much blood, all I could do was hold her hand and tell her it would be okay. Which in my heart, even at that age, I knew it wouldn’t. I knew there was no way this would ever be okay and I just knew that this moment was going to change everything.”
“Is she alright now?”
“She is.” He smiled. “And actually, despite how terrible the incident was, everything worked out the way it was meant to, I guess you could say.”
“I didn’t know you had another sister, other than Sindi,” I said.
Noah turned and looked at me. It was the first time he’d looked at me since he’d begun his story. “I don’t. My other sister died that day.”
I inhaled, and tears stung my eyes. “I’m so sorry. Your mom and dad must have been devastated. And you.”
He looked back to the road. “They were. When we finally got my mom to the hospital, they were able to save her, but not the baby. She had to be rushed into emergency surgery, but there was nothing they could do . . . she had to have a hysterectomy. Severe obstetric hemorrhage.”
I reached over and put my hand on his shoulder. “I’m so sorry that happened to you.”
“I am too. And I’m also not.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, two things came out of that moment. The first one was me realizing that all I wanted to do when I grew up was help people like that. I wanted to be that man who had scooped me up in his arms and carried me into the ambulance and held my hand and told me not to be afraid. I knew that I wanted to do that for someone one day,”
“You did for me. You were the only thing, the only voice, the only hand that made me feel better.”
“I’m glad.”
“And what was the other thing?” I asked.
“Sindi,” he said. “Because my mom could no longer have biological children, my parents adopted Sindi. And it’s weird, you know. The moment she came into our lives we all knew she was meant to be in our family. She was already one year old and had been waiting for an entire year for a family. Just waiting for us to find her. And if you ask my mom today, she’ll tell you that Maggie—that was going to be my biological sister’s name—however much she was wanted and is missed, just wasn’t meant to be. Because Sindi was meant to be in our family. She was the sister and daughter we had all been waiting for.”
Tears made my chest tight. The first one fell and I wiped it away with my fingers and looked down at the wet tips.
“So, you can’t say that things that have happened in the past are worth forgetting. Or regrettable. Because they just can’t be.”
“Thanks for telling me that,” I said. No one had spoken to me like that before and I realized how much I wanted this. A real human connection. A connection beyond the cards. “I don’t think anyone has ever told me something so personal.”
“I find that hard to believe. You’re so easy to talk to. People must talk to you all the time.”
I hung my head. “I worked at that company for seven years, and no one knew who I was. I was, quite patently, invisible. I don’t think I’ve had a single conversation with any of them in seven years.”
Noah turned again and gave me that smile. A dazzling bloody smile it was. “Well, now you have someone to talk to.”
I felt that little rush of warmth in my body again. “You’re so nice. That’s why you make such a brilliant paramedic. You get people. Even if I don’t get myself.”
“I’ve actually been feeling these past few years that it’s not enough for me anymore, being a paramedic. When you’re a paramedic, you only help people for a short period of time. You get them to where they need to be and then leave. You don’t get to watch them on their journey of recovery, and that’s why I want to go to nursing school. A few of my colleagues have been teasing me for wanting to go into such a female-dominated profession, but I don’t care. Besides, I’m not afraid to admit that I’m not academic enough to become a doctor. Nurse it is. I just want to do more for the patient. I want my journey with them not to end at an emergency room.”