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With her insides shaking, Chrissie finished checking her patient.
When she left the room, she was sweating.
Yet icy cold inside.
If only she’d told me. For her not to have...was selfish.
Was that a sentiment Trace would someday feel? That she’d been selfish to deprive him of Joss?
It was how she’d feel if she were the one missing their son’s life.
She glanced around the CVICU. For a morning that had started a bit chaotic due to being short-handed, now everything was, for the moment, calm and smooth, thanks to Savannah coming in and covering their short-staffed situation.
With clammy hands, she pulled out her phone, then went into an empty patient room and pulled the sliding glass door closed.
She had to call Alexis, then Trace. Now. She couldn’t wait another minute, couldn’t second-guess herself or let the past, or her baggage, interfere with doing what she knew she had to do.
* * *
Trace had gotten his next assignment with DAW. He’d start out in Africa again for at least six months. Unfortunately, he wouldn’t be leaving for almost three weeks and that had him restless. He was ready to get back to work.
He’d met Bud and Agnes for lunch at a downtown Atlanta restaurant to spend some time with them prior to leaving. A week had passed since the fund-raiser event and he’d not seen them since. Bud always took Agnes on a mini-vacation the week after the event and they’d just gotten home the day before.
He enjoyed listening to the details of their cruise. Years ago, he’d met them on a regular basis for lunch and realized as he sat across from them how much he missed doing so.
“Have you talked to Chrissie?”
Agnes’s question caught him off guard.
“We made no plans to stay in touch. You know that.”
The older woman looked at her husband and shook her head. “Young people these days are
so blind to what’s right in front of them.”
Bud smiled indulgently at his wife. “What’s that, honey?”
“Don’t tell me you didn’t see what I saw at the event, because I know better.”
Bud patted her hand. “Agnes, if the boy says he doesn’t want to stay in touch with the girl then he doesn’t want to stay in touch with her.”
“No, that’s not what that means, Bud. It means he’s not smart enough to go after her.”
“Agnes, I leave in a couple of weeks,” he reminded her. “Even if I wanted to go after Chrissie, what would be the point?”
An aha! look brightened her face. “Do you want to?”
Good ol’ Agnes. She didn’t beat around the bush.
“No, Agnes, I don’t want to pursue a woman.” Which might not be a hundred percent the truth because he had thought about Chrissie a lot over the past week.
But he always came back to the same conclusion. She’d left without saying goodbye for a reason. Because she’d known, like him, that they had no future together.
He couldn’t justify interfering in her life when he’d be on another continent. What were they supposed to do? Teleconference stay in touch? He wouldn’t do that to her.
“See, I told you there was more between them than met the eye,” Agnes spoke up, nudging her husband, and sending Trace an I-told-you-so look.
“Oh, there was plenty that met the eye,” Bud countered. “But whatever was between them was exactly like the boy said, between him and the girl.”
