Chapter 1
Chapter One
Twenty years later
Mia
“Here I come, Dr. D’Angelo!” Bianca Giarelli, one of my favorite patients, sped by in her wheelchair as I stood charting at the nurses’ station of the Children’s Wisconsin adolescent unit, where I was a third-year pediatric resident. The chair had an IV bag attached to a pole in the back, filled with an icky green liquid and swinging slightly as she breezed by. Bianca, age sixteen, had tied red and green streamers and a string of battery-powered LED lights to her pole, completing the Christmasy effect. I waved and gave her a thumbs-up as I talked into my phone, finishing a conversation with my mom as I worked.
“So, are you all packed?” my mom asked, sounding strong and well after the ordeal she’d just been through, which made my heart swell doubly with both happiness and relief.
After what had happened with my sister so long ago, you’d think my family would have gotten a pass on the C word. No such luck, but my mom’s breast cancer was caught early. She’d gotten through surgery and six difficult cycles of chemo. But now she certainly sounded like herself, and this nearly made me cry with joy. The doctors were extremely hopeful that she was going to be fine. Which was still terrifying, but we were dealing. And so, so grateful.
“Getting there,” I answered. It was Monday, and my four-day holiday break began after I was off the clock on Friday. “Can’t wait to come home for Christmas.” As my mom related what was new with my family, my eyes wandered over to my co-resident on the hematology-oncology service this month, Braxton Hughes.
Brax was actually the chief resident over the interns, the first-year residents, in our program. That meant he’d already completed his residency and had been hired on for a year where he had various duties like making the interns’ schedules, arranging and helping teach their educational sessions, and keeping an eye on their professional growth and mental health.
But this week, the week before Christmas, he was pinch-hitting on the ward for a resident who had to travel overseas to see his family for the holiday. At the moment, he was standing in the middle of the hallway consulting with Joe, one of our wonderful child life specialists.
They stood against a backdrop of light strings, tinsel, and glittery paper snowflakes dangling from the acoustic ceiling tiles above their heads. Brax was tall, big-shouldered, and all lean muscle, and actually very nice to look at. I didn’t realize I was staring until he glanced over at me, giving me the slightest nod, turning his dark gaze on me that always seemed to contain a twinkle of mischief—and sometimes more.
I waved and quickly looked away, trying to stop my heart from racing and the telltale flush that was already flaring its way into my cheeks. I sometimes sensed that mischief, that heat , was directed at me, although he’d made it clear, since breaking things off last summer, that there could only be friendship between us.
I tried not to fan myself, but the hormonal rush was, frankly, uncontrollable. But I was working on it.
As my mom discussed all the different ways she’d decorated the Christmas trees she’d talked my dad into putting up all around our house, I was distracted by what was going on in front of me on the ward. “Hey, Bianca,” Brax said in a teasing voice as she rolled by. “You’d better be practicing up for ping-pong tonight.” He circled his right arm around as if he were warming up his muscles for a pitch. “’Cause I’m gonna whup your butt.”
“Hey, Doctor Brax,” she said. “We’ll see about that. I’ve been practicing too.” She wound her arm around in the same way. She was weak, of course, from the chemo she’d endured, but her enthusiasm—and her sass—made up for her lack of muscle.
Brax laughed. Laughter that caused a lot of females to melt into Jell-O at his feet. Not me, of course. I was not a melter. But he did make my knees wobble. And a couple of other reactions that I would never admit out loud.
Bonded by the life-and-death nature of our job, Brax and I quickly fell into a friendship that was more than simply collegial, but less revealing than what we’d had before. We managed to keep the other stuff out of it. Mostly.
“So how’s your guy?” my mom asked.
Brax was not my guy. But my mom actually thought he was. “He plays ping-pong with the teens who’ve been on the ward for a while.” I watched Brax grab a small beanbag elf off the counter and toss it playfully at Bianca. It landed in her lap, making her chuckle. “They kind of have a pool going. They play for M&M’s.”
“Oh, Mia,” my mom gushed. “He sounds wonderful.”
A hefty dose of guilt flooded through me as I failed, as I had repeatedly through these past months, to tell my mom the truth about our breakup. Bianca cranked up her arm again and tossed the elf in Brax’s direction. He made a giant show of catching it, hurtling himself in the air, making faces, and doing a football-esque victory dance when he caught it, almost running into Valerie Beckett, our charge nurse, who’d recently celebrated her thirty-fifth year in the profession.
“Sorry, Val.” Brax displayed his boyish grin, which did not make my heart flutter. “We were just practicing for the big competition tonight.”
“In the nurses’ station , Dr. Hughes?” Her frown wasn’t really even a frown. More like a he’s-so-adorable-and-I-wish-I-were-thirty-years-younger kind of look.
Geesh. He was adorable.
Brax gave a casual shrug. “To make up for it, you can join us tonight for the tournament, okay? If you’re as good at ping-pong as you are at managing this ward, we should be very afraid.”
Val, completely charmed, shook her head. “Mmmhmm. Maybe they should keep you residents busier if you’ve got time for ping-pong tournaments.” But she turned away smiling.
Suddenly, the red-and-green felt blur flew through the air, directly toward me.
In a not-very-pretty but nevertheless practical move, I caught it while somehow managing to mute and not break my phone. “You suck,” I said to Brax.
Bianca laughed.
Brax lifted a well-defined brow in surprise. His gaze, full of challenge, settled upon me in a way that gave me goose bumps.
To make things worse, he walked up and leaned over the counter, staring down at me with amused, warm brown eyes. “Thought you had better reflexes, Dr. D’Angelo.”
“You’re all bluster,” I shot back. “I have great reflexes. A true teammate communicates.” And then I tossed it right back. He caught it quickly and smoothly, with one show-offy hand. If only I could summon the nerve to speak with him that way—in a bold, sassy tone—about what really mattered. But Brax only allowed people in so far.
My twin, Grace, had been sassy. I, on the other hand, tended to think of smart comebacks approximately five hours after a conversation. So much for genetics.
His full mouth turned up ever so slightly. “And here I thought we had something better than words.”
“And what would that be?” I couldn’t wait to hear this.
“Intuition. Reflexes.” He tossed the poor elf back and forth between his hands. “Being in tune with each other’s moves.”
Okay, it was definitely getting hot in here. I dropped my voice and frowned. “Are we talking about sex or ping-pong here?” Had I just said that, one finger press away from my mother actually hearing it?
I’d sworn to never bring that up again. But when did my mouth ever listen to my brain? Plus, he was being flirty. But why? We’d broken up months ago.
“Touché.” He leaned on his elbows, his face so close that I could see the masculine grain of his late afternoon stubble. “I was thinking more about how we handled that case in the ER last week.”
I called baloney—silently, of course. Because his eyes told me differently. They often did. But he never acted on the impulses I saw there.
And yes, we had worked together very efficiently and quickly to help a toddler with pneumonia get oxygen, antibiotics, and quick admission to the PICU, short for the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit.
“I’ll be sure to communicate my plays from now on. Okay?” There was that smile again, hot lava to my insides. Oh, so painful, to be this close to him and constantly pretend we were friends, friends, friends . I needed a brain reset. For my own sanity.
After he’d broken things off last summer, he’d said, “I care about you so much, Mia. We’ll be working together all year. I want us to be friends.”
With his words, my heart cracked right in half. I should have said Screw you, absolutely not.
But you know what? We often happened to be on call the same nights, working closely to help very sick kids. Give us any emergency, and we were magic together. We anticipated each other’s moves, had the same rhythms, even the same thoughts about what to do next.
So, I had no choice but to accept his friendship, which he offered very sincerely. That worked fine, as long as I ignored the rush of hormones that released in my body every time he walked into a room.
It had been magic in bed too. Well, in my opinion, anyway. Let’s face it, if he’d felt the same, I wouldn’t be searching for a fake boyfriend to bring home with me in T minus five days, now would I?
I forced myself into the here and now as Brax walked over to Bianca and handed the beanbag to her. “I’ve got to go but keep practicing. ’Cause Pedro and I are going to whup Mia’s and your butts tonight.” Pedro was another teen on the unit who happened to love ping-pong—and Brax.
“ Not ,” Bianca said definitively, like the typical teenager she was, spinning her chair around and heading down the hall.
“Mia?” my mom asked.
Oh. My mom.
“Sorry,” I said. She’d been relating a story about how our whole town was excited for the big annual Christmas party, where everyone got way too dressed up, ate a fancy sit-down meal, and danced to a live band—a usually fun event that happened to be hosted by my ex’s parents. Except this year, it would be hosted by—bonus!—my ex and his new wife. I was definitely not going.
“I’ll let you get back to work,” my mom said. “Is that Braxton I hear in the background?”
“He—um—he just said he can’t wait until we’re on call together tonight. If it’s not too busy, we’re going to put together a fake Christmas tree someone donated and get the kids to make paper chains and stuff.”
That part was true. But for the rest of the tales I was spinning, I was going to burn in hell.
“He sounds so…light. Fun loving. I can see why he’s perfect for you.”
I didn’t have to tell my mom that life had sucked the fun loving right out of me for quite some time, starting with my longtime boyfriend breaking up with me two years ago and marrying someone else in Vegas last month.
I was okay with being single at twenty-nine, but this made my mother, who’d married my dad at twenty, worry about me constantly. Plus, the breakup with Charlie had been hard, and people in our small town, two hours from Milwaukee, asked about me a lot, which made her worry even more.
When Brax dumped me a few weeks after we’d started dating, she’d been about to start chemo, and I just couldn’t tell her. And so the fantasy lived on.
I was definitely going to burn in hell. Since my sister had died, I’d made it my mission not to cause my parents any worry. I supposed I’d become the perfect child, determined to do everything right. They’d had enough grief in their lives. I didn’t want to give them more. But inventing a boyfriend was a whopper, even for me.
“How are you feeling?” I asked. “Maybe it’s too much, me coming home with someone. Maybe it’s better if—” Please, I prayed. Please say it’s too much.
“Sweetheart, we cannot wait to meet Brax,” she quickly said. “And I’m feeling great. Ask your dad.”
“Hi, honey,” I heard in the distance.
“Hey, Dad.” I pictured him standing there, dutifully holding an ornament box for my mom while she picked them out one by one, exclaimed over the story each one told, and hung them on our tree. I’d basically hit the parent jackpot—my dad always had my mom’s back, and vice versa. Not always easy when she tended to be Mrs. Christmas.
“Tell her, Steven,” my mom urged. “Tell her I’m just fine.”
I heard a shuffling noise as my father took the phone. “Your mother now has a total of eight Christmas trees in our house.” There was a painfully patient pause. “She’s made me haul each one to its perfect place. And she’s been decorating for the past two weeks.” In his voice, I heard an unconscious plea for reinforcements. “I can firmly say she’s back to her old self.”
Stopping my mom from decorating would be like stopping the snow from coming just south of Madison, where I grew up in a quaint lakeside town dotted in the summer with crystal blue lakes, bright red geraniums, fresh June strawberries, and the squeakiest cheese curds you’ve ever tasted. In the winter, it was all quaint old homes and rolling snow-covered hills. And everyone trying to outdo themselves in the Christmas-decoration department.
“We can’t wait to meet your young man,” my dad said.
“Knowing you’ll be here soon is the best medicine of all,” my mom said, “so hurry home.”
“’Kay. See you soon. Love you,” I said as I hung up.
I took a giant breath. And rubbed my forehead. It had been so hard to support my mom this past year when I’d had so little time off, but my stories had distracted her and given her something to look forward to. Along the way, I’d invented happiness in the form of a boyfriend who was kind, funny, handsome, and treated me like a queen.
He greatly resembled Brax times ten—like, Brax if he’d never broken up with me. If he’d said he loved me instead of Can’t we please be friends?
I marveled that, somehow, I’d managed to do what I’d never been able to do before—fool my mother. And I’d done it spectacularly. I wasn’t congratulating myself for my Academy Award-winning performance or my on-the-spot creativity—every time I added onto the pile of lies, I literally broke out in a sweat.
I’d invented the perfect man. The only problem was, now I had to produce him. For Christmas .
I’d tried telling my parents back in November that he couldn’t make it. But then my mom, her immune system already weakened, got sick with a head cold that had gone straight into her chest, requiring antibiotics and a brief hospital stay for pneumonia. She’d sounded so discouraged, so weary and tired, that I said he could make it after all.
Yes, I’d panicked. But fortunately, I now had a plan. My pal Gabe offered to play the part, which was just for a long weekend. Eventually, in a month or two, maybe, I’d tell my mom that we broke up, but it wouldn’t be a big deal because by then, she would hopefully be long past this awful health scare.
So it was all going to be fine. I had it covered.
On the ward, Dr. Robin Miller, who was in her first year of practice, sat down across from me at the nurses’ station. She finished a call with another doc and hung up. “Hi, Mia,” she said, “how’s it going?”
“You’re here late.” I glanced at my watch. Almost seven. I was already getting called about night shift admissions from the ER.
She sat back and rubbed her very pregnant abdomen. “Long day.”
Robin was the only female physician in the prestigious BCP Group—named after the founding partners, Drs. Brunner, Curry, and Pendergast—but affectionately called by nearly everyone the Brew City Pediatrics group. Otherwise known as the most well-respected practice in town, it was the practice that ran the smoothest, stayed up to date on all the latest trends, and which invested the most time teaching the residents. It was also the group where Brax and I were both vying for the one open spot.
They were the best group with the highest standards, and I wanted that job more than anything. I loved working with people who loved their jobs, who strove for excellence, and who truly cared about making a difference for kids—everything that checked all my boxes for why I wanted to be a pediatrician in the first place. Come July, I’d be done with residency and ready for the real world, and I couldn’t wait.
She came right out and addressed what was on my mind. “I don’t think we’ll be making a decision about the job until after the holidays. You and Brax are both such excellent candidates.” She took a sip of water from her flask. “All I can say is, enjoy third year, because that’s a dream compared to private practice.”
What? I, along with every other resident, was under the impression that residency might be its own form of hell, but the light on the other side was finishing and having a real job. Life balance was just a few elusive months away.
Robin must have noticed my puzzled expression. “You know how high the standards are in our practice. We all work as long as it takes for our patients. That’s why we choose the hardest-working residents to join us.”
I didn’t want to question her too much, lest she question my dedication, even though her comment struck me as a little intense. So I settled on “Is practice what you expected?”
She hesitated. The tiniest bit. Yet that little pause took me from concerned to really concerned. “I’m the only woman in the practice, so I’d love more representation. Sometimes I feel that it will take bringing on another woman to bring some balance, if you know what I mean.”
I was really confused, but just then, the charge nurse walked over to ask me a question about someone’s medication, and Robin’s pager went off, so our convo ended.
When I finished, Robin was gone, but there was Brax, giving a pep talk to Pedro, a gangly teen of fifteen, who was passing by, dragging his IV pole behind him. They talked ping-pong strategy while Brax took the pole, walking alongside him, deep in conversation.
I got up, grabbed my laptop, and headed down the hall. Brax saw me coming and glanced up. “Hey, Mia,” he said in his sexy, deep voice, “hope you and Bianca have been talking, because Pedro and I have our strategy down.” He fist-bumped with Pedro.
I loved being on call with him. Well, no one loves being on call, but the key here was with him . He had a way of making even the most awful nights fun.
“Bianca and I are going to win,” I said with confidence. “What are we playing for this time?”
“Ice cream!” Bianca said as she passed by on her tenth lap. She smiled widely at Pedro, and he returned an equally enthusiastic smile.
Aw. Seemed like those two had a little bit of a crush going on.
“Already in the freezer,” Brax said. “Waiting for me and Pedro to feast on it.” He rubbed his flat stomach and licked his chops, making Bianca, Pedro, and me roll our eyes.
A visual appeared before my eyes—I’d seen that flat stomach up close. Those sculpted abs. That lovely chest. And all the rest of him. I could attest that every body part was of excellent quality. But oh, how I wish I could erase those images.
Brax’s fun-loving antics with our patients had entertained my mom over the past few months and helped her—and me—through a tough time. Now, I just had to play out the charade until I could end it. My stomach gave a nervous flip, like it did when I knew I was in trouble. I reassured myself that everything was set up perfectly, if a little precariously. What could go wrong?