Page 83 of Drifter’s Heart

Leon looks down at his leg and sighs. “Well, I’m not going⁠—”

“Anywhere.” Keith swallows his roll almost whole and grins. “We’ll be here, Winnie. Go get us goss.”

I stare. “You two are terrible.” I head off past triage, waving to Maisie, who has her head down as she fills in forms. She waves back anyway, her sixth nurse’s sense kicking in as she holds a bag out for her current patient to spew in.

“Good skills.” I nod my appreciation. “Do you know where Tom is?”

The wave turns into a finger point leading up the next hallway. I divert my path and head toward the nurses’ station instead.

“Do you know where—” A trolley rolls past. I flatten myself to the wall and try again as I head to one side of the circular nurse’s station. “Sorry. Do you know where Tom is this morning? I haven’t seen him or his delish chicken sandwiches.”

Demi, roster nurse, makes a face. “I think he’s occupying the toilet. But also, why that man, Winnie? You could have anyone. Not him.”

“I have my ‘anyone,’ thank you,” I say tartly. How have I missed this, that everyone I know dislikes the man I crushed on for a little over a year? Did I have my rose-tinted glasses on for all that time, yet again? My stomach flip-flops a few times as I head toward the bathroom in the hallway and give the door a kick.

It’s Brad all over again. This is how it started with him. My choices are clearly mangled. First, Brad seemed wonderful to me. Then I spent less time with my family. With my parents and Cordell. Then we moved away to a city I didn’t know. I stopped working. Stopped doing what I loved because he wanted all of my hours. Then I stopped having friends. I fell pregnant.

My beautiful baby is the best thing to come out of my marriage to Brad. The only good thing.

Then, once Sally was delivered and my attention shifted to her, the verbal attacks started. The emotional abuse. And that never ever stopped.

Then I walked. Her birth rewired my brain. Even through the fog, I understood that something was wrong. Or at least I tried to leave. But no matter what I did, Brad was the boomerang ex I couldn’t get away from because I needed a place to live. And taking money from Cord? It seemed like such a bad idea then. Because then I’d be beholden to the man who seemed to want to control my daughter. Cord and I hadn’t gotten along for ages at that point. And so I ended up living in Brad’s house, and getting a restraining order away from him.

Ugh. The jigsaw mess I’ve made of my life.

I kick the door again. “Tom? The nurse sent me up here. Someone answer me or else I’m abusing you for not being Tom.” I sip my coffee, retreat to the opposite wall, and wait.

The door opens a few minutes later. Tom emerges, his hands still damp as he wipes them on his scrubs. They tremble the finest amount. His hair is lanky and greasy, and it hangs in thick strands about his face. But it’s his face that shocks me. At least, at first. Then I look closer, and that’s the tip of the iceberg.

Deep, dark circles hang under his eyes set in a too-pale face that has nothing to do with shift work and too many late nights. Okay, so that last part isn’t strictly true, but it’s not everything that’s going on with my ex-crush.

Already high cheekbones are too prominent, gaunt and angular. And when I add all that information into the overload currently processing in my brain? His scrubs hang off him in drapes of loose pink material that weren’t that bad a few weeks ago.

The last time I studied this man properly.

Either my Hottie McNurse got real sick, real fast in the last few weeks, or he’s exerting control over something he shouldn’t be.

“Tom?” I offer my coffee. I know he hasn’t been sick but I ask anyway, “Are you feeling better?”

He looks at me in surprise. “I’m not sick, Winnie.”

Oh. A sense of sadness descends over me as a mothering sense replaces anger. I force a smile I neither believe in nor feel. “No, but I bet you’re both tired and worn out from last night, right? I might have heard. This place, you know? Sorry I wasn’t there. I sent some messages this morning, but I’m not sure how many made it through.”

His shoulders shift under his shirt, little more than bones encased in pink cotton. “Yeah, I missed those. Kinda lost my phone last night after… you know. I didn’t have a great night,” he mutters. His eyes flick up to me in a hard stare that belies his words. Blaming. You weren’t there.

I’ve seen that stare before on another man, a man whom I loved, right before his whole person flipped. My stomach plummets.

“Oh, yeah. That sounds like it sucks,” I reply casually over the incessant beating in my chest cavity that attempts to drown out everything else. I still want to help Tom, but the urge to back away from the sickness in him is strong. I can’t fix him, but maybe I can still do something to help, even if I couldn’t with Brad. “We drove back from my brother’s last night. Crashed afterward, or I might have come out. Where are you playing next?”

His eyes dart along the corridor. “I’m not sure.”

“Really? I thought you had a calendar laid out with all your booked dates set up.” I smile, pretending like him that there’s nothing wrong even when it’s staring at us right in the face. I wonder how long it’ll take him to tell me, but I suspect his denial phase will last for a long, long time. More time than I have.

“Yeah, I did. Listen, Winnie. I gotta get back to work…” Tom drifts toward the nurse’s station, where every one of them watches our interaction from a distance without butting in. Not one of them says a word or comes any closer.

I sip my coffee. “Sure you do.” I pull my phone out and send a message off to Keith. He replies fast enough that he shoots to the top of my friends list for freaking ever.

Done.