Chapter 12
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Hearing a shout behind her, Sammy turned to see Burton walking toward her, waving a couple sandwiches.
“Hey. I just went down to the cafeteria. I left Anderson so he could spend a few minutes alone with his sister.” He smiled as he held out a sandwich to her.
“You didn’t grab anything to eat either? ”
“No, I didn’t,” she said, accepting it. “Thanks for this.” She looked at him and smiled. “Ham and cheese, always a good choice.”
“Mine’s bacon and egg, but I wasn’t sure about you and eggs,” he remarked.
“I have them sometimes, but it’s not a huge thing for me,” she replied. “This is perfect,” she said, as she unwrapped it. “Did I see you earlier down the other hallway a few minutes ago?”
“Yeah, I thought I saw somebody familiar, but, by the time I got there, I couldn’t tell who had been there and who hadn’t. Some sort of commotion was going on in that hallway.”
She nodded. “Security had a problem on the third floor with somebody high on drugs, and it always causes a ruckus as we try to get them moved out of the hospital.”
“Sorry, mental health and addictions have got to be an ugly side of your job,” he mused.
“It can be,” she conceded. “They also need help, so trying to help those who either don’t want to help themselves or are incapable of helping themselves is a challenge. But we do what we can.”
“Of course,” he murmured gently as he unwrapped his sandwich and took a big bite.
She laughed. “I guess this is what you would call, what? … A breakfast date?”
“Absolutely.” He nodded in agreement, a twinkle in his eyes. “A little unorthodox, and definitely not my style, but that would appear to be a good name for it.” He chuckled.
She just smiled as they both leaned against the wall of the hallway and munched down on their sandwiches.
“I presume you’re still on the clock and working hard,” he inquired.
“Yeah, but I did miss my break. So, hey, I will gladly accept five minutes to get some food down. But, when you hear me run, you’ll know that somebody needs me.”
“Of course.” He looked around at a rather organized hustle and bustle around her. “Are you happy in this environment?”
“Yeah, happy enough for the moment,” she stated. “There are lots of other options if I ever want to change, but this is where I feel I belong.”
“Good to know,” he said.
She smiled. “Why?”
“I just wondered if this is home for you,” he inquired, watching her with intensity in his gaze.
“It is home to me.” She turned to face him. “And again, why?”
“I’m just … looking at options.” He winked at her.
She flushed. “We’re back to that whole thing about clearing the air of all these things that have ample time to be sorted if we’re actually in a relationship.”
“Yes,” he agreed, “but I have a decision about my leave coming up, so … that’s not the easiest thing right now, especially when we don’t have a solution at the moment for Talia. And we need that.”
“Plus I have another forty-eight, maybe seventy-two hours,” she shared, “and then I have to check in and make a few changes to my schedule. I tend to forget that you’re all on leave too.”
“Yep. We too have to check in and make arrangements, and we dare not miss our orders,” he added with a smile. “We could be shipped out any day, and we might be at our base for a while.”
“And is that your life?” she asked.
“It is for the moment,” he said, almost identically copying her.
She laughed. “I guess I deserve that answer.”
“It wasn’t intended that way,” he replied, with a shrug.
“Seriously I have a couple more years before I could shift it anyway,” he explained.
“And this is the kind of work that I want to do. It’s also not the kind of work that I can continue to do forever anyway.
So just like Anderson, Leland, Gunner, and all my friends, we’ve been considering plans B and C, trying to figure out what we want to do when this stage of our careers is over. ”
“And will it ever be over?” she pondered.
“That’s another question,” he mused. “We could always take desk jobs.”
Yet such an abhorrent note filled his tone that she burst out laughing.
“I guess you can tell how I feel about that,” he stated, as he grinned.
She nodded in agreement. “I get it. I don’t know what I would do if I wasn’t a nurse, but I could do a lot of different things with it.
I could work for a single community. I could work for a nonprofit.
I could work for blood banks. I could do all kinds of stuff.
” She chuckled. “But this is where I’m at, and this is what I’m happy with … right now.”
“And that’s where you should stay then.” He crumpled up his empty wrapper and tossed it in the garbage can across the hallway. “At least one of us will have a job then,” he joked, as he leaned over and gave her a brisk kiss on the cheek, then turned and went back the way he’d come.
She was left, still holding the sandwich in her hand, staring behind him in shock.
When she heard a whistle and someone called out, “Now who is that yummy man?” Sammy turned to see Kim, and her face must have been flushed because Kim woofed. “Oh, boy, do you have it bad.”
She glared at her. “I do not.”
“You do.”
“Do not.”
“Hey, just do you … and enjoy it.”
While her denials had fallen on deaf ears, by the time Sammy made it to her station, she was grinning like crazy because Kim was right.
Sammy did have it bad.
As Burton walked back up to Talia’s hospital room, he took a detour, walking down the hallway he had taken earlier, to see just what could have been the location of this person he had seen and how could Burton possibly find out if it had been Tim, because, man, it sure seemed like it was.
He walked through the area, noting several security cameras. By the time he walked back up to Talia’s hospital bed, Anderson sat at his sister’s side, holding her hand. “Did she wake up?” he asked her brother.
Anderson shot him a look that was pure joy. “She did, though she didn’t say anything. But she woke up, took one look, smiled at me, and went right back under. She knew who I was.”
“And did you call anybody about it?”
“I did. It just happened, and now she’s back asleep again.”
Burton turned around as footsteps could be heard running along the hallway. He smiled as Sammy raced inside. “She’s already asleep again.”
“Right, and that’s normal,” she shared, with a nod. “But she’s waking up more and more, and that’s a good thing. Maybe next time,” she began, with a look over at Anderson, “she’ll stay awake a little longer. You need to be more patient than ever now.”
“I will.”
“We will,” Burton confirmed, eyeing Anderson. “This is definitely encouraging, and it’s exactly what you said would be the timing of it.”
“Nobody hits those markers perfectly, but that’s even better when we do.” Sammy patted Anderson’s shoulder and turned to leave. She was near the door when she pivoted to Burton, her gaze questioning. “I thought I saw you down a different hallway … again.”
He looked at her in surprise and got up to walk with her into the hallway just outside. “That’s because earlier, I swear to God, I saw Tim.”
She frowned and nodded. “I kind of wondered that too, but a crowd of people were there. I just couldn’t see clearly enough. I hope it wasn’t Tim. That’s the last thing we need here right now.”
“I know, particularly if she’s starting to wake up,” Burton added, keeping his voice down. “We don’t really want him interfering in her progress.”
“No, … God no,” she murmured, with a headshake. Her phone buzzed. “I’ve got to go.” With that, she dashed away again.
Burton rejoined Anderson, and, by the look on his face, Anderson had guessed what they were trying to discreetly share outside of his hearing. Burton sat down beside Anderson on the same side of Talia’s bed. “Any chance we can get access to those security cameras?”
Anderson pulled out his phone and texted Levi. “I updated him on your gunman incident from last night. I didn’t even think about security cameras here in the hospital or even those street cams by Alexandra’s place,” he admitted, “so let’s see if he can do something with that.”
When his phone buzzed a little later, he looked down and smiled. “He’ll check into it and see. They have some clearance but not necessarily enough to get into all the places they need to.”
“I’m surprised they even asked for permission,” Burton quipped, with a smirk.
“I didn’t ask him what he was doing or how he was doing it,” Anderson pointed out.
“Just that we had a suspicion that Tim’s been here today, and we needed to know because, according to the sheriff’s office, he’s still in custody, and that brings us back to whether Tim has a lookalike brother or not. ”
“Right, especially since I did find out that Tim was adopted.”
At that, Anderson stared off into the distance and nodded. “Now that you mention it, I feel like maybe my sister told me. Yet I didn’t remember that—until now.” He groaned.
“And it’s not for you to remember now either. Plus, if these supposed brothers look as much alike as we are beginning to surmise, we need a close-up look at each one to even begin to tell the difference,” Burton replied. “Just chill. Take it easy. We’ll get to the bottom of this.”
“I know. I know,” he muttered, “but it’s just so frustrating. Here we are trying to find out who the boogeyman is every time we turn around, and yet, for all we know, Tim could have three or four brothers.”
“And then the question is, does Tim know? Being adopted, did he ever check into his biological family? Is he connected to them now? Does he work with them now? Has he told Talia about them, and is there anybody else? You know, like his birth father, his birth mother or some parental figure or something?”
“I don’t know.” Anderson shook his head, as he stared down at his sister. “I need her to wake up to help us sort it all out.”
Burton patted his shoulder. “She will wake up, dude. She will.”
Just then, a soft sigh came from Talia’s lips, and she opened her eyes, looked up at one and then the other. There was no surprise in her eyes, just recognition. She grabbed Anderson’s hand as he reached for her.
“Hey,” he whispered.
“Hey,” she whispered back. “Are you home from leave?”
“I am,” he confirmed, his voice very soft and gentle. “Do you know where you are?”
She frowned, her eyes closing. “No, where am I?”
“You’re in the hospital.”
“Oh,” she whispered, as if the news were completely disjointed and disconnected from her brain.
And then she opened her eyes, and the panic hit.
“The girls, where are my girls?” she roared, bolting upright, then trying to get off the bed.
However, when the pain hit, she collapsed back down, literally shaking.
He turned to Burton, who had already reached out to Sammy and told her that Talia was awake and talking.
A commotion of lots of footsteps neared them, as several people ran into the ward. One of them was a doctor. So Burton and Anderson were immediately shooed out, even though they protested and wanted to stay, but that wasn’t happening. All Anderson had time to say was, “She’s in a lot of pain.”
The doctor nodded. “We’ll take care of it,” and the door was shut firmly in their faces.