Chapter 25
Seven years, Liam thought, as the buzz sounded and he walked through the double doors out of the Pine Ridge General ER for the last time, feeling the weight of his entire history there—all the gut-wrenching codes, resource shortages, seventy-two hours straight on call, eighteen hour shifts, systematic failings, administrative conflicts, patient loss, and death notifications—condense into a single long, sharp exhale from in his lungs.
He’d just left the staff room, it hummed the way it always did at change of shift: tired laughter, Nespresso chugging, and the click of plastic badge clips as nurses traded stories or compared days.
Someone had brought in two boxes of mixed donuts, with a pink sticky note—Good Luck, Dr. Dreamy!
—and a lipstick kiss beside it. He smiled faintly and slid out a jelly.
If someone told him, even six months ago, that leaving this place would make him feel something as trite as nostalgia, he would’ve laughed in their face.
But there it was. Nostalgia.
The goodbye celebration lasted about five minutes before they were called out on a code yellow. There was a car accident, and the driver was being helicoptered in with suspected internal injuries.
By the time he’d finished his shift, he’d replicated the goodbye routine at least a dozen times—accepting clumsy backslaps, “Don’t go getting soft on us” and “Remember us little people when you’re famous.
” It was an inside joke because so many celebrities lived in Hope Falls that it was nicknamed the “Hollywood of the Sierra Nevada.”
All day, all he’d wanted to do was get back to Frankie.
Leaving her in bed the second time was even more difficult than the first time he’d had to do it.
He wondered if it would ever get easier.
He was excited to find out, he thought as the sliding glass doors to freedom opened and one foot stepped out when he heard his name.
He would have ignored it, but he recognized the voice and knew he couldn’t.
He turned around to find his sister Poppy. Donut in one hand, coffee in the other. She’d been a lab tech there for almost a decade and ran on caffeine, sugar, sarcasm, and deep, inexplicable knowledge of everyone’s business.
Her head tilted to the side as her eyes narrowed.
“You look almost…chipper. Happy. Relaxed. It’s like your walls are down, or at least a few windows are cracked to your soul.
Your guard isn’t up. It’s like you don’t have one foot out the door.
Which, I realize, is ironic since this is your last day and I stopped you literally when you had one foot out the door, but I don’t know, you just seem… open. Present.”
She pretty much summed up how he felt most of his adult life—walls up, braced for impact, always.
Guarded. One foot out the door. Ever since he got the call that his mom was sick, he had been different.
Detached. On edge. He could pinpoint the exact moment when the tension started to bleed away.
It was when Frankie had crashed back into his world, a hurricane in human form with sunset hair and yoga pants, upending every routine and expectation he’d ever set for himself.
From the second she’d re-entered his life, all the years of anger, of hurt, of grief, of pain began to melt away.
He looked down at his sister, saw the complicated affection in her expression, and realized she was rooting for him in a way that went beyond family obligation, and smiled. This time he didn’t have to fake the smile.
Her eyes widened. “Who are you, and what have you done with my broody brother?”
“It’s my last day.” He attributed his expression, demeanor, and mood to his employment ending, but he knew the real reason was a five-foot-nothing redhead he’d left naked in bed.
“Hmmm,” she made a noncommittal sound.
“I need to go,” he stated.
“Right.” She lifted her pointer finger in the air. “Just a quick question. What time are you picking me up?”
He stared down at her, his expression as blank as his recall of what she was referring to.
It didn’t help when she asked, “Am I meeting you there?”
He blinked.
“The wedding,” she emphasized.
“Oh, right.” Last night had served as a reset to his brain. Sex with Frankie had wiped his mind like an Etch-A-Sketch. He’d completely forgotten that Poppy was going as his plus one.
“Ahh!” she huffed in offense as her jaw dropped and smacked him on the arm. Hard. “You didn’t remember I was going?!” she asked in an accusatory tone.
“Five. I’ll pick you up.” That way she could drink. He knew that Poppy liked to let loose, or in her words, get lit. He had no plans to do either. He turned, assuming the conversation was over, but was stopped once more.
She grabbed his forearm, spinning him back towards her. For a scrawny thing, she was surprisingly strong. “Wait!”
If this was about what she would wear, so help him.
She pulled her phone out of her pocket faster than Wyatt Earp on speed. In .0000000001 seconds she was scrolling. He inhaled slowly through his nose in an attempt to calm himself in what he assumed would be a virtual slideshow of dress options he gave absolutely zero fucks about.
His preparatory Zen turned out to be unnecessary when she turned the device, and on the screen was a photo from Frankie’s Instagram with her and her two brothers—Niko and AJ, the infamous Costas twins—standing in front of a wall at what looked like an urban ax-throwing bar.
Frankie, all five-foot-she wished-one of her, had a plaid shirt cinched at her waist, an ax raised in one tiny fist, and a face that said “bring it” with absolute conviction.
AJ and Niko stood six-foot-two and a half and six-foot-three, respectively, flanking her, each holding their own giant ax, both with open-mouth smiles that told Liam Frankie had just said something hilarious, and they were cracking up.
He shook his head as a smile tugged at his mouth, and he quietly remarked to himself, “She’s going to kill someone with that thing.”
He hadn’t meant to say it out loud, it just came out. He found that happening a lot with Frankie. When he was around her, his entire body was a patellar tendon, and she was a reflex hammer. His reactions to her were entirely involuntary.
His sister either ignored him or didn’t hear him.
“Which one is that?” She pointed to AJ, the taller of the twins, one of only two physical differences.
“AJ.”
She pursed her lips, her expression thoughtful and considered. “He looks like a Greek-god version of Henry Cavill with a better smile.”
“Don’t let Frankie hear you say that,” he warned.
Frankie was very protective of her brothers.
Maybe more protective of them than they were of her.
And more protective of AJ than of Niko. She was a mama bear.
He’d never thought about why, but it could have been because her mom had suffered with both mental health and alcohol issues and had been so fragile.
And after their dad passed, she’d been the one there to pick trying to pick up the pieces even at five.
She shrugged, undeterred. “Relax, I’m just window shopping.” Then immediately demanded, “Stats.”
“Male, thirty-one, six-foot-three, two hundred and ten pounds, twelve percent BMI.”
She rolled her hands in the universal sign for him to continue.
“He’s a good guy.” Liam considered it for a moment. “He is the best guy I know.”
She rolled her eyes, prompting, “Job. Relationship status. Baby mama situation.”
The last two were easy to answer, so he tackled those first. “No kids. Single.” He hesitated on the first since the answer was complicated. “He’s just got back from deployment.”
“Which branch?”
“He works in intelligence.”
“Oh, my god! It is like getting a confession from a mime.” She sighed in frustration. “Is he funny? Is he smart? Does he drink a lot? Is he a serial killer, or worse”—she gasped dramatically as she did the sign of the cross—“does he do CrossFit?”
She crossed her fingers as if him saying, yes, he does CrossFit, would be the most devastating of all responses. That was funny because he remembered something about the Costas having a running joke about CrossFit.
The corners of his mouth twitched with amusement. “He doesn’t do CrossFit.”
“Oh, thank god.” She placed her hand on her chest and bent forward in exaggerated relief.
“He’s funny. Really funny. But has a dry sense of humor.
He’s the most intelligent person I know.
He got a thirty-five on his ACT and a 1560 on his SATs.
He was asked to join Mensa when he was seventeen.
As far as I know, he’s not a big drinker.
And if he was a serial killer, he’s smart enough to get away with it. ”
“That’s hot.”
“It’s hot that he could be a serial killer and get away with it?”
“You said he’s a good guy, the best guy you know. You don’t throw compliments like that around willy-nilly.”
“Willy nilly?” he repeated.
“So, I’m thinking he’d be like Dexter if he was a serial killer.” She grinned. “Hot.”
Liam couldn’t tell whether Poppy was serious or not about finding the possibility of AJ being a serial killer that only killed other killers hot.
He was leaning towards was. But she seemed like herself again, so even if she was being serious that she thought AJ being a serial killer like Dexter was hot, he was okay with it. “You’re not going to ask about Niko?”
“Nope.” She shook her head with a determined gleam in her eyes.
“He plays professional baseball.”
Poppy shrugged, wholly uninterested.