Page 1 of Wild

Chapter 1

"How long has she been without a pulse?" Erin asks, walking into the ER bay as she finishes pulling on her latex gloves.

"Two, maybe three minutes," answers Joshua, the resident who took the patient when he came in.

The doctor presses her fingers to the boy's neck out of pure need for confirmation. She doesn't know much about him yet; she was just paged. But he doesn't look older than fifteen, and minors always add an extra layer of pressure.

"What happened?" she asks, nodding toward the defibrillator.

The nurse hands her the paddles, and everyone pulls their hands away from the boy's body as Dr. Dooley moves to place them on his chest.

"Bicycle accident," Joshua says as Erin prepares for the first shock. "He clipped a cab and went down hard—cracked his head on the curb."

"Charge to two hundred."

The boy's body lifts off the gurney with the shock, and Joshua flinches, stepping back as if the current might reach him. Erin catches it out of the corner of her eye. The kid has potential, but she's always thought he's too soft for this kind of work.

Ten minutes later, the doctor walks out of the bay after stabilizing him and ordering a transfer to the ICU. She strips off her gloves, tightens the tie holding her thick, dark, wavy hair in a high ponytail, and heads over to talk to the patient's mother. She knows now that the boy's name is Ander, because a second nurse came in with his background the moment his mother arrived.

The woman breaks down when Erin explains her son's condition, and the doctor doesn't pull away when she grabs onto her like they're old friends. There's a knot in Erin's stomach, because there's nothing more she can give her—nothing except this. Growing up without a father, with a mother who worked too much, Erin spent her childhood being a second mom to her little sister—twelve years younger than her—and feeling like she never did enough. That never went away. Now, at thirty-seven, she still hasn't shaken the belief that she's supposed to give without expecting anything back, because that's what she learned, and it's what she always gets from her sister Brooke: nothing at all.

"He's in intensive care now—monitored and stable. Why don't you take a short walk, get some air? I promise he's being watched closely, and they'll come get you the second anything changes."

Ander's mother looks up at her with wide, wet eyes and manages a small smile, because Erin is warm and gentle with the people who need it, and sharp and closed-off with the ones who don't—and this woman needs the first thing, so that's what she gets.

Erin watches her head down the hallway, then turns in the opposite direction toward the locker room. Her shift ended an hour ago; she shouldn't even have been here when they paged her for the emergency. But she never feels any rush to go back to an apartment where no one's waiting for her.

She showers and changes into cargo pants—her favorite, comfortable and practical—and a short-sleeved t-shirt. She grabs her bag and jacket, checks herself in the mirror before heading out. She's pulled her hair into a loose bun now, and her gray eyes look smaller than usual, heavy with sleep. Still, when she steps outside, she walks straight to the café a couple of blocks from the hospital. Doesn't matter if it's days or nights: Erin always stops somewhere before going home, as if she needsto pass through a non-hospital world first, to feel like her life isn't entirely defined by her job.

It's almost eight in the morning when she walks into Vanis and drops into a free table in the corner.

"Night shift?" asks Esteban, the owner, with the wide smile that never fails to brighten her day.

"Yeah. Long and rough," Erin confirms.

"Two donuts, then?" he offers, easy and familiar—he knows her by now, knows she always orders the same thing depending on how the night went: two donuts when she's stressed, one when it was quiet, and just coffee when it was awful, when she lost someone. Those days, her stomach shuts down for hours.

"Chocolate, please."

Esteban brings the coffee and heads back toward the counter while Erin notices the woman at the next table watching her. She doesn't know if it's because she ordered chocolate donuts at eight in the morning or because the woman is simply interested in her—but either way, Erin doesn't care. At this hour, after a brutal night, the only thing she wants is her breakfast. The last thing she wants is to flirt with a woman who can't seem to make up her mind.

"Here you go, enjoy," Esteban says.

She gives him a smile and eats the first donut in about three bites. She takes her time with the second, and when she's done, she drains the rest of her coffee in one go, stands up, leaves a bill on the table, says goodbye to Esteban, and walks out.

She gets back to her apartment feeling wrecked. When she closes the door and looks around the empty space, she thinks again—like every time—that maybe getting a cat, the way Barry keeps telling her to (Barry, her partner on the ambulance when she works private events), wouldn't be such a bad idea. But then she reminds herself that she's barely home. When she doesn'thave a shift, she picks up extra work specifically to avoid being here, so the poor thing would be alone all day.

She drops her bag on the hook by the door and walks across the dark gray tile toward her bedroom, where she left the bed perfectly made before she left—not a single wrinkle—and grabs comfortable clothes for after her shower.

Once she's cleaned up and changed, she settles into the living room, because if she goes straight to bed she can't sleep. She needs something to clear her head first. So she curls onto the chaise longue, legs folded until her heels nearly touch the back of her thighs, and picks up where she left off in her book—reads until sleep starts pulling at her.

She's barely gotten through the first line when her phone goes off and Brooke's name lights up the screen.

"Hey, Brooke," Erin says, swallowing a yawn.

"Are you home or at the hospital?" her sister asks.

"Home—just got in. I had this really long shift, it was—"