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Donovan had been unconscious for three whole days and counting.
Sasha stayed at his bedside, leaving only when the nurses kicked her out at night. Then she went home and paced and worried until she could go back the next morning. She took comfort in the fact that his doctors hadn’t seen the need to transfer him to a bigger trauma hospital.
On the afternoon of the third day, Zak and Anna stopped by. They both looked exhausted, but their concern for her when they stepped into the room was palpable. What did that say about how she looked?
“Hey, Sash,” Anna said gently and squeezed her shoulder. “When was the last time you ate?”
When she didn’t answer right away—because she honestly couldn’t remember—Anna pulled on her hand. “C’mon. Let’s go get some fries.”
“Oh. I don’t know—”
“Zak will stay with him.” She sent a meaningful look at her husband, and Zak nodded.
“Yeah, I’ll hang out and chat with him.”
Still, she hesitated. “What if—”
“If he wakes up,” Zak added, “you’ll be the first to know. Go on.”
Down in the cafeteria, Sasha picked a salad over fries but regretted it instantly. The lettuce was wilted, and there was only one sad cherry tomato on top. She poked at it with her fork. Maybe if she doused it in ranch dressing, it wouldn’t be so bad. “Is the fire still burning?”
Anna took a sip of her milkshake and sat back in her seat with a heavy sigh. “Yeah. The whole mountain is on fire. They estimate it’s at fourteen thousand acres now and still growing, but it’s burning east, so they don’t think the town is in danger. At least not yet. I hate that this fire carries my family’s name. The Double R Fire. For Rawlings Ranch. Zak says it’s because they’re named for where they’re first reported, but it sucks. Why couldn’t they have called it… I don’t know… the Hella Hot Fire or the Smokin’ Squirrels Scorch? Honestly, anything would be better than slapping my family’s name on it.”
Anna often rambled when she was upset, and she had every right in the world to her anger and sadness right now, so Sasha just rolled with it. “What about The Humboldt Heatwave?”
“Oh, that’s a good one. The Trinity Toaster.”
“The Shasta Sizzler?”
“That sounds like a burger.” Her lower lip trembled, and tears spilled over. “Oh. My kitchen. I’ll never make dinner there again. I loved my kitchen.”
Sasha’s heart ached for her best friend. She’d lost the clinic she’d spent her whole life working toward, and it felt like she’d lost a limb. She couldn’t even imagine how it must feel to lose everything you owned. “I know, sweetie. I’m so sorry. Is anything salvageable?”
“No.” Anna pulled her straw out of her milkshake and jabbed it back in. “It’s all gone. The barn, your clinic, my parents’ house. All of my pictures. Our daughter’s grave….” Her voice cracked, and she trailed off.
Sasha reached for her hand. “Are you okay?”
Anna sniffled and swiped at her eyes with the backs of her hands. “I don’t know. I was considering selling the land to Monarch—”
“No, you can’t! It’s all insured, and we’ll rebuild, bigger and better than before. It’s not like we didn’t need new facilities anyway. That’s why we were renovating in the first place. Now we’ll be able to build to our exact specifications. We can make my clinic bigger, expand the training facility, and give Zak’s team their own space.”
Anna sighed. “Logically, I know all of that. But the amount of work it’ll take… it’s daunting. And what about you? You can’t go months without working while we rebuild. You’ll lose all your patients.”
“Don’t worry about me. Dr. Richards said I could work out of his practice in town until I have my own clinic again. He’s cut way back on his hours in preparation for retirement and never hired another vet after I left, so my old office is even still available. It’ll be okay.” She squeezed Anna’s hand. “We’ll get through this. You don’t have to sell.”
“I know. And I wouldn’t. I don’t know why I even said that. This land has been in my family since the Gold Rush, and I’m not giving it to some corporation to develop into hotels and condos that will price people out of town. I just spiraled for a couple of days, but then Zak reminded me this morning that we didn’t lose everything. We still have Bella and Poppy and both of our dogs. We’re so lucky they were at his parents’ house that night. And we’re lucky we decided to stay there after the fundraiser instead of going home. We could’ve slept right through it, and then we would’ve orphaned the girls again.”
A chill scraped down Sasha’s spine. “Oh, don’t say that.”
“But it’s true. We were so lucky. And we’re lucky that Zak’s brother digitized the pictures of our daughter, so we at least still have those. We’re even lucky that we’ve been doing those damn renovations, so we didn’t have a full house at the rescue. And, thanks to Donovan, the dogs that were there are safe.”
Now Sasha’s eyes flooded with tears. “He ran in there without a second thought to his own safety. He was so determined to get to Spirit and the others. It was incredibly brave.”
Anna scowled. “And incredibly stupid.”
“Would you rather he not have gone in for the dogs?” Wow, where had that surge of defensive protectiveness come from? Anna was right. It had been stupid and risky. She even had the exact same thought as she paced in front of the barn and watched it burn with Donovan inside. She’d cursed him and feared for him and told herself if he lived through it, she’d never sleep with him again. She didn’t need his kind of danger in her life.
So why did she feel the need to defend him now?
