Chapter 11
NATHAN
“And how are you tolerating food at the moment?” Nathan asked as he checked the heart-rate monitor and IV set up around Elizabeth Reynolds’s bed. The older woman smiled at him.
“It’s not bad, Doc,” she said. “My daughter has been making me all kinds of blended soups. She says I need to keep my strength up.”
“Perfect.” Nathan smiled down at her, even though his heart ached.
He had a few patients like Elizabeth on his roster — patients with serious illnesses who were on end-of-life care.
It meant a lot to them, and their families, that they could stay at home for the last days or weeks of their lives instead of being moved to a hospice in a nearby town.
Elizabeth, for instance, got to spend time with her two young grandchildren, her daughter and son-in-law, her younger sister and her brother-in-law.
She slept in her living room in the house she’d lived in all her life instead of in a sterile, clinical room.
This was why Nathan offered end-of-life care, even though it was difficult for him.
He hated not being able to help people. A doctor’s job is to make everyone better, and when he saw patients like Elizabeth, who would never get better, it broke his heart.
That was why he hadn’t wanted Zoe to come.
He knew she’d want to film this, since it was emotional and relatively dramatic, and he couldn’t let anything make the end of Elizabeth’s life harder than it needed to be.
Sooner or later, Zoe would try to interfere, and Nathan would have to deal with that. For now, though, she was standing quietly by one of the walls, her face a little paler than usual.
“Who did you bring with you?” Elizabeth asked. With some effort, she raised her head to look at Zoe then lowered her voice. “Is this someone special?”
“No.” Nathan almost laughed at the ridiculousness of the suggestion that he and Zoe were together. Even though she was charming, beautiful, and intelligent, they were more or less working against each other. Or at least it felt that way. “This is Zoe Devine. She’s my PR manager.”
“Hello there,” Elizabeth called. Zoe pushed off the wall and came over, arranging her face into a warm smile.
“It’s lovely to meet you. I’m Zoe.”
“I’m Elizabeth. I’d shake your hand, but…” Elizabeth smiled, but Nathan knew she was covering for the fact that she was so weak that any movement was a struggle. Zoe seemed to understand, too, because she rested one hand on Elizabeth’s for a moment. “I haven’t seen you around before.”
“I’m only here for a week or two,” Zoe explained. Her face was still pale. “I’m so sorry, Elizabeth, but I need to excuse myself. I need to make a quick call.”
“Of course.” Elizabeth nodded, causing her scarf to slip back and reveal part of her bare scalp. “It was nice to meet you.”
Zoe nodded and turned to leave. As she passed him, Nathan caught a glimpse of her face, and he froze. Her brown eyes were shining with unshed tears, and her posture was slumped. She hadn’t shown any of her feelings to Elizabeth, but she was clearly struggling.
Nathan took a breath to steady himself. He wanted to make sure Zoe was okay — he knew how difficult being around dying people could be. As always, though, his patient came first, so he turned back to Elizabeth.
“She’s pretty,” Elizabeth said. “If a little overdressed.” Zoe’s pencil skirt and neutral-colored blouse were a little at odds with the cozy home.
“Hmm.” Nathan took Elizabeth’s wrist to feel her pulse.
“You don’t think she’s pretty, Doc?”
He smiled. “Of course she is, but we work together.” At least for now they did. Later, he was going to have a tough discussion with her about the end of their collaboration — but not until he’d made sure she was okay.
“You know, my Barry and I met at work,” Elizabeth said. She stifled a yawn. “We were both teachers, working together. And we spent forty wonderful years side by side.”
“I know.” Nathan squeezed her hand. “All your vitals look okay. How’s your pain? Do you need a higher dose of your medicine?”
“Maybe just a little.”
Nathan got her set up with the right medication, helped her adjust her pillows, and asked a few more questions.
Just as he was wrapping up, Elizabeth’s daughter arrived with her kids, and the room was full of laughter as Elizabeth’s eight-year-old grandson climbed onto the bed to show her a picture he’d drawn that day.
Nathan smiled at the heartwarming scene before bidding Elizabeth goodbye and slipping out.
Once he was outside, he looked around for Zoe.
He half-expected her to be sitting in the truck, but she wasn’t there.
After a minute, he spotted her sitting on a bench on the far side of the overgrown garden, listlessly pulling petals off a flower.
Her gaze was fixed straight ahead, and tears slipped from her eyes, though she barely seemed to notice them.
Her hair was escaping from her bun to fall in curly strands around her face.
In the fading sunlight, she looked both sad and lovely, and Nathan’s view of her shifted.
She didn’t look like the consummate professional he’d met before. She looked vulnerable. Real.
Nathan crossed the yard to sit beside her on the bench. She looked at him, her eyes still shining.
“Are you okay?” Nathan asked.
“I’m fine.” She picked at the flower in her hands again.
Nathan let out a little sigh. She was clearly not fine. “I know being around patients on end-of-life care is difficult. I’m sorry you had to see that.”
Zoe gave a choked little laugh. “It’s not my first time seeing end-of-life care.”
Nathan paused, his mind racing. “Did you lose someone?”
“I…” Zoe shook her head, wiping fiercely at the tears that still shone on her cheeks. “It doesn’t matter. We should get back to town. You wanted to talk about the show, right?” She stood abruptly.
Nathan reached for her hand and gently tugged her back down onto the bench. Her hand was small and cold in his, despite the warm day, and he didn’t let go.
“It does matter,” he said firmly. “It matters to me.”
She lifted her free hand to rub across her collarbone and took a deep breath. For a few minutes, they sat in silence, the warm June evening punctuated by the trilling songs of birds. Nathan thought she might refuse to speak, but after a while, she began.
“It was my mother.”
The single sentence hit Nathan in the gut. He squeezed her hand. It should have felt unnatural, holding the hand of a woman he’d spent the last week locked in combat with over every little thing, but it felt right somehow.
“What happened?” he asked.
“When I was eight, my mother was diagnosed with lung cancer.” Zoe shook her head, sending a few more strands springing free of her bun.
“Lung cancer! She’d never smoked a cigarette in her life, but there it was.
Stage three. They said she had months, maybe years, but in the end, it was only weeks.
” Her voice broke. “We brought her home, my dad and I. Once we knew it was too late. Set up a bed in the living room. Watched silly rom-coms and talked and just sat with her while she slept. Watched her grow weaker and weaker.”
Nathan was overwhelmed with sympathy for the woman beside him. It was all too easy to imagine her as an eight-year-old, sitting on her mother’s hospital bed, struggling with feelings that were far too big for anyone to handle, especially a child.
“I’m so sorry,” he said, squeezing her hand again.
“No, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have run off.” Zoe rubbed at her collarbone again with her free hand. “It was a long time ago, but seeing Elizabeth in the hospital bed with all those machines and her scarf brought it all back. I felt like I was there again.”
“I know.” Nathan bit his lip. Even though it had been a few years, he remembered sitting at his father’s bedside as though it were yesterday.
He would always remember holding his hand, feeling his papery skin, listening to the beep of the monitors.
“I lost my father. Heart attack. Sometimes, it feels like I’ll always be stuck in that moment of sitting by his bedside, unable to help. ”
Zoe lifted her brown eyes to his, her hand falling to her lap. There was something there, behind her careful expressions and perfectly done hair, a real spark of understanding.
“Exactly,” she breathed. “No one really knows unless they’ve been there.” She glanced back at the house. “How long does she have?”
“Not long,” Nathan said. He squeezed her hand again. “What was your mother like?”
Zoe smiled, a ghost of warmth. “She was wonderful. So full of life. Every day, it was like she was trying to enjoy every single moment life had to offer, whether that meant ice cream after school on our walk home or dancing while she cleaned the kitchen. After she was gone, that gave me some peace, because I knew she’d never let a single moment of her life go to waste.
That’s why I try never to let my life go to waste, either.
She told me to chase my dreams and do whatever it took to build the life I wanted, so I do. Every day.”
“I see that,” Nathan said, and Zoe gave a wry smile.
“I suppose it isn’t always easy on the people around me. I can be a little… intense.”
Though it was definitely true, Nathan shook his head. “Intense? You? Never.”
Zoe laughed at that, a hesitant sound that gave away how close she still was to tears. “Thanks.”
“Do you look like her?” Nathan asked. Zoe smoothed her free hand over her pulled-back hair.
“Sort of. We had the same hair, though she always wore hers down, and the same teeth.” She smiled.
“Teeth?” Nathan grinned.
“Teeth. We both needed braces when we were younger.” Zoe flashed her now-perfect, white-toothed smile. “But she wore glasses, which I don’t, and she was a little shorter than I am. I think. It’s hard to know — I was still growing when she…” Her smile faded and she bit her lip.
“I know.” Nathan stood, pulling her up with him.
After a split second’s hesitation, he folded her into a hug.
She felt soft and warm in his arms, and she smelled a little like roses, a soft, feminine scent he wouldn’t have expected from the tough woman he’d gotten to know over the last few days.
Her head fitted perfectly into the hollow of his shoulder, and her hands were soft and hesitant against his back, brushing his shoulder blades as lightly as butterflies.
Nathan’s heart gave an unexpected lurch, and he released her, meeting her eyes.
“The thing is, as much as we might feel trapped in the past sometimes, we’re not there anymore. Come on. We’re going somewhere.”
“Another home visit?”
“No.” Nathan smiled. “Somewhere I think you’ll like. We both need a little break from work.”
An hour ago, he’d been ready to tell Zoe to leave Islingburn, and him, alone.
Maybe tomorrow that would still be the right thing to do — after all, they’d had more than a few professional clashes.
But the woman in front of him now, the insightful, vulnerable woman he felt he’d only just met, was someone he didn’t want to say goodbye to yet.
He wanted to comfort her in any way he could.
He wanted to remind her that life went on.
Nathan understood Zoe better now. The drive she felt came from losing her mother at such a young age, which he could understand.
Nathan, too, was driven to do the best he could, always, after losing his father.
There was more to Zoe than a dedicated PR professional.
Maybe he could show her that there was more to him than a stick-in-the-mud, old-fashioned, small-town doctor, too.