Chapter 18
18
F ear unlike any I’ve ever known slams into me with the force of a runaway train. Or a bullet. Or something equally, if not more, deadly and destructive. All I could hear was Estlin’s voice, thick with tears and poorly disguised anxiety, and then my baby girl’s scream. Her scream . A crunching bang that will haunt my nightmares for eternity pierced my ears, and then nothing.
The call dropped.
I race for the elevator as I dial her again, only it rings and rings and rings with no answer. Dread and panic rip my insides apart, threatening to cut me out at the knees. I pace the elevator, about ready to lose my absolute fucking mind, but the moment the doors part, adrenaline takes over. It has me sprinting into the emergency department, straight for the nurse’s station.
“There was an accident. I need you to call dispatch and get an ambulance to this address.” I pull up the tracking app on my phone and show the nurse, who is staring at me with wide, shocked eyes. “Now!” I bark when she doesn’t immediately move .
She snaps into gear, getting on the phone with the police and ambulance dispatch, which is infinitely faster than calling nine-one-one.
“What’s going on?” Stone comes over, noting the wild, unhinged look on my face.
“Estlin and Rory were in a car accident.”
His hand hits my shoulder. “Jesus. Are they okay?”
I shake my head. “I don’t know. I was on the phone with them. It just happened now.”
“Yes, we need paramedics, police, and fire immediately to the scene of a motor vehicle accident,” the nurse says before giving the dispatcher the coordinates. “We have at least one female and one child involved. The child belongs to one of ours.” She covers the phone and looks up at me. “It had already been called in, and they’re not even two minutes out.” She goes back to the phone. “The child needs to be brought here to Children’s. The father is already here waiting.”
“No. I want both of them brought here. The female is only twenty-two.” Right on the line for being able to be treated here, but I don’t care, and I know no one will challenge me on it given the situation.
She relays that to the dispatcher, and I thank her, though I’m hardly able to catch my breath.
“Stay close, Dr. Fritz,” she advises. “I’ll keep you updated when I get a status on them.”
I don’t know if I can hear it. I don’t know if I can hear it if Rory and Estlin aren’t okay.
“Notify trauma surgery to be on standby, and let’s get traumas one and two prepped and ready. I want no delays,” Stone orders.
Nurses and other doctors jump into action, giving me looks and patting me on the back in a way that says they’ve got this. That they’re here with me, and I’m not alone. I spend a lot of time down here. I’m a general surgeon, and the number of ER consults we get is staggering. So everyone here knows me personally. And even if they didn’t, they know Stone, and they know my other family members who work in this hospital.
It’s one of the few times I’m incredibly thankful I’m a Fritz in a family of a lot of doctors.
“Police and paramedics are on the scene,” the nurse tells me with the phone to her ear, snapping me away from everything around me. “The child is alert and oriented but in a lot of pain. Suspected broken right arm. Other injuries unknown.”
I blow out a breath, relieved she’s awake and alert, and shattered that she’s in pain with a broken arm and other unknown injuries. My little girl. My baby fucking girl. I can’t handle not being there.
“What about her nanny?” I ask urgently. “The woman who was driving?”
She listens for a moment and then says, “She’s refusing care. But also awake and oriented.”
My hands hit my head, and I pace a circle in front of the nurse’s station. Fucking Estlin. What the hell is she doing refusing care? Goddammit!
“They’re ten minutes out, Dr. Fritz. Don’t worry. They’re in good hands.”
I thank the nurse again and then stagger my way out to the ambulance bay in a daze to wait. It’s like I’m outside my body watching this unfold. I can’t make sense of Rory or Estlin being hurt. Stone is by my side, both of us silent and tense as every second ticks by like an eternity.
“Do you want to call anyone? Your parents? Her parents? Jack?”
I shake my head. “Not yet.”
“My dad is upstairs. Can I text him?”
“Yeah. Thanks. I don’t know who’s on for ortho?—”
“I’ve already called them in and they’re on their way down.”
I glance over at my cousin. “Thank you. I’m glad you’re on right now. I don’t think I could do this without you, and it’ll help Rory to have a familiar face.”
“It’s likely against protocol.”
“I don’t give a fuck. I want—no, I need —you in there with her.”
“Either way I’d be in there. No place else I’d be.”
I clutch his shoulder, giving him a squeeze, before I release him and start to pace, unable to slow myself down. Where the fuck is this fucking ambulance?
I need to know what happened. Estlin was upset. She was distraught and I told her to pull over, but she wanted to get home. I should have forced it. She was in no shape to drive, and I knew it. Once I know my girls are okay, I’m going to call Vander in on this. I’m going to get everything I can on her ex.
Sirens in the distance still my movements, and I stare off into the Boston night, listening as they grow closer, louder, more urgent. Two nurses and an emergency room attending come out into the ambulance bay, give me a fleeting glance, and then it’s all business.
The ambulance pulls in, and the back doors open.
I race forward, only for Stone to throw an arm across my chest, holding me back with a meaningful look. A look that says I need to let everyone else handle this. A look I can’t fucking stand.
“Six-year-old female T-boned by a car running a red,” the paramedic starts as she jumps out, and they pull the gurney out of the back of the rig. “Front right side of the car took most of the impact, and the child was in a booster and restrained. Side airbags deployed on impact. Obvious right arm fracture, alert and oriented times three. Vitals have been stable with heart rate in the one thirties and blood pressure one-oh-six over seventy. Pulse ox is ninety-eight, but we gave her oxygen for comfort. She received IV saline and point eight of morphine en route. ”
Rory is pale with visible tears all over her face. Her right arm is stabilized in an air cast but obviously broken. Her eyes lock with mine and she starts to cry all over again. I don’t know how to handle this. My little girl.
I come up beside her head as Stone and the other doctors and nurses get to work on her. “I’m here, Moonshine. It’s okay. Stone has you too, and they’re going to take good care of you.”
“Daddy, I hurt.”
I choke and quickly swallow it. “I know, my sweetheart. We’ll help with that. You’re going to be okay. I promise.”
They wheel her inside, and I spin around to find Estlin exiting the back of the rig, refusing help, a blood-soaked pad of gauze held to the left side of her head. Her eyes meet mine, and tears immediately start to pour, the same as Rory’s did.
I’m furious. A rage so acute it cannot be contained.
She races into the hospital, bypassing me and my harsh gaze. Heavy steps take her right to the edge of the trauma room.
“Miss. I’m sorry, but we need to check you out,” one of the nurses explains, trying to get her into a wheelchair.
Estlin shakes her head, waving her away. “I’m fine. It’s just a cut. Take care of Rory.”
My hand hits her waist, my fingers clutching, gripping, a fucking vise. I spin her to face me, staring deep into her eyes for a moment before my lips scrape across her cheek to her ear. “Go get checked out. Now.”
“No,” she sharply hisses.
I drag her into me, holding her close, not giving two fucks who sees me do it. “You’re bleeding from your head, which means you hit your head. I need you to go and get a CT scan, so I know you’re okay. I can’t…” My forehead hits her shoulder, and I bring her body tighter to mine. “I can’t handle this, Estlin. I can’t. I need to focus on Rory, but I can’t do that fully if I don’t know you’re not bleeding into your brain. Do you not understand that I need you to be okay too? Please. For me. Let them ch eck you out, and for fuck’s sake, get a CT. Then come back to me.”
Her hand meets my back, and I can feel her trembling. She’s scared, but I am too. On a normal day, I can lie and pretend she hasn’t become my everything, but this isn’t one of those moments.
“Okay,” she relents. “For you, I will.”
“Thank you.” I kiss the crook of her neck and release her. The nurse all but forces her into a wheelchair. “I want a stat head CT with results sent to me, and I want her assessed for other injuries as well.”
“Yes, Dr. Fritz.”
Estlin is wheeled off, and I don’t hesitate before I enter Rory’s trauma room.
Stone doesn’t even spare me a glance as they ultrasound her belly. “If you stay, you’re the patient’s father, not the doctor.”
“I’m a pediatric surgeon.”
“Not right now, you’re not.”
Fuck. Fuck!
“Besides, her belly is soft and nondistended, with no rebound or guarding. X-ray and ultrasound are negative. It seems her arm took the brunt of it, so we don’t need a pediatric general surgeon on her case.”
I give him a look that doesn’t hide my every fuck you thought as I make my way up to Rory’s head.
I soften my features. “How are you doing, Moonshine?”
“My arm hurts,” she whines, but she’s also groggy, and I can tell they gave her some more morphine.
My lips meet her temple, and I wrap myself around her head. “I know, honey. They’re going to fix your arm. You’re in my hospital with people here who love you and will take the best care of you.”
“Like you? Like Stone?”
My forehead presses against her temple. “Like us. ”
“Where’s Estlin?”
“They’re taking a special picture of her head to make sure she’s okay.”
“She sang to me.”
“What?” I pull back and stare down at her.
“After the car hit us, she held my hand and sang to me. She wouldn’t let me out of my seat, and I was scared and crying. She held my hand and sang to me until the ambulance came.”
Fuck, if I wasn’t already falling in love with that woman before, I sure as hell am now.
“She was bleeding a lot. Is she going to be okay?”
“She’s going to be fine. We need to focus on you.”
The trauma room doors swing open, and there is the orthopedic surgeon, Lester Falcon, along with Kaplan.
Lester comes over and stands above her, giving us both a smile. “Well, little lady, I hear you’re Rory Fritz.”
Rory gives me an uncertain look, and I nod at her. She turns back to him and nods too.
“Excellent. It’s so nice to meet you. I’m a good friend of your dad’s and great-uncle’s. It looks like we’re going to be taking you upstairs for a special surgery on your arm. I know that sounds pretty scary, but don’t worry, we’re going to take good care of you, and when you wake up, your dad will be there.”
“I’m going too,” I demand.
“You’re not,” he tells me in no uncertain terms. “You’re the father, and you have no place in that OR or even in my gallery. I know you’ve seen orthopedic surgeries. These are Rory’s films.” Lester turns on the monitor and shows me Rory’s fractured arm. “You see that?” He points to the jagged, misplaced parts of her ulna and radius. “Those have to be reset, and I know you know exactly how we do that. You cannot watch that.”
Because orthopedic surgeries are violent as hell. Saws and screws, and yeah, I can’t watch them do that to my little girl. I’d go fucking nuts .
“I’ll be there,” Kaplan says, putting his hand on my shoulder. “Does that sound okay, Rory? Can I watch your special surgery?”
Rory looks at me and then over at Kaplan and gives another nod.
“From up in the gallery,” Lester presses.
“From up in the gallery,” Kaplan agrees before he turns to me. “I’ll update you as it goes.”
I puff out a breath and come up to my full height, hands on my hips, as I stare up at the ceiling. “How long?”
“Three hours, maybe four, but likely not more than that.”
I walk with Rory over to the elevator, along with Kaplan and Stone. Kaplan is telling her stories about when I was a kid as he tries to get her to crack a smile. Lester asks what color cast she wants, and she tells him pink. It’s all standard, and she’s not in pain thanks to the morphine, but I feel like she’s taking my heart with her as I kiss her goodbye and promise to be there when she wakes up.
“We’ve got her,” Kaplan promises and the doors close, the elevator climbing up into the building with Rory in it. For the longest time, I can’t make myself move from this spot.
“Dr. Fritz?”
I turn to find two police officers standing behind me.
“If you have a moment, we’d like to speak with you.”
A few minutes later, Estlin is wheeled back, just after I finish speaking to the police about the accident. The other driver plowed right through the red light at top speed and straight into the car. It’s amazing they weren’t more injured. The driver of the other car was taken to another hospital but seemed to be uninjured.
“Did I miss her?” Estlin asks as she spots the now-empty trauma room being cleaned.
“She went up to surgery for her arm.”
She nods, but there’s no hiding how her chin trembles and her body shakes. Fresh tears leak from her eyes, and I come over to wipe them away, only to stop myself. Estlin isn’t mine. She’s Rory’s nanny, though I’m having a hell of a time convincing myself of this.
“Her head CT is clear,” the nurse tells me. “I had the radiologist do a stat read. It’s just a nasty laceration that we’ll get stitched up.”
“I’ve got it,” I tell her, grabbing all the suturing supplies and dumping them on Estlin’s lap.
“Dr. Fritz?”
“It’s fine. I’ll do the sutures and take responsibility.” I take the handles of Estlin’s wheelchair and start to walk us away.
The nurse wants to argue with me but wisely doesn’t. “Where are you taking me?” Estlin asks as we reach the elevators.
“My office. I can’t be down here right now, and I’m not allowed in the OR. I can stitch your forehead upstairs.”
“What if I want someone else to do it?” she challenges, and I can’t help my reluctant smirk.
“You want an intern who has been practicing medicine for less than six months to stitch your face? We don’t exactly have plastics on call here this time of day on a Friday.”
She sighs. “The car ran the red.”
“I know. I spoke to the police.”
“So why can’t I stop blaming myself? I didn’t see the car. How did I not see the fucking car?”
I run my fingers through her hair. “Because you were upset before that, and the light was green.”
“I still should have looked both ways, and I didn’t.”
The elevator opens, and I wheel her down the hall toward my office. I stop just as we reach the door, and she stands, a little wobbly but steady enough that I take her hand and lead her inside .
Her nervous, tormented eyes meet mine. “The car is totaled.”
I shake my head as I shut the door behind us and cup her face in my hand so she hears me. “I don’t give a shit. It’s a car. It’s replaceable. You and Rory are not. Even if it had been your fault, I still wouldn’t care about the fucking car and only care about the two of you.”
She starts to break down, crying without the ability to stop as she sits on the sofa, her face in her hands. I drag over an unused filing cabinet and place all the equipment on top of it. Opening things up and keeping them as sterile as I can.
“She’s been through so much, Owen.”
“She’ll be fine, Estlin. She’ll heal and get spoiled rotten by everyone. You’ve been through a lot too. I’d like you to explain to me about your ex.”
She nods, and I clean my hands with sanitizer before I snap on gloves and get to work on her forehead laceration.
“I moved to Paris for art school when I was seventeen, and a few months in, I met Claude Morceaux when I applied for a job at his gallery.”
I freeze and stare dead into her eyes. “Claude Morceaux?”
“Yes,” she says wryly, almost as if the irony is torture. “You have his paintings in your office. I was living with him when he made those.”
“Jesus Christ. Are you kidding me?” I don’t know how to respond to that. Other than to burn them. I bought them from a top-rated gallery in New York. I had no clue.
She grimaces as I clean her forehead. “Sorry. The ones you have are lovely.”
I give her a look, and she laughs lightly. It’s the first one I’ve heard from her all evening, so that’s something.
“Claude was a lot older, sophisticated, brilliant, and he wanted me. I was barely eighteen by then and very naive. He swooped in and swept me off my feet. For almost four years, my entire world was about him. His friends, his genius, his schedule, his moods. And let me tell you, those fluctuated like a mirror in a fun house. I didn’t care, though. I was so taken in by everything that I didn’t realize how toxic it all was.”
“What did your family say about him? This will burn.”
I inject lidocaine into her skin to numb her up. She winces but holds still.
“I don’t remember Jack talking about him,” I admit. “Just that you were living in Paris with a famous artist.”
“That’s because Jack only met him a couple of times. Jack was living and working in LA, remember? That’s pretty far from Paris. We kept up mostly through FaceTime and text. Besides, Jack doesn’t know about any artist other than our mother. Claude never spoke great English, but he put on all the charm for my parents. They loved him because he loved me, and I loved him.”
“All right. So what happened? How did we get here?” I ask as I start to stitch her.
Her eyes fill with more tears, and she’s silent as I finish her sutures and cover them with steri-strips, not speaking again until I start to clean everything up.
“He created a new exhibition. Twenty pieces of new art he was going to reveal and showcase in his gallery. It was a huge deal, and he had invited people from all over the world for the opening. He allowed fifteen critics and gallery owners to preview it in our home. We both had studio space there. The boundaries between his and mine weren’t all that clear. Every time these people came, I had to leave. I didn’t understand why, but I didn’t challenge it either.
“I came home after being out for two hours and discovered him and a gallery owner I knew he greatly admired and respected in the studio space. Claude was shirtless, and the woman’s hair was down and messy. They didn’t hear me come in. They were too busy looking at a photograph of me. The woman called me fat and said she was surprised Claude would be attracted to such a woman. Claude, in turn, called me a devoted pet along the lines of a baby cow you can’t help but love. After that, he went on to tear apart my work, calling me talentless, but claiming he didn’t have the heart to be that cruel and tell me.”
“Christ, Estlin. You heard all of this?” I can barely breathe thinking about what that must have been like for her to walk in on and overhear.
“Yep.” She pops the P sound. “I was in such a brutal daze, my heart literally feeling like it had been shredded inside me, that I didn’t immediately catch the issue with the art. She hated his work. Like hated it. But then she walked over to my work, my canvases that were on easels, and loved those. He was furious. Absolutely enraged. He told her the ones she hated were mine and the ones she loved were his, and when he went to kick her out, they saw me standing there, falling apart.”
“So, this gallery owner hated his work and loved yours, but he claimed yours were his and vice versa?”
“Yes.”
I reach up and wipe her tears, unable to handle them for another second. “Estlin, that’s the most fucked-up thing I’ve ever heard.”
She looks down at her knotted hands in her lap. “The entire time we were together, he told me my pieces weren’t good enough to sell. That I didn’t have the talent to make it. And then this gallery owner walks in and flips all that on its head.”
“Claude didn’t take that well,” I surmise.
She laughs caustically, sniffling and drying her eyes with the backs of her hands. I doubt she even notices the mascara smeared on them. “I lost my mind. Ranting and raving, but he became unglued .”
“What does that mean? Unglued ?”
“I screamed about what he said about me. About the cheating. About the lying about my work to her. He had never hurt me before, but that doesn’t mean I always felt safe around him. He told me my work was trash, and that all these years he was fostering a nothing-there talent because he didn’t know how to let me down gently, and the sex was good even though he did think I was a fat cow.
“I left. I was distraught and needed to try to think. I had never felt so ruined and betrayed. By the time I came back to end it with him and leave for good, I found all my work in shreds and shattered pieces. He had destroyed every piece of mine. He told me that I was nothing and he knew I was all along and that he was going to make sure no one ever discovered me. That if I ever tried to sell my art in Paris, he’d ruin it time and time again. That he had that power over me because he was famous, and I was nothing without him.”
My jaw locks and my fists clench. “Then what?”
“I lost it.” She shrugs with a small, humorless laugh. “I was heartbroken. His words killed me. What he did with that woman was crushing, but what he did to my art was devastating. Years of my work, my blood, sweat, and tears, all gone. That was my chance. I told him he was the one who was nothing and that he was jealous and pathetic. He came after me, and I ran.”
I stand, pacing toward the window, breathing hard, close to losing it myself. I want to plow my fist through the window. I want to shatter the glass. I want to break and tear and burn the world apart. But I won’t. I won’t even attempt it because Estlin deserves better from me.
She deserves to know that I’m safe and that I’d never hurt her. No matter what.
She was right to call him pathetic. I know what it is to be betrayed by someone you love, someone you trust. It’s gutting how it terrorizes you. How it strips you of your trust and faith, especially in yourself.
All I know is that I will destroy Claude Morceaux .
He will never see me coming, but his life as he knows it is over.
No one hurts her like that. No one hurts my girl. Not ever. And him coming after her here? No. No fucking way, no.
My hands meet the back of my head, and I blow out a harsh, murderous breath. Resolved in not caring how dark that goes, I turn back around to face her.
“What happened after you left?”
She stares down at her hands before she raises her chin and meets my eyes. Her tears have dried, and I can see the strength and conviction in her. “I went to my favorite professor, needing a comforting place to be. I had met her husband and their children several times before.” She pauses here and tilts her head. “You have to understand. Claude is like you. Well, not like you at all, actually, but wealthy and famous and powerful. He ruined my art, and what recourse did I have? My work was in his studio. I owned nothing, and I knew it’d be his word against mine and I’d lose.”
I collapse to my knees in front of her, clutching her legs.
“My professor’s husband told me they were moving to London, which I already knew. He asked me to come with them as their nanny. I didn’t hesitate. I left everything in Paris behind and went with them. Claude never knew about my professor or her husband. All he knew was that I never came back.”
“And now he shows up here because you were photographed with Rory.”
She nods slowly. “Yes. He was already in New York, though.”
“He’ll never come near you again,” I promise her.
As a man whose control has snapped, I reach up and drag my thumb along the crest of her cheek. And then I do the only thing I can do. I lean in and kiss her.