Winter Lights in Pine Harbor (Pine Harbor #2)

Chapter 1

MAE

‘Fourteen-year-old male, stab wound to the lower abdomen,’ the paramedic informed us as he wheeled the gurney into the ER bay where the team was waiting, alerted by the trauma call from the ambulance en route.

An emergency physician, trauma surgeon, nurses, radiographers; we were all poised and alert, ready to hear the debriefing.

The paramedic who spoke looked tired and bone-weary, as we all tended to do towards the end of a long shift.

His much younger partner moved faster, clearly keen to offload the patient onto us as quickly as possible so he could leave.

He’d done what he could. It was our problem now.

They brought the bitter Chicago cold in with them, on their clothes, in their hair. I could smell the snow.

‘Jesus,’ Matt muttered, hanging a bag of blood in preparation. ‘So young. Look at the lashes on him. He’s like fucking Bambi.’

‘A group of uninvited teens gatecrashed a birthday party,’ the paramedic continued. ‘There are more patients incoming but this kid’s in the worst shape. Went down twice on us on the way here. Managed to get him back both times but he’s lost a lot of blood.’

The lost blood was everywhere it shouldn’t be, soaked through the boy’s shirt, down his legs, all over the gurney.

‘On my count,’ I ordered, briefly taking control. ‘One, two, three.’

Together, we lifted the boy over to the bed, more blood soaking through the white sheet immediately, spreading in a way that would have been beautiful if it wasn’t someone’s literal life bleeding out of them.

‘OK,’ Dr. Alice Salisbury said, taking over. ‘Let’s do a top-to-toe, make sure there are no other injuries. Matt, we’re going to need more blood. Mae, get me a line in.’

Her words were a formality; I was already doing it.

‘Left arm’s in,’ I told her, less than a minute later.

‘Great. Get me one in the right too.’

‘On it.’

The monitor behind me sounded an alarm.

‘Oxygen stats are dropping,’ Rory warned. ‘Can barely find a pulse. He’s crashing again.’

‘Do we have a name?’ Alice asked in a clipped voice.

‘Theo Miller,’ the paramedic answered. ‘Parents are on the way. It was his brother’s birthday party.’

‘This is going to traumatize his brother for life,’ Matt said. ‘He’ll never celebrate a birthday again. Not to mention it’s Christmas in, like, a month.’

‘Not helpful, Matt,’ Alice barked, shooting him a look before focusing again on the job at hand. ‘Come on, Theo. Keep breathing. You’ve made it this far. I need eyes on the wound, people.’

‘It’s here,’ I told her, as I finished cutting away the boy’s shirt, exposing his chest. Pale and concave with youth. Every rib outlined through skin slick with blood. So much of it.

‘I need suction,’ Alice said. Matt obliged while her fingers investigated the wound, hunting for the source of the bleeding, ready to clamp.

‘His blood pressure is diving,’ Rory warned. ‘We’re losing him.’

‘Start compressions,’ Devin, trauma specialist, ordered.

Rory climbed on the stool and started giving the boy chest compressions. Around me, the room blurred as a team of people fought to save a life.

I squeezed the Ambu bag, breathing for the boy, willing him to live. Matt was right, his eyelashes were long and curled. Beautiful. His skin, dewy with youth, so pale. A light dusting of freckles across his nose and cheeks.

‘He’s bleeding out,’ someone called.

The monitor flatlined.

‘Come on, Theo,’ I whispered, squeezing the bag while he was probed, clamped, compressed, shocked, injected. ‘Come on.’

‘Still no pulse.’

I tuned out the voices and various noises of machines and procedures. Focused on his face only, blurred out the rest. Did my job. Willed him to live.

‘It’s been thirty minutes.’

The finality of the words cut through. Dr. Alice sighed heavily, pulling her bloodied fingers from the boy and carefully rubbing the hair away from her forehead with the back of her hand. ‘Anyone got any ideas?’

Heads shook. Hands withdrew. Faces were somber.

Alice snapped off her gloves. ‘Time of death, zero one thirty-two. Are the family here yet?’

‘In the waiting room.’

‘Give me a few minutes to get cleaned up, then I’ll speak to them.’

Voice trailed away. A curtain was pulled. I was alone with him.

‘I’m so sorry,’ I told him, gently wiping a streak of blood off his cheek, feeling a tear trickle down mine.

People died in front of me every day. It was part of the job.

Something that was drilled into us at training.

If we let every death get to us, we’d be basket cases.

For ten years I’d been able to do my job.

We’d congratulate ourselves for the ones we could save.

Accept the ones we couldn’t. Learn from them, if there were lessons to be learned.

I’d debrief with colleagues if I needed to, then let it go.

But lately, something had changed. I’d been ignoring it, pretending it wasn’t real, that it was fleeting, temporary. Convincing myself that everything was as it should be. But some nights, the faces of the ones we lost had started to haunt me.

This boy, Theo, was around the same age as my nephew, Logan.

Same lanky, long-limbed teenage-boy build.

Painfully young features, cheeks still slightly cubby in contrast with the rest of him.

This was someone’s baby. Someone’s world.

I tried to imagine my sister facing the news Theo’s parents were about to receive but couldn’t.

In a room with glittering Christmas tinsel taped to the walls and a brightly lit six-foot fake tree in the corner, they were about to be told the world as they knew it was over. Would never be the same again.

At the desk outside the cubicle, the trauma phone went off. In the emergency bay next door, on the other side of the curtain, a monitor alarmed. Voices became louder, more urgent. More people were dying. More were coming in.

It would never end.

The curtain rustled and the familiar head of my best friend, Holly, popped around the curtain.

‘Fuck him,’ she said. ‘Honestly, you could do a million times better.’

I blinked at her. ‘What?’

She noticed the dead boy on the bed in front of me. ‘Oh shit, sorry. Are you OK?’

‘Yeah, I’m fine. It’s just… tragic, you know?’

‘He looks young.’

‘Fourteen.’

‘Fourteen?’ She shook her head solemnly. ‘Poor kid.’

I sighed, pulling the sheet up to cover Theo’s face. ‘Distract me. What were you saying when you rudely burst in here?’

She suddenly looked shifty. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘Tell me.’

‘Honestly, it’s nothing important. It can wait. I’ll catch up with you later.’ She closed the curtain and disappeared, but I followed her out.

‘Stop right there, Holly Walsh.’

She froze in her tracks and slowly turned.

‘You know that I know you’re lying, right?’ I told her. ‘So just spit it out. Whatever it is.’

She pulled a face. ‘OK. But first you have to promise me that you won’t spiral when I tell you.’

‘I promise.’

She rolled her eyes. ‘You know that I know when you’re lying too, right?’

I gave her a stern look, the one I usually reserved for drunken frat boys at 3 a.m. on a Saturday night.

She sighed. ‘OK, but maybe you should wait until the end of your shift to check it.’

‘Check what?’

‘Nick’s Instagram. Or don’t. It’s up to you. Depends how much you want to torture yourself.’

I was pulling off my gloves before she’d even finished speaking, tossing them towards the bin, not caring when one missed and hit the floor.

My heart raced as I fumbled inside my pocket for my phone.

Facial recognition took an age to decide that it was indeed me, but once it did I swiped and tapped the little icon, willing myself to be patient while the app loaded and then refreshed itself.

The post was right there, at the top of the page, as if it had been waiting to taunt me.

Nicholas. His face so achingly familiar.

Tanned skin, eyes shining, teeth bright.

His smile wide, as if he were about to launch into full-blown, throaty laughter the moment after the camera clicked.

I knew his laugh so well, could almost hear it.

He was wearing a white short-sleeved shirt, the top couple of buttons undone, exposing his smooth, tanned chest. I stared at it, trying to delay the inevitable.

How many times had I drifted off to sleep with my cheek pressed against that chest?

The gentle beating of his heart my lullaby.

‘We don’t know that they’re together,’ Holly said.

I dragged my eyes across to take in the blond woman standing next to Nicholas in the photograph.

She was nestled into his side, her toned shoulder fitting perfectly underneath the arm that lay casually behind her neck and over her shoulders, pulling her body against his.

His left fingers caressed the bare skin of her upper arm.

She was wearing nothing but a black bikini top, the tiny triangles of fabric revealing more of her breasts than they covered, and she was smiling, staring up at him with an expression I knew all too well.

It was a look of complete and utter adoration.

Whoever she was, she had clearly fallen hard.

‘Yeah we do,’ I said flatly.

‘I bet she’s just some Australian backpacker that he met in a bar and hooked up with. A drunken one-night stand on one of those cheap plastic beach chairs.’

Every word conjured up an image that made me want to gouge my own brain out with a spoon. ‘Is that supposed to make me feel better?’

‘I’m just saying, he’s probably already forgotten her name.’

My eyes searched for a caption beneath the post but there wasn’t one. Just a few emojis: the flag of Thailand, a sun, an ocean wave and a cocktail. Nick had never been one for unnecessary words.

Inside my chest, I felt my heart splinter into a million tiny pieces. ‘I guess that’s it, then.’

‘You promised you wouldn’t spiral.’

‘I’m not spiraling. Does it sound like I’m spiraling?’

Her eyes narrowed. ‘No, actually. And that’s what’s freaking me out. You’re weirdly calm.’

I clicked the button on the side of my phone that plunged the screen back into darkness and slipped it back into my pocket, smiling at her. I felt calm. And to be honest, it was freaking me out too.

‘Seriously,’ she said. ‘I expected tears. Anger. Something.’

‘Six months,’ I told her. ‘Six months I’ve been waiting for him to come to his senses. To realize he’s made a monumentally fucking huge mistake and fly home to beg for my forgiveness. Beg me to take him back.’

She stared at me with the familiar sad look, the one everyone had been giving me ever since Nick had announced out of the blue that he didn’t love me any more, taken a sabbatical from his job as a doctor at the same hospital, and promptly hopped on a plane to backpack around Asia.

‘I know,’ she said. ‘And as much as I hate his guts, as much as it would have killed me to see you back with him, I wanted that too. For your sake.’

‘He’s not coming back, is he?’

She shook her head. ‘I don’t think so.’