Chapter 21
Molly
It's a quiet afternoon in the L&D which is nice after the past couple of shifts. I've checked on my patients, and I'm sitting down to check my phone when Macie has a seat beside me.
"It's nice huh?" She grins over at me. "Especially after the ER situation you had. You deserve a quiet shift or two."
"Yeah, but I don't want to say it out loud," I admit, shaking my head with a laugh, shushing her.
"I know, as soon as we do, there will be something."
Which is why I don't even want to admit it. I don't have a text from Dakota or Levi, so they must be busy today I'm scrolling through my Instagram feed when a post catches my eye. "Macie..."
"What?" She turns to me, her eyes glancing up from her screen.
"Is this you?" I flip my wrist to show her what I'm looking at. It's a picture of Macie dancing at The Lean To, which isn't unusual. We've all gone there and had a great time. I'm more surprised by who she's with.
I watch her face to see her reaction. Recognition washes over her, and she glances up at me. "I had no idea they were taking pictures that night."
I'm slightly amused, and a lot curious. "My biggest question is, do you know that the man you're looking up at with adoration in your eyes is my cousin?"
"Darren is your cousin? He looks nothing like your family."
That's not the first time someone has said that when I've talked about Darren.
"If he tells you all this later, if you two have that kind of relationship, just let him tell you," I start, needing to let her know that I'm not trying to break a confidence.
"He's adopted. My aunt and her husband adopted him and he's been a part of our family since. But, he doesn't look like any of us."
She grins. "I should've know that he would be related to your family. He's cocky as hell, and he walks with the same type of swagger that the men in your family have in spades."
I've heard this more times than I care to count. "Hey, us ladies have some swagger, too. Don't let Ruby or Karina Harrison hear you say that."
"Girl, I would never say that when either one of them were around. You know me better than that."
Crossing my arms over my chest, I give her a mock-glare. "So, what were you doing with my cousin? I think that's the question that you haven't answered yet."
"Mollyyyy," she drags the y in my name out. "I don't even know what to say about him."
"Well I mean try. He's been through the ringer for the past few years.
Just came out of a bad divorce." There's a part of me that's enjoying giving her a hard time, but there's another part of me that wants to make sure she's in this for the right reasons.
There's more than just Darren at stake in this.
There's a little girl who has been hurt just as much as he has, if not more.
Along with us as a family, as we've watched what Darren has had to go through.
Her arm stretches across the desk, and grips the side, almost as if she's trying to hold herself up to the interrogation I'm giving her.
"Molly, I say this in the gentlest way. I'm not sure where Darren and I are going, but we have a lot of fun.
We've not put a label on it, because both of us have been dealing with a lot.
I don't talk about it often, but the last year in my life hasn't been easy either. He makes things a little easier."
And those words are what make me think both she and Darren may be the ones to heal each other from whatever it is their dealing with.
"He does," I agree. "He's always been one of the best men I've known.
A few times he kicked Levi's ass when he was doing things he shouldn't have been doing.
We've always respected him, and I like knowing that he's with someone like you. "
"So do I, Molly. So do I."
All of a sudden we hear a large commotion of sirens, more than we normally do.
"What the fuck?" I ask, hopping up, and running over to the window to look down at the ambulance bay.
There's not only ambulances, but there are cop cars from every agency within our county.
Immediately, I'm nervous. I haven't heard from Levi or Dakota today, and come to think of it, I haven't heard from Dad since the texts we shared this morning.
Normally I don't text my grandfather every day, but with shaking hands, I fire off a text to him, just to be safe.
"That's got to be law enforcement that's hurt," I whisper.
"Come on, let's head down there. Have you heard from Darren today? " I ask as we jog down the stairs.
"Yeah." She pulls her phone out of her pocket. "We talked a little over an hour ago."
The uneasiness in my stomach doesn't go away though, not as we we take the stairs two at a time, down toward the ER. It's a living thing in my stomach, breathing and sinking it's claws into my flesh, tearing it with the fear of what I'm going to find when I get down there.
We burst through the doors to the ER, and I see a stream of first responders.
There are three stretchers coming through the bay, EMT's calling out vitals as they come in.
The first two are people I don't know. They don't look like they're from around here.
They have tattoos on their necks, and they look gang affiliated.
We don't have anything like that around here that I'm aware of.
But it's the third stretcher. That's the one that causes my knees to buckle and a cry to be torn from my chest. My brother is doing chest compressions on our Dad, and my life as I know it? It stops.