Page 1 of Guess Again
Summer 2015
Cherryview, Wisconsin
WHEN HE UNCLASPED THE BUTTON ON HER JEANS, SHE KNEW SHEwould lose her virginity that night.
His aftershave was stronger than she ever remembered. She’d smelled it before, like the first time they kissed in his car. But tonight, in his apartment when he was on top of her with his lips on her neck, it was intoxicating. Hyperaware of every sensation and emotion, she tried to calm herself as she took in his scent. She wasn’t nervous about losing her virginity. She was in love and wanted this badly. Her anxiety came from inexperience, and she worried that whatever the act of sex was supposed to be, she would get it wrong.
She felt his hand slip inside her underwear. The moment intensified when he gently pulled them down. She lifted her hips and was suddenly lying naked on his bed. It was the first time she’d been naked with a man. It was happening. It was real. And she had never been happier in her life.
He pressed his hips against her pelvis and slid inside of her. She inhaled sharply at the shock of it. But the pain was overshadowed by a thought. It dawned on her, as she wrapped her arms around his shoulders, that she should whisper his name into his ear. But she couldn’t. As a star player on the high school volleyball team, all she’d ever called him wasCoach, and to refer to him that way now seemed wildly inappropriate and even more awkward. Instead, she closed her eyes and settled on a soft moan as he pushed himself deeper inside of her.
PART I
Un-Retirement
CHAPTER 1
Madison, Wisconsin Thursday, May 22, 2025
ETHANHALL HAD BEEN THE OLDEST STUDENT IN HIS MEDICALschool class. He was thirty-six when he walked into gross anatomy lab during his first year of med school. Today, he was a forty-five-year-old emergency medicine physician. Although he was without the years of experience other physicians in their forties sported, Ethan was more than competent. He had finished first in his class and could have gone into any specialty. He chose emergency medicine because his previous occupation had conditioned him to chaos, and somewhere along the way bedlam became imprinted in his DNA.
Years earlier he was a special agent with Wisconsin’s Division of Criminal Investigation and in charge of investigating crimes against kids. For a while it was satisfying to put away the subhumans who committed such atrocities. But the job had taken a toll. He saw too much violence directed at society’s most vulnerable. A “win” in his old profession still left a kid dead, a family grieving, and a perp getting three meals a day and a warm pillow at night. During the ten years that he worked for the DCI, he’d lost faith in the human race. He fell so far adrift that he had started to lose touch with the human condition. It had been a decade-long slippery slope and dangerous spiral he needed to escape before the void swallowed him whole. He decided a career change was necessary to keep his sanity. So, he put in his notice and applied to medical school.
Now, as an emergency room physician, he was able to help his patientsbeforethey died. It was a refreshing change, and something his life desperately needed. For the first time in many years, Ethan Hall was a happy man.
He pulled the curtain to the side of ER Room 3 and found his patient sitting in the bedside chair. This was unusual. Patients were typically lying in bed when he entered the room. Also odd was that this patient was not wearing a hospital gown. The thirty-eight-year-old male, according to the chart, sat in the chair wearing a T-shirt, shorts, and flip-flops. Taken together with the man’s long blond hair that nearly reached his shoulders, he could have been on the cover of a surfing magazine. Ethan smiled.
“I’m Dr. Hall.”
“Hey, Doc. Christian Malone.”
“Are you the patient?”
“I am. I just can’t do the whole gown and the bed thing. I mean, unless something was tragically wrong with me. Then it’s fine. But otherwise, it just takes away my dignity and makes me feel like shit.”
“Fair enough,” Ethan said, tapping on the computer keyboard to bring up the man’s file. “You’re having abdominal pain?”
“Iwas. Not anymore. Listen, I don’t want to waste your time. I had a nasty pain in my back, so I came in this morning. Your nurse told me it was a kidney stone. She said the doctor ordered pain meds, shot me up with morphine, and hustled me down to have a CT scan. But just before she gave me the morphine, the pain went away. Like from a ten to a zero in a matter of seconds. She insisted on giving me the morphine anyway because she said the pain had subsided only because I had found a comfortable position. But the pain never came back.”
Ethan pulled up the CT scan on the computer and saw that his patient had a kidney stone sitting in his bladder, indicating that it had already made the painful trek through the ureter.
“Yeah, see? It passed into my bladder,” the man said.
“You a doctor?” Ethan asked.
“No, just a tech guy from California.”
“California? What are you doing in Madison?”
“I escaped Silicon Valley and live here now.”
“Welcome to the Midwest. I’m assuming this isn’t your first kidney stone.”
“Nope. I’ve had two others. Hurts like hell until it gets to the bladder, then I pee it out a couple of days later. I tried to tell the nurse, but she shot me up with morphine anyhow. Gotta admit, the buzz is pretty phenomenal.”
Ethan smiled. Christian Malone, the thirty-eight-year-old Silicon Valley transplant, suddenly sounded like a Californian.
“Did you drive yourself to the ER this morning?”
