bathed in sweat, yet his skin felt cold. The clock in the console read five o’clock.
Since he was already stopped, he decided to check in with Maura.
She answered in a sleepy voice. “I’m not on call.”
“I’m not the hospital.”
“Sean.” A rustle of bedclothes. “Where are you?”
“Derek still hasn’t shown up so I’ve been driving around looking for him and trying to figure out where he is.”
“You are not your brother’s keeper.”
“No. I got stuck with his kids, though.”
“You left them alone?”
“Lily’s with them.”
“Lily.”
“The schoolmarm. Charlie’s teacher.”
“Nobody says schoolmarm anymore.”
“You would if you saw Lily.” Sean wiped his brow with his sleeve. “This has me pretty damned worried.”
“He’s a grown man, Sean.” A yawn elongated her words.
“He took off with his ex-wife yesterday afternoon and they haven’t been seen since.”
“Of course they haven’t. They’re sneaking around and don’t want to be seen. Come home, Sean. I have to go to Portland for a seminar, and I want to see you before I leave.”
He pictured the rumpled bed, her sleep-warm body in her favorite oversize surgical scrubs, her soft hair in disarray.
“I can’t say when I’ll be back,” he said.
“Oh, well. You do what you have to do, I guess.” Another yawn. “Sorry. I had a hellacious shift. Two MIs and an MVA.”
He was quiet, trying to work out the abbreviations. She was in the midst of an emergency-ward rotation and often spoke in jargon.
“Two heart attacks and a multiple-vehicle accident,” she translated for him.
He winced, thinking of Derek. “I better go. I just thought…I’d check in.”
“Wish you were here.” She sighed into the phone.
He thought about the way her hair smelled. “Yeah, me, too. Anyway, I guess I’m going to head over to Crystal’s again. Maybe they’re back.”
“Come home.”
“No. Meet me there.”
“I’m not going to show up at your ex-sister-in-law’s house. I have to go to Portland. I can’t get out of it. Listen, keep me posted, okay?”
“You got it.” He set down the phone and rubbed his damp palms on his thighs. So that had accomplished next to nothing, except to interrupt the sleep of his already sleep-deprived girlfriend.
Funny how she had turned into his girlfriend, literally overnight. When they’d first met in a Portland club, he’d been looking to avoid one more lonely night. It was only the next morning, facing the glare of a rare spring sunrise through the unadorned windows of his apartment, that he’d discovered he wanted more from her.
She was beautiful and smart, a fourth-year medical student with lonely eyes and a low-key, undemanding charm.
He told her so right away, while making her breakfast that morning. He’d felt different around her. She brought out his serious side. For a guy who had once referred to his girlfriend as the nineteenth hole, this was a leap of maturity. “I wish I’d had better manners around you before we slept together,” he’d told her.
He’d set a plate of eggs in front of her, leaning down to place a soft, sincere kiss on her lips. People thought he was lucky with women. Hell, he thought he was lucky with women, but the fact was, he’d never gotten past the lust and excitement to see what lay on the other side. Every once in a while, he wondered about that. “Now that we’ve gotten to know each other,” he’d said to Maura that first morning, “we should do it again.”
He tried to smile at the memory, but he was too tired and worried. And, uninvited, an image of Lily Robinson, thin-lipped and scowling, pushed into his mind. He’d ditched her with the kids and Jane, and she hadn’t even complained. She seemed like an interesting person. Yes, that was the word for her. Interesting, with a lot of unspoken thoughts behind brown eyes made bigger by thick eyeglass lenses. Her compassion for the kids was unmistakable, but that wasn’t what made her so interesting. She was uptight and judgmental, yet he sensed something in her, a peculiar heat she kept trying to snuff out.
Slowly, he pulled back onto the empty road. The headlights illuminated a set of skid marks snaking across both lanes. That was the closest he’d ever come to hitting something, except for the time in college when Derek had driven him out to the coast to hit drives off the scenic overlook. Sean recalled that darkness had fallen on the way home and a raccoon had crossed their path. Derek had creamed it. He’d pulled over and wept.