Chapter 2
Alison
For a few brief stunned seconds, Alison could only stare at Juniper Connelly, crumpled on the carpet behind her sleek midcentury-modern
desk.
Her brain couldn’t quite connect the dots.
One moment, June had been her normal take-no-prisoners self, her voice confident and assured as she made it clear what a failure
she found Alison to be.
Big surprise there. She had been a nervous wreck as soon as she walked into the offices of Move Inc.
The next, June had clutched her chest and fallen over.
What the hell?
She felt paralyzed with shock and the echo of recent trauma for only a second or two, and then she rushed forward.
“Ms. Connelly? June?”
When she didn’t get a response, she pushed the chair out of the way and lowered June all the way to the floor. Her face had
gone pale, her features chalky against the thick pile of the carpet, and her eyes were fixed and open, staring at nothing.
Alison felt for a pulse. When she didn’t find one, panic clawed at her. This couldn’t be happening!
“Help!” she screamed. “We need help!”
With a quick breath to calm herself, she turned back to her boss. “Hang on. Hang on, June.”
She loosened the woman’s tailored black shirt and positioned her flat on the floor. She mentally rehearsed the steps she had learned in the class she took a few months ago. She checked again to make sure she couldn’t feel a pulse. Nothing. June’s chest wasn’t moving either, and Ali couldn’t see any sign of life.
Okay. She could do this. She had the training. If only she could find the courage.
She inhaled sharply and was just about to give the first rescue breath before starting cardiopulmonary resuscitation when
she sensed someone else in the room.
“What’s going on?”
The baffled, alarmed voice came from Jason Taylor, she saw at a glance. He was June’s administrative assistant. One of two,
actually, who worked in cubicles next to Alison’s.
“What have you done?”
He clearly hadn’t been impressed by her timid performance of the past three weeks, either. She stared at his haughty features
for a fraction of a second. “June has collapsed. Call 911. Tell them we’ve got a medical incident of unknown origin. She’s
not breathing. She needs CPR. Do you have any training?”
He stared. “CPR?” he repeated as if he had never heard the acronym.
She didn’t have time to deal with his. Time was of the essence. She had only a tiny window to avoid irreversible hypoxic brain
damage. “Call 911,” she ordered, her voice as firm and direct as she could make it.
That recent trauma pushed through her consciousness, the helplessness and the fear and the inevitable crushing grief.
Not June, as well. Especially not before she had any chance to tell her...
Alison jerked her mind away from the information that had brought her here, to this high-rise building in Seattle and the
sleek office of the woman who intimidated her so very much. Instead, she forced herself to focus on the matter at hand.
She would never have the chance to tell Juniper Connelly anything if the woman didn’t start breathing again.
She inhaled once more and then reached down to give a rescue breath. It seemed to go in and remain trapped there so she knelt beside the woman, covered one hand with the other and began the count in her head.
Performing CPR on an actual human was much different than practicing on the dummy she had used during the training class she
had forced herself to take after her father died. This was real. Not training. Someone’s life was at stake. Juniper Connelly’s life was at stake.
She was on her third round of compressions when Jason rushed back into the office.
“Okay,” he said. She could hear the fear in his voice but didn’t take time from her efforts to look up. “Help is on the way.
Is she breathing?”
“Not yet.” Ali couldn’t spare even a look at him, focused solely on her efforts.
She heard him repeat the information into the phone, then he moved closer to the two of them. “The dispatcher wants to know
if you’re familiar with CPR.”
Wasn’t it obvious?
“Yes,” she said, her arms moving in the steady “Staying Alive” cadence. “I finished training two months ago.”
Later, she knew she would be deeply grateful she had made herself go through the training. She had been driven by grief and
pain and her helplessness at being unable to help her father. She never wanted to endure again the pain of watching someone
die in front of her. Especially not someone she loved.
Surely, June looked a little better, didn’t she? She was still deathly pale but there seemed a smidge more color in her cheeks.
Or maybe that was wishful thinking. Ali lost track of time and how many cycles she went through as the room seemed to fill
up with people.
A dozen? Two? She didn’t stop even after the paramedics came in, answering their questions automatically with one side of
her consciousness while instinct forced her to keep up the relentless rhythm. Finally, one of them nudged her aside.
“Miss? You need to step away now. I’ll take over from here. We’ve got an AED. We’re going to try to shock her back.”
She eased back on her heels. Someone—maybe Jason?—reached a hand down to help her up and she rose, her arms, shoulders and
spine on fire from the exertion.
She couldn’t seem to take her eyes off the drama unfolding on the floor, Juniper so pale and still while a half dozen paramedics
worked around her. One continued CPR while another applied an oxygen mask attached to a bag to cover her nose and mouth. A
third opened a machine and pulled out adhesive stickers that she attached to June’s now-bare chest.
“Okay, Mike,” the woman said in an authoritative voice. “Stop compressions. Everyone stand clear.”
A mechanical voice spoke from the box, announcing that a shock was being delivered, then seconds later said, Shock delivered. Provide chest compressions and rescue breaths .
They all seemed to bustle around her again. “Anything?” the paramedic performing chest compressions asked.
“Not yet.”
They went through the shock process a second time. This time, even Ali from her vantage point could see something was different.
“I’ve got a pulse,” one of them called out.
A pulse. June might survive this. Alison nearly collapsed back to the floor in relief. Fortunately, Jason was there and to
her surprise he wrapped a comforting arm around her shoulders while the paramedics continued working on June.
“Yes. She’s got a pulse,” the woman paramedic said. “It’s thready but there. Keep going with the bag valve mask.”
She didn’t regain consciousness, but Ali could see her chest rising and falling on her own now. They worked on her until two
more paramedics came in with a gurney.
“Where are you taking her?” she asked one of the paramedics.
He gave her the name of a hospital, but she hadn’t been in Seattle long enough to know where that was.
“Does she have family we should contact?”
She stared blankly at him, not at all sure how to answer that. Jason quickly stepped in.
“No. She doesn’t have any family,” he answered. “She has a couple of good friends. She is close with Adam Greene, the president
of the company, but he’s in Hong Kong this week. I can notify him.”
“Will she be okay?” The words rushed out of Ali.
The paramedic shrugged. “The doctors can figure that out better than we can. You did what you could. Good work. If not for
you, we would be taking her to the morgue, not the emergency room.”
After they left, a pall descended on the office. The floor was littered with medical debris. Empty canister wrappings, a discarded
oxygen mask. The air smelled of alcohol wipes, sharp and distinctive.
In the strange silence, Ali felt as if she had somehow miraculously survived a tsunami and was wading her way back to dry
land.
“Wow. You saved her life.” Jason looked shocked.
Margaret Thuy, Juniper’s other assistant, who must have come in while Alison was performing CPR, gave her an admiring look.
“You had nerves of steel. I would have been terrified. How did you learn how to do CPR?”
“My dad died of a heart attack six months ago. I... couldn’t help him. I took a class so I would never find myself in that
position again.”
She was shaking, she suddenly realized. Her arms trembled and her shoulders jerked with fine, small shudders. She was nauseated,
as well. But then, she had not eaten much that morning.
June had been in the middle of firing her. Well, since she was an unpaid intern, she had been in the middle of telling Ali
that her services were no longer needed.
I am sure you will agree that these past three weeks have been something of a disaster, from start to finish.
Ali had seen the disappointment in the other woman’s expression, a kind of pained resignation.
She couldn’t say she didn’t deserve to be canned. She had made a lousy executive intern, especially in a fast-paced tech innovation
company like Move Inc. Juniper left her as nervous as a bag of cats, as her grandmother would say, and she had been completely
out of her comfort zone.
That didn’t matter now. The woman who was the entire reason she had come to Seattle was in the process of being transported
to a hospital and now Alison didn’t know what to do.
She couldn’t simply... walk away. June would need help over the next few days or weeks. Or maybe months. Ali couldn’t abandon
her.
She would stay and help where she could. She could check on her in the hospital, run errands for her. Whatever she needed.
She hadn’t been able to do anything to save her father. But even if June had been in the middle of firing her, Alison wouldn’t
simply slink away in the night, abandoning one of the few family members she had left.