be comfort in that, but right now, there’s none.
I shift my focus back to her. “Why are you here? Why now?”
Her weight shifts to her other foot. She’s in a designer dress and heels, with her hair and makeup done to perfection. She’s not in a gown, and I wonder how long she’s been hanging out back here waiting for me.
“After Pete died—that’s my husband’s name—every attorney I went to told me I had no case to sue you.
That there was no malpractice. Pete simply had what’s called a widowmaker and that was that.
But that wasn’t enough for me. How was I supposed to take that?
He was so young. Too young. Men in their thirties don’t die from heart attacks.
I heard you tell one of the doctors that Pete was going to code and you weren’t even in the room.
You were at some machine when they called out the code blue.
You knew he was going to die and you weren’t even in the room. Did you poison him?”
“What?” I gasp out, beyond disgusted by the accusation.
“No. His vitals weren’t looking good, and neither was his EKG.
I was getting meds from that machine to try to help him and I told the doctor I thought he was going to code so they’d be in there when he did and start ACLS, which is advanced cardiac life support, immediately. ”
She shakes her head, her hands going to her hips and her face turning away. She thinks I’m lying.
“You wouldn’t let me be in the room with him.
You told me I had to wait outside. I never got to say goodbye.
That’s also your fault,” she spits, turning back to me with venom glowing in her eyes.
“You said he was going to die so easily, so cavalier, just another moment in your life, while it was the worst of mine.”
“Nothing I ever do with my patients is easy or cavalier,” I defend harshly. “I think you should go.”
“You can’t dismiss me again,” she hisses.
“Not this time. I tried to ruin your life the way you ruined mine. I got a job working at your fiancé’s company and seduced him.
” She snorts and gives me a feigned pitying look.
“Not that it was difficult to. It was pathetically easy actually. I’d already had pictures taken of us, and I was going to have them sent to you the night before your wedding, but when the hotel room wasn’t ready, he agreed when I suggested fucking at your place.
It was too good to pass up. I was planning to leave something behind in your bed.
Something you’d find. But then you came home. ”
I tilt my head, utterly gobsmacked by this, even as my brain fights the adrenaline telling me to get the fuck out of here.
“You seduced Adam to get back at me? I thought it was so you could coerce or even blackmail a show out of him.”
“The show idea was how I got my boss to let me fly out to Vegas. I would have fucked your new boyfriend”—she holds up a hand and rolls her eyes—“oh, excuse me, husband, too by the time I was done. You jumped so quickly into his bed after Adam’s.
I was pissed. It was like all my hard work was for naught.
You hardly even cared that I ruined your relationship and stole the man who was supposed to be the love of your life from you the way you did mine. ”
“Wow. Okay then.” I take another step away, this time toward the nurse’s station.
I need to create distance between us. I need to actually get the hell out of here and likely make a police report for my psycho stalker friend and get a restraining order going.
I feel horrible about her husband, but her grief has twisted things in her mind.
“I watched you at the club with Roman that night. I followed you to the wedding place. I saw it all. You looked so stupid and drunk and happy, it made me furious. I had just ruined your life by fucking your fiancé and there you were, not even two weeks later, with Roman Fritz. I leaked your wedding. I leaked your photos from Mexico. You’d be shocked if I told you how much Intertainment paid me for them. ”
Another step back, but now she’s giving chase, keeping close, the sound of her heels on the floor like fingernails on a chalkboard.
“That’s great,” I tell her. “Super happy for you. I’m going to have security escort you out, and I think it’s time you leave me and Roman, for that matter, alone.
I understand with grief it’s easy to blame others for things beyond our control, but this isn’t the way to do it. ”
She digs into her expensive purse and tosses papers at me.
Except they’re not paper. They’re photographs that slip and slide on the floor in front of me, hitting my feet and colliding into the wall right behind me.
I glance down and see most of them are of her and Adam, which isn’t great to see, but whatever. That’s not new.
Except there are three other pictures, large and glossy, of a redhead hugging and kissing Roman this morning. I know it’s this morning because he was wearing that shirt under his leather jacket when I left the apartment.
“It’s sad how easy it is to get a man to cheat.
My PI didn’t even have to follow your husband more than a few times to catch this.
My PI heard everything. She’s one of his waitresses and they used to meet up at the coffee shop a few days a week before they went back to one of their places.
This morning, it was her place since you’re living at his now.
I guess they had been an on-again, off-again thing for a while before you came into the picture.
” She taps her toe toward the pictures at my feet. “Clearly, it’s back on again.”
She smiles the most malevolent smile.
“It hurts when you lose the thing you love most, doesn’t it? We’re not quite even, but this is good enough for now. Your face says it all. Just so you know, I’m going public with those. All of those.”
Before I can reply, movement catches my attention, and I find yet another person I didn’t expect to see. Someone I’m not too excited about at the moment.
“What are you doing here?” Seriously, what is with this night and these people?
Adam comes in beside me, his shoulder practically touching mine. “I came to see you,” he says. “I was worried about you. I was on my way out to meet up with some friends and I got a notification from my PI that Anne was here and you never left at the end of your shift.”