13. Chapter 13
Three Months Later
Like I’ve been doing these past three months, I make another loop around the nurse’s station, making sure to check in on the roster at the front check-in desk, then with the receptionist, and then finally with the triage nurse. Each time, I verify if Mary’s name is or is not on the list. I’m sure the other nurses and receptionists think I’m crazy, but I don’t give a fuck. Though I think one of the triage nurses suspects I’m watching for someone specific, but so far, she hasn’t said anything to me.
The last time Mary was in the ER, it was a little over a month ago on Mother’s Day. I hadn’t been working, but Alli had been.
My body tenses as I recall what Alli had told me about their conversation. Somehow, Alli had convinced Stephan to step outside so that Mary could be examined. He knew it was hospital policy, but he was fighting it. That, in and of itself, is a red flag we watch for in potential abuse situations.
“When I asked Mary if she remembered me, she cut me a glare that could have killed, Luke. Said that she’d never forget those who forgot about her. Abandoned her. Walked away from her.” Alli pauses and gives me a sympathetic look. “Or those that ripped out her heart and shredded it repeatedly these past nine years.”
I could only stand there, shocked, as I stared at Alli’s sad face.
Somehow, I manage to shake myself out of the shock. “What do you mean, ripped it out and shredded it? I’ve been spending every spare second looking for her and my child.”
Once again, Alli gives me a sympathetic look. “When I pressed, she finally showed me pictures that her husband’s been sending her about you. There were a lot of them. Probably over a hundred, if not more.” Her cheeks flame and she looks everywhere but at me.
“What were the pictures about?” I ask, even though I probably know based on Alli’s reaction.
“You having sex with other women as well as you getting blow jobs,” she whispers.
My heart drops at this new level of low that this asshole’s been putting her through. I’ll admit, I’ve given in a handful of times over the years where I slept with someone else or had a bunny suck me off. I could probably count the encounters all on both hands and that’s for the last nine years. In total. Each time, I felt absolutely terrible about it. Like I was cheating on Mary.
“You and I both know how many times I’ve done that, so to have more than nine or ten is a lie. Fake.”
She knows because we’ve talked about it before in the past. She caught me once as I sat on my parents’ back deck and stared up at the windows next door that had been Mary’s bedroom all those years ago. I was drunk and pissed at myself for stepping out on her the night before. It was the second time that it’d happened.
I bared my soul that night to Alli. Afterward, she made me swear that I was to come to her if it ever happened again rather than get shit-faced and beating myself up even worse than I had been.
Alli nods. “I know, and I told her. She didn’t look like she believed me. I told her about you and Sam looking for her all these years. That whenever you guys got close to finding her, she moved. When I told her Brady started looking as well, once he got his badge, she really looked skeptical.
“She told me she texted you hundreds if not thousands of times once she found where her old phone had been hidden. Same for me, but I told her I never received them. I even showed her. Hell, I kept my number the same all these years just in case she called.” Alli shakes her head and the defeat on her face has my chest aching.
She takes a deep breath, but I can tell she’s trying hard not to cry. “I don’t know what else to say. What to tell her that will make her believe that she wasn’t forgotten or abandoned,” she says, the last words choked as tears start falling down her cheeks.
I pull Alli into my arms and hold her as she cries. “All we can do is keep trying. Somehow, I’ll get her and the kids away from that asshole. Just keep trying, Alli-bear.” Using my nickname for her from when we were kids has a small laugh escaping her, just like I had hoped.
As I stared up at the night sky that night after my shift ended, I swore I’d do everything I possibly could to convince Mary to believe me. That everything Stephan has told her is a lie.
Sighing, I shake off those thoughts and duck into the check-in station, then freeze when I look over the list.
Mary’s name is on it.
And she signed in ten minutes ago.
My head pops up and I anxiously scan the waiting room. I finally find her tucked into a dark corner as if she were trying to hide herself. Next to her are her children, and it doesn’t escape my notice that Asher looks devastated as he watches his mom.
Picking up her clipboard, I read over her information and my blood boils when I connect the dots to what’s really happened. Then I look at the triage nurses’ notes for who will be coming back next. Thankfully, it’s Mary.
“I’ll take this one, Sally,” I tell the receptionist and she gives me a nod before going back to entering information into our system for another upcoming patient.
Backtracking to the nurse’s station, since I have to pass it to get to the hallway leading to the waiting room, I’m not surprised when Alli rushes over to me, a worried and anxious look on her face.
“She’s here, isn’t she? You look like you could murder someone.”
I grit my teeth and nod as I try to stamp down my anger over her being hurt again. I can’t approach Mary if I’m like this. If I do, I might scare her and possibly the kids. She might not realize my anger isn’t directed at her, but rather toward her asshole husband.
“Take a deep breath, Luke. I’m here if you need me, okay?” Alli looks up at me expectedly and I jerkily nod my head. She gives me a hug before going back to her station.
After a few moments, I’m able to tamp down my emotions enough to where I think I can keep myself under control. Exhaling heavily, I leave the ER and head down the short hallway to the waiting room.
“Mary Hayes,” I call out and her head snaps up at my voice, shock written all over her face.
My chest tightens when I see her blank her emotions a second later. She carefully stands and Asher takes her trembling hand in his. She whispers something to them and they all nod. The youngest, Cassie’s, lip trembles and Isaiah tucks her into his side as they follow their mom.
“Right this way.” I turn and grab my badge to open the doors, but freeze when not just Mary, but her kids too, all flinch and jerk away from me.
Motherfucker is a dead man.
Deciding not to draw any attention to their reactions, I scan my badge and once the door closes behind us; I notice the tremors running through Mary intensify a little more. Even though I want to pick her up and carry her into the closest available room so I can help ease her pain quicker, I don’t. I don’t want to scare her off right away. Nor do I want any of her husband’s cronies to possibly see us, either. That’s the last thing I want is for Mary or the kids to be beaten or hurt because of something I do.
There are rooms that are closer to the entrance of the ER that are open, but I lead Mary to the back of the pod, where there are multiple rooms open on either side of it. With how skittish they all are, maybe they’ll be more open to talking if there’s even less of a chance someone will hear them.
Opening the door, I step inside and after they are all in, I close it. “Feel free to have a seat, kids. Do you want me to get you another chair so all three of you can have your own seat?” I ask as I crouch down in front of them, trying to make myself smaller.
The youngest, Cassie, whimpers slightly and buries her face in Asher’s side. His arm tightens around her as he stares defiantly at me. “She’s shy, but she usually sits on my lap if she can’t be with Mom.”
Nodding, I stand and step back. All three of their little bodies slightly relax and I bite my cheek to keep my anger off my face. “No problem. Let me know if you change your minds.” Pausing, I turn to Mary, who is now sitting on the examination table. I had meant to say everything after getting her fixed up, but instead my mouth decides to overrule my head. “Hello, Siren.”
She stiffens, and her eyes harden as she glares at me. “I’m not your Siren anymore. Please leave. I want a different nurse,” she says, her voice as hard and icy as her eyes.
Glancing at the kids, I notice that Asher’s eyeing me warily and my gaze goes back to Mary. “I swear to you, Siren, I’ve been looking for you for the past nine years. As soon as I got close, as in physically on my way to you, you’d be gone by the time I got there. In fact, as a just in case I ever saw you again after you came in here a few months ago, I took some pictures of some of my notes so you can see the proof for yourself.”
Digging into my pocket, I unlock my phone and bring up the photo album for her to see before handing her my phone. “Do you want me to do my examination while you look through that, or wait and do it after?”
Hesitantly, she takes my phone with her good hand since her other is still in a cast. Normally, she should have gotten it off a month ago, but when she was here last month, it was re-injured when she fell, so the doctor decided to recast it.
Mary gnaws on her lip as she stares at me. It takes everything in me to not reach out, to caress her lip and gently pull her abused lip free like I used to do when we were dating. Finally, she glances down and opens the album. Taking a deep breath, she swallows thickly. “Wait please. I need to know. After all these years, I need to know. I can deal with the pain for a little longer. It’s not like I’m not used to it,” she replies, her voice barely a whisper.
Rage boils in my veins at her words, but I try to stomp it down as much as possible. I will not make her or her kids think that I’m the same as that asshole.
As I look her over while she scrolls through my phone, I’m torn. A part of me wants to make it so that she isn’t in pain anymore, but the other part of me agrees with her and wants her to know the truth. She’s had so many choices taken from her all these years. I’m not going to push her on this, but if I notice that the pain is getting to be too much, I’ll step in.
However, there is something I can do for her eye right now.
Walking over to the cabinets, I pull out one of our medical ice packs and squeeze it. The chain reaction of the chemicals inside starts to lower the temperature, and I hand it to Mary. “Try to hold this to your eye. That should help minimize some of your swelling.”
Mary eyes me hesitantly, and then takes the ice pack from me. Her fingers brush mine, and just like in the past, a current zips through me at the contact. Judging by her sharp breath, she felt it too. I have to bite my cheek to keep from reacting when I see that gorgeous blush staining her cheeks. Crap, if this keeps up, the insides of my cheeks are going to be raw as fuck.
I clasp my hands behind my back as the silence stretches so I don’t do something stupid like reach out and touch her before she’s ready for me to. Instead, I watch Mary as she flicks through each picture. I know when she gets to her past hospital records logs because the blood drains from her face, but I give her credit. She keeps going.
A tug on my pants has me looking down, and I see Cassie standing there looking up at me in confusion. I glance back toward Asher in surprise, but he just smirks at me, a proud little smirk. I hadn’t even seen or heard her move.
“Well, aren’t you a little ninja?” I say as I crouch down again. “What’s your name? I’m Luke, but some of my friends call me ‘Patch’,” I ask, since I can’t very well let on that I already know all three of their names.
“I’m Cassie. Do you really know my mama?”
I glance up at Mary to find her watching me like a hawk, and when I refocus on Cassie, I nod. “Yes, Angel, I do. She’s very important to me. Always has been and always will be.”
Cassie frowns. “Why do some people call you Patch?”
I honestly thought she’d ask about what I’d just said, but maybe Mary has talked to her about me in the past. Or this is just a reminder of how kids’ brains work sometimes.
“I’m part of a motorcycle club here in town, the Steel Archangel’s MC. I’m their club medic. When I was prospecting with them, a friend of mine was riding his motorcycle around town when someone clipped him and caused him to wreck his bike. He didn’t want to go to the hospital, so I cleaned up his road rash and injuries at our clubhouse. Someone made a joke about me patching him up and it just stuck. When I earned the right to be a Steel Archangel, Patch became my road name.”
Isaiah slowly slides down off his chair and takes a tentative step forward. “I’m Isaiah. What’s a road name?” he asks me, and I grin when I notice that he has motorcycles on his t-shirt. Guess talking about motorcycles is an ice breaker topic for him.
“It’s like a nickname. One that all my brothers and sisters call me rather than Luke.”
Cassie’s eyes widen in surprise. “How many siblings do you have?”
I can’t help but chuckle. “They aren’t my brothers and sisters by blood, but brothers and sisters by choice, and there are a lot of them. As for blood relation, I have a little sister, Amanda, but everyone calls her Mandy.”
I pause and glance up at Mary, and frown when I notice she’s staring at my phone in disbelief. “How you doing there, Siren?”
“You never got them,” she whispers as her eyes turn misty.
“Never got what?”
She sniffs and I stand, grabbing the tissues off the counter and hand them to her.
“Ash, baby, can you please grab my cell phone out of my purse?”
Asher turns around and digs through the purse behind him on the chair before handing Mary her phone.
As she fiddles with something on it, she continues. “I don’t know why, but Stephan kept my old phone and has been paying service on it this entire time. When I found it, I sent messages to you and when you didn’t respond, I tried Alli, too. I never texted Brady because I figured he wouldn’t help me.
“I saved them all on the cloud login that Dad had. He mainly used it for his accounting jobs but he let me use it to. But I saved pictures of everything there so that there’d be no way Stephan would know about the texts. Then I’d delete them off my phone and put it back in its hiding place. Neither of you ever responded,” she says with a defeated look on her face as she hands me her phone.
I quickly scroll through the information and my heart breaks at the desperation in her words. She never mentions if Asher is my son, but now isn’t really the time to ask with the kids here. Plus, I’m not sure if Mary’s ready to have that talk yet. When I get to the last one, I frown when I notice that the messages stop three years ago, almost to the day.
Glancing up at her, she’s blinking rapidly as her good hand clenches at the hem of her t-shirt.
“No, I never got them, but I bet that f—jerk blocked all of our numbers.”
She bites her lip at my almost curse but then her face pales and she shakes her head in disbelief. “God, I never even thought about that. I’m such an idiot,” she says as she buries her head in her hands and then winces. Her hand flies to her ribs and I set the phone down on her lap as I switch into nursing mode again.