Homecoming for Beginners
Prologue
TY DIDN’T even have time to bask in his achievement before it all went to shit.
After years of drifting, followed by as many years of training and hard work, he was finally here—in the ambulance bay at his fire station, in his paramedic uniform, starting his first shift as ambulance commander.
“Try to grin less,” advised his friend Stacey, the fire captain—now his direct superior, no more middlemen. “People get weird when you roll up to their broken leg looking like you won the lottery.” But she smiled as she said it, so it didn’t feel like a criticism.
Ty tried to cut down on the amount of dimple he knew he was flashing. It had taken him until his midtwenties to figure out what he wanted to do with his life, and he’d worked his ass off for it. Now, at twenty-nine, he finally felt like he was where he needed to be, doing what he needed to do. “Sorry, sorry.” He pursed his lips, but the smile wanted to come back. “I promise I’m not going to, like, pull a Joker or anything. I’m just happy.”
Stacey patted his shoulder. She was almost as tall as he was and built like a linebacker, so Ty was grateful he never had to fit next to her in the back of the ambulance. “You’re adorable.”
He grinned wider. “It’s been said.” Mostly by him, but it still counted.
“Just try not to bounce into anything and knock it over on yourself,” she said in a way that would have made Ty wonder if she could actually see into his past, but he knew for a fact she’d been present for him doing that at least three times.
He drew an X across the left side of his chest anyway. “Promise.”
Stacey rolled her eyes, but again, no hint of mean-spiritedness. “Great. Are you going to be able to sit down, do you think, or are you going to pace until we get our first call?”
Ty would’ve answered—he didn’t know how he would’ve answered, but he would’ve come up with something clever and endearing—if their coworker, Brandon, hadn’t poked his head into the breakroom. “Hey, Morris. Some lawyer here to see you. She’s in the front. ”
What? Ty looked from Brandon to Stacey, who was regarding him with mild disbelief. “Boy, you didn’t get sued, did you?”
“I’m going to pretend I’m not concerned that you jumped right to getting sued,” Brandon told Stacey.
She flushed. “I’m a little gun-shy after last year, is all.”
Yeah, last year had been a mess. Ty cleared his throat. “Uh, I guess I should…?”
Stacey waved him toward the door. “Jason will give you the room.”
Great. Exactly what Ty wanted.
He hunched his shoulders and squeezed past Brandon to make his way toward the front of the station. Why would a lawyer be looking for him? And how would they know to find him here?
His thoughts flashed to Myra, and his stomach dropped. Something must have happened to her, and this was how he was finding out. Sure, they broke up five months ago, when she took that Doctors Without Borders posting in Ethiopia, but they were still friends. She’d probably left instructions to contact him if she….
Ty’s stomach clenched, and he pushed the thought from his mind as he stepped into the front foyer. “Hey, I’m Tyler Morris, I heard someone is—”
And then his eyes caught on the familiar figure standing by the front doors, and his heart sank.
Eliza Kent’s power suit had undergone a handful of fashion upgrades since the last time Ty had seen her in one. But otherwise his father’s attorney looked like she had when he was sixteen and she was throwing her weight around a police station in Suffolk, Connecticut, to bully the cops into letting him off a vandalism charge. He ended up getting kicked out of school—not much he could do about that one, since he had smuggled a half-dozen chickens into the principal’s office—but he hadn’t faced any legal consequences.
Somehow he knew that whatever had brought her here, he wasn’t likely to get off so easily this time.
“Ms. Kent,” Ty said automatically, through a very dry mouth. “What are you doing here?”
Kent took off her sunglasses and met his eyes. Her voice was heavy when she said, “We need to talk.”