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“What’s your name?” he pushed.
I licked my lips, not wanting to say a word, but my mouth opened on its own accord, and words started to pour out before I could stop them.
“Pru Ember Mackenzie,” I answered.
He took my hand that I’d seemingly held out for him to shake and smiled. “Nice to meet you, Pru.”
I felt the edges of my lips turn up in a small smile.
“I…”
“MVA, Pru!” Dwight, the doctor that was working with us tonight, yelled. “Multiple injuries. One is a stick shift through a little girl’s chest.”
I felt something inside of my gut clench, and then adrenaline started to course through my body. All the while the man—Hoax—still held my hand.
I swallowed but didn’t pull away, and he noticed.
Eventually, once we could hear the first sounds of sirens, he let me go and said, “Until next time, Pru.”
Then he was gone, and I was left more confused than ever.
I wanted him to leave, right?Chapter 3I just wanted some leggings. Unfortunately, I think I might’ve joined a cult when I purchased them.
-Pru’s Secret thoughts
Pru
I walked into my parents’ house and groaned at the smell of the cookies that were baking in the oven.
“Oh, God,” I moaned as I followed the smell. “Please tell me you have more than enough for me.”
My dad, who was sitting on the bar stool next to the counter, grinned at me as I made my way into the kitchen.
I walked straight to him and wrapped my arms around his large, muscular chest.
“Bad day at work, baby?” he asked me.
His chest rumbled with his words, and I closed my eyes as I thought about how awful my day had been.
Well, not all of it. Just most of it.
“Mom yelled at me when I told her we needed to change the code to the ER,” I mumbled. “And that was only the best part. The worst part is that a motor vehicle accident came in and not one, not two, but three children were unrestrained in the car doing the shitty driving. The mom was drunk off her ass and hit a parked car. Two kids were ejected. The one that wasn’t was only held inside by the stick shift impaling her in the left abdomen. They’re all in really bad shape.”
My dad’s arms around me tightened. “Bad day.”
Seriously. Bad day didn’t even begin to cover it.
“I made cookies for your mother, but if she’s going to yell at my baby, then maybe you should eat hers,” Dad suggested.
“I heard that.” My mother, my spitting image, walked through the door off the side of the kitchen that led to their bedroom, and straight to the bottle of Dr. Pepper that was sitting on the counter. She spared me a glare and drank. Once she’d finished, she turned to me. “I also didn’t yell at her. I explained why we didn’t change the code to the ER. Which she argued with me in front of the entire ER. It’s not my fault that I got pissed. She’s supposed to treat me like her boss at work, not her mother.”
“You’re both,” I argued. “And you know it’s a good idea.”
She growled in frustration. “I do know it’s a good idea! I’ve brought it up to the freakin’ hospital board multiple times, yet they still haven’t quite figured out how to pull their heads out of their asses. They argued about what the code should be changed to, who should have access to the code, where the code would be stored and how much money it was going to cost them to change it. At the end of the day, the goddamn code never gets changed.”
“Maybe you should tell ol’ Fat Bastard that he needs to stop fucking himself with his thumbs and make that hospital safe for y’all,” my dad muttered. “Jesus, I hate that guy.”
‘That guy’ was actually the board director, Kelley Lowe. And Kelley Lowe wasn’t fat. He was actually quite skinny—well, fit was more the word I was looking for. He definitely wasn’t a ‘fat bastard’ though my dad liked to call him that because he talked like the guy from Austin Powers and made my dad think of him every single time he opened his mouth.
I tended to agree, but this was one argument I definitely wasn’t going to get into the middle of. Especially seeing as if we gave him any attention at all, my dad would go off on a tangent.
Apparently, when the hospital my mom and I were working for merged with a different hospital a few years before my tenure there, my mother almost lost her job because she was very vocal about the lack of safety in the hospital itself. Then, she’d been a charge nurse just like me, and hadn’t had the reach. But, when I took over her job for her, and she moved up to the director of the ER, she slowly started to implement new protocols. Kelley, the douche canoe, didn’t like that she was taking initiative. He also didn’t like her, my father, or me.
