Page 24 of Accidental Doctor Daddy

I posted on some Chicago message boards, hoping to find out more. Thankfully, people were quick to answer, and I stayed up all night learning what I could. My mere questions became the groundwork for relocation.

For a few days, I reached out discreetly to connections and explored job openings for a chef in the city. It would be a fresh start, a simpler life for my child, away from the shadows of the Mortoli men and the complexities of New York’s culinary scene.

I would do right by them, and I’d do it on my own.

Even if it meant never telling him.

Even if it meant breaking my own heart to protect theirs.

Chapter 8

Dom

Friday the 13th had a reputation in the ED, and not a good one.

I wasn’t superstitious about most things—broken mirrors, black cats—but this date? It earned my respect. The staff joked about it, but I’d worked enough of them to know they were no joke.

Patients would flood in like clockwork—car crashes, bizarre injuries, and people convinced they were cursed.

Like the guy who’d impaled his thigh on the brittle base of his Christmas tree—the one his wife had been nagging him to put away since January. The wound oozed pine-scented pulp, and it took an hour to dig the splinters out.

Or the woman who got backed over by her own car after hopping out to check her taillights. Somehow, she walked away with a busted foot and a ruined coat.

But ‘thirteen guy’? He took the crown. Thirteenth child, born on a Friday the 13th, married a woman who died on the same date. He came in swearing it was his time. An hour later, he dropped dead in the hallway, like the universe had signed off on the story.

The day came with cases that kept your hands moving before your brain had time to catch up. My shift had been running on black coffee and muscle memory since dawn, and we weren’t even halfway through it. Sometimes, that was the only thing standing between life and death, so our coffee pots ran twenty-four hours a day. The muscle memory only came after years of practice.

It had been a brutal winter in the city, and though the calendar promised spring, no one believed it. The bitter cold still clung to the air alongside snowflakes. I expected plenty of interesting winter Friday the 13th injuries. The snow made physics flexible.

Maybe I need another trip to the tropics.

The thought brought a warmth with it that reminded me of squawking seabirds, sandy shores, a parade to end all parades, and a certain poet chef I’d tucked in the back of my mind. It had been eight months since I’d taken that vacation.

Since I’d met Ella.

I didn’t think about her all the time anymore, but she was never entirely gone, either. She lingered, a memory with sharp edges. The nights I let my guard down, she crept in—her laughter, the way she’d arched against me in the moonlight, the feeling of her fingers tracing patterns over my skin.

Her softness.

I’d caught myself wondering, more than once, if fate would put us back on that island at the same time. Maybe she had gone back. Maybe she was thinking about me, too.

It was a comforting thought, but one tainted by the memory of the morning after. I wondered whether she regretted leaving me like that, or if that was just standard operating procedure for her. Hookup, get out. It was just a vacation fling, after all.

If it was meant to be, we’d see each other again. That’s what I told myself on especially lonely nights. It was easy to feel lonelyin winter when the chill settled into your bed to remind you that you were alone. As if I needed a reminder.

While watching the snowstorm through the window, I got paged. Preterm labor. Twins. Mother in distress.

On any given day, I dealt with all kinds of cases. Grandmother fell down the stairs. A dad with a gunshot wound. Cute kid with a broken arm. Each patient had their sob story, and you try to be as professional, yet empathetic as possible. It’s impossible to turn your humanity off entirely, though.

Preterm labor with a mother in distress was one of those scenarios that, no matter how many times I faced it, I never got numb to it.

Even still, I responded automatically and tried to slip into that controlled headspace where emotion had no place. But I couldn’t quite get there. “Going Vulcan,” my daughter Gina called it. My kids gave me a hard time for having that ability, but I never regretted being able to get to that dull headspace. It had saved my mental health more times than I probably knew.

The jog to the ED bay doors was quick—just down the hall. The paramedics rattled off stats as they wheeled her in through the doors. Blood pressure dropping. Tachycardic. Four or five weeks early.

I moved in to assess the patient. And then?—

Everything inside me seized.

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