We All Sleep Alone (Finley Creek #11) - Calle J. Brookes Page 0,32
done for a very, very long time.
Years. By her calculations, she’d be forty-two by the time the bills were completely paid off. Possibly forty-three if she couldn’t make an extra payment now and then.
That was without paying tuition to finish her degree and licensing. At any time during the next ten years.
Turner had mentioned quietly that she should consider a civil suit against Henedy. Once the criminal trial was over. She might be able to get him to be responsible for the majority of the bills; Turner had said that the Henedys had more than enough to pay for it all.
Izzie didn’t know how long she wanted to drag everything out with Wallace Henedy. She wanted the nightmare to be over.
Then again, signing a check to the hospital every month until she was forty-two was more than she wanted to do, too. After what he’d done to her, he should have to make it right somehow.
Even if that was with money.
Tomorrow, she’d go back to the ER. Where everyone would be staring. Watching her.
Wondering what had happened to make Wallace Henedy try to kill her. Nikkie Jean, Annie, Lacy, and Jillian had kept her up to date on all the rumors.
The most disgusting was that he’d been having an affair with both her and Nikkie Jean. Nikkie Jean had told him to get rid of Izzie. That Nikkie Jean had provided her own father’s gun to make it happen.
Revolting through and through.
Another tabloid stated that Izzie was his illegitimate child and his wife had ordered her killed. Yet another stated that she was Jennifer Henedy’s illegitimate daughter—the hair and eyes were the main evidence, apparently—and she had given Izzie up for adoption. Jake had adopted her, apparently, but they kept it secret so the Italian mob wouldn’t find out. When she’d been an infant. Never mind that Jake had been all of eleven and living in Italy when she’d been born.
The more idiotic members of the staff speculated that Wallace had shot her out of jealousy because Jake was involved with Henedy’s wife.
FCGH could really be a soap opera.
Dr. Henedy had walked in, raised the gun, and fired. That was it.
No one knew more than that. According to the prosecutor, Wallace wasn’t saying anything else—other than grief had made him insensible for a time.
She gave a frustrated growl and flopped over on her bed again. Her chest still twinged. Mel, who’d had her own brush with a .38 bullet a few years ago, had told her that it probably always would. That it got a little easier. Mel had sought her out to make certain Izzie knew that counseling helped. It had helped Mel, who had been left partially paralyzed.
Some of Izzie’s flesh had been destroyed. Muscles and nerves ripped in two. Scars would always be a reminder of what happened.
She had eight visible scars. The bullet holes and the scars where Cage and Virat had shoved tubes or scalpels into her body to keep her alive and breathing.
One hand went to the worst of the scars. The wound that had almost killed her.
If she could just figure out why.
Maybe she wouldn’t still feel like she was in stasis, wondering.
She’d get back to work and try her best to forget that she had almost died. She’d try to replan her future somehow.
Somehow.
She finally fell asleep, to relive it all again in her dreams. She woke as gray eyes filled her nightmares. Again.
She wiped tears off her cheeks and willed herself back to sleep.
Sleep never came.
33
There was a Welcome Back, Nurse Izzie banner draped over the ER intake desk. There were dozens of signatures on it. It made her want to cry. Izzie stopped there first and just read the names. There was Rafe’s, big and bold and very center.
Nikkie Jean’s was near his, her I’s dotted with stars. No tame hearts for Nikkie Jean.
Annie’s was there, the biggest name visible. Jillian’s nearly illegible scrawl was next to her husband’s. Lacy—who had the characteristic horrible surgeon’s handwriting. Someone—she suspected Nikkie Jean since it was in the same pink ink as her name—had drawn a cartoon heart around Fin and Virat.
Cage had drawn an alien playing a guitar next to his. He was such a big kid sometimes.