Chapter 7
Chapter Seven
No shit it’s hard…If it were easy, any miserable bitch would be doing it too.
Boss the fuck up, dammit.
—From Remy’s Badass Bitch Affirmations jar
Remy
Remy checked her reflection in the rearview mirror, cringing at what she saw. She’d tossed and turned all night, battling a headache from too little food and too much wine.
But those were just convenient scapegoats.
The real blame lay with a certain ridiculously attractive movie star.
It was beyond out of character, as well as patently immature of her, to be so fixated on a man—much less one who went through insanely gorgeous younger women like some people went through tissues. Use ‘em, dispose of ‘em, get another.
So why was she so damn preoccupied with Sebastian Wheatley? Between the wine, the headache, and him, she’d barely slept three hours.
“Fucking get it together, Remy. You have people who need you.” As always, speaking aloud to herself helped shake her out of her abstraction.
Running a hand through her poker-straight long bob, Remy noted she was due to touch up her roots.
She didn’t have much gray, but was vain enough to want the threads that were present routinely covered.
Frowning in the harsh glare of the morning sun and the visor light, she contemplated slapping on more of her foundation—the only makeup she generally wore, and even that had been a more recent concession to age.
She fingered her bag, where she kept a compact and flavored lip balm.
Screw it.
The dark circles of sleepless nights were getting harder to cover as she aged.
She wondered if part of that was hereditary, as well as her early menopause.
No way to ever know. Her mother was barely thirty-five when she died, and Remy had never met her grandmother.
Likely, that ogre was long gone, but Remy had never bothered to search for an obituary online.
That woman had been disdainful when her unmarried, seventeen-year-old daughter began a relationship with a guy from the wrong side of the tracks.
And when Remy’s mother got knocked up? Dearest Granny immediately threatened to disown her if she kept the baby.
And so it came to be. Remy grew up with just her useless mother and her pathetic excuse for a father.
No siblings. No cousins. No aunts, uncles, or extended family.
Just a drug-addicted, violent sperm donor and an alcoholic mother who was too busy being her partner’s punching bag and then dramatically forgiving him—repeat ad nauseum—to be much of a presence in Remy’s life.
Forget caring for her and nurturing her and loving her.
Mostly they ignored her, often leaving her alone in the shabby, rodent- and roach-infested apartment they shared. Yay for quality genes.
Her father had never hit Remy. But he was still every inch an abusive parent.
From her earliest memories of him until the day he died when she was fifteen, he used nasty, hurtful words as cudgels—leaving interior damage that took much longer to heal than a broken bone.
He reserved his fists, and sometimes his kicks, for her mother.
Don Torres would get high on crack, drunk on cheap alcohol that he’d probably stolen, and then take his rage out on the woman he never bothered to marry.
Several times, her mother—usually at the behest of cops or social services—accepted a placement at a nearby shelter.
When she was young, Remy was consumed with guilt.
Those times when Don was particularly violent were horrific, but they also meant one or two weeks in the shelter.
Maybe a few days more. Where Remy would have a decent mattress, sheets on the bed, and a bland but sufficient meal to fill her stomach. Peace to do her homework.
Shelters were her safe harbor and salvation. And every time her mother left to return to one of their revolving doors of revolting apartments, declaring that her man had changed, Remy withered a little inside.
It was only through the grace of the various shelter employees and volunteers, along with one very special family who finally filled a gaping hole in Remy’s life, that she survived to adulthood.
Only to invite into her own life the mistakes of the past.
Her phone chimed. Brinder—calling on a weekend. Experience told her that was generally not a harbinger of happy news.
“Brinder. What can I do for you?” She kept the wariness out of her voice, striving for the cool professionalism warranted by a Saturday call from the boss.
“Hey. You at the shelter?” Brinder was aware of her volunteer work, but not the reason behind it.
“Yes, just got here. What’s going on? Everything ok with the baby?”
“Yep, he’s fine. Judah’s currently sound asleep in his uncle’s arm, his little belly full and tight like a drum.”
His uncle. Bash.
A shiver raced down her spine as she pictured his stupidly handsome face. Shit. This mild obsession with him was ludicrous. Bash Wheatley wasn’t even around and he was causing an ache in places that hadn’t reacted like that in a long time.
She’d even had to break out her vibrator last night—pissed that it needed a charge. While she waited, she’d had one more glass of wine, finishing that second bottle.
And the orgasm she’d had, picturing him rising above her and pounding into her over and over? Off the fucking charts.
“Remy?” Brinder’s concerned tone interrupted her reverie.
“Sorry. Just distracted this morning. What’s going on?”
“I’m the administrator on call this weekend and I just heard some news I thought you might want to know.”
Brinder’s somber tone grounded her in reality. Definitely not a social call. Remy braced herself for bad news. “Ok. What’s that?”
“Your patient passed away. The seventy-two-year-old hip patient who’d been admitted to the ICU yesterday.”
Remy’s heart sank. “Oh. Wow. Ok. Shit. What happened?”
“Cardiac arrest. They tried to revive him, and were successful twice, but he coded.”
“Dammit. He passed the cardiac workup, Brinder. Flying colors. He likes—liked—to hike with his daughter and grandsons, for fuck’s sake. He was in better shape than people twenty years younger.” A tear snaked down her cheek, and she dashed it away with the back of her hand.
“I’m sorry, Remy. I know you really connected with him. His daughter pleaded with the charge nurse to call you. He wasn’t sure what to do, so he called me. And I knew you’d want to know.”
Remy closed her eyes and pressed the back of her head to the headrest. “Thank you,” she choked out, unsure why she was taking it so hard. She’d lost patients before, though it was a rare occurrence in her specialty, largely confined to ortho trauma patients with other bodily damage.
She sniffed back her running nose. “Do you have his daughter’s cell?”
“I do.” Sympathy tinged Brinder’s tone. “I’ll text it to you.”
“Thanks, Brin.” Remy dabbed at her tears, hoping her boss couldn’t tell she’d become emotional. “I’m about to head into the shelter, but I’ll call her later. I’ll go to the funeral, if there is one.”
“You’re a good woman and an amazing doctor, Arabella Remington.”
Remy smiled sadly. “You, too, Brinder Desai.”
She disconnected the call. Fuck. Remy blotted more tears, inhaling shaky breaths.
No matter how many times she came to the shelter, and it had been at least thirty in the last year, she got emotional.
Add to that her sorrow over her patient, and if she didn’t pull herself together, she’d probably end up in a soggy puddle of pathetic sadness, one of the other volunteers sopping up her tears with a pile of tissues.
Sighing, she steeled herself for her shift.
Every week—unless she was at the hospital—Remy volunteered at this tiny shelter just outside Charlottesville.
She’d also earmarked a portion of her paychecks for charitable donations to St. Dymphna’s.
It was the least she could do, and she always wished she could do more.
The area surrounding St. D’s was impoverished, the nearby buildings dilapidated and in poor repair.
But the shelter, its brick edifice painted a crisp white, represented a visible shift.
A visual and literal oasis amidst harsh realities.
Yes, the building had seen better days. The plumbing was going up.
They had occasional sewage line issues. Sometimes the HVAC just gave up and gave out.
But, for the women and children who desperately needed it, St. Dymphna’s was a sanctuary of peace.
A bridge to healing and, sometimes, a fresh start.
It was the type of place where Remy knew she could make a difference.
Because every time she walked in, she recognized the faces she saw there as a reflection of her mother’s. And her own.
Moreover, Remy had a debt to pay. A long time ago, she swore a final pledge of honor to Etta Remington that she’d do everything in her power to pay forward the saving love of the Remingtons.
And she would never let Etta down again.