of Kennedy and nothing would come of it? Did you forget I was there to watch your entire sleazebag routine?”
The woman in the pantsuit stared, as did the patients sitting in the waiting room. A little boy giggled and his mother covered his ears.
“Kennedy Monroe thought this man was inviting her out for a business meeting,” I said for anyone listening, “but he spent the entire night flirting, even when she stomped on the brakes. I know, because I was there. I watched the whole thing because I knew something smelled off about that situation. And yes, that makes me an asshole, but it makes me her asshole.”
The whole situation had me so upset that I was rambling curse words in a pediatric waiting room.
The receptionist’s jaw dropped, but I didn’t hang around to hear what the horrible woman talking shit about my Penny had to say. After pausing to apologize for my language to some wide-eyed kids and their scowling parents, I was out the door, phone pressed to my ear as I spewed another desperate plea to Kennedy’s voicemail.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Kennedy
My phone started going crazy around noon and it didn’t stop. I didn’t want to talk to Joe. Not yet. Maybe not ever. But I felt his absence like I’d lost a part of myself. I couldn’t catch a breath. The sun seemed less bright. The sky less blue. The world less…well…just less.
I set my phone to silent, but that didn’t stop me from checking it every few minutes like a neurotic idiot. Finally, I decided to leave the thing at home while I went to the store to restock the snack table at the clinic. I needed to get my mind on something that wasn’t Joe Channing. Though, as I finished my fifth lap around the store to pick up items I missed on the last pass, it became obvious he was the only thing I could think about.
Even Dorothy seemed like her volume had been turned down. Her thousand-watt smile didn’t light up the room when I entered with the rattle and grunt of too many bags of groceries on my arms.
“What’s up, Doc?” she asked with so much concern I almost turned right around and walked out of the clinic.
“Not much, my friend. Not much at all.”
And somehow, that seemed to communicate everything.
Dorothy offered me a sad smile and a warm hug, then helped arrange the snacks on the table. When that was done, I had to make peace with the fact that I had no idea what to do with myself until my next shift at the clinic. Without a job to focus on, I had nothing. No friends. No hobbies. It was just me, alone with myself, and a phone full of messages waiting for me at home.
Maybe my priorities had been skewed over the last few years. There had to be more to life than work, right? Maybe I needed to take up knitting. Or reading. Or baking.
“Shane Samuels was here earlier,” Dorothy said. “With his mom.”
I didn’t have it in me to find out Shane’s mom had been lying. And I definitely didn’t have it in me to discover I’d given one more bad person the benefit of the doubt when they didn’t deserve it. Between Ramsey and Joe, my faith in humanity was stretched to the breaking point.
“Everything okay with them?” I crossed my fingers, hoping Dorothy had good news for me.
“Both of them seemed good. He looked clean. Happy. He ate the last apple, then asked me to give this to you.” Dorothy held out a folded piece of paper.
Opening it up, I found a detailed crayon picture. Me in my white coat. Him with a bleeding finger and a hummingbird smile. He’d drawn a heart around us and scribbled “thank you” in the corner. A note in feminine script scrawled at the bottom.
Thank you again for taking care of my son. He keeps saying he wants to be a doctor just like you when he grows up. Maybe he’ll make that better life for himself after all.
Feeling a little revived, I drove around for an hour or so, but without my favorite Collin West playlist to lighten my mood, I finally gave up and took myself back to the apartment I’d been so proud of once upon a time.
The second I walked through the door, I made a beeline for my phone.
Seven missed calls. Seven voicemails. Too many texts to count.
I didn’t trust myself to hear Joe’s voice, so