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movie was that she’d seen. Did
she think to eat dinner. And they were working. Tate
could feel herself melting like candlewax, forgiveness edging out the old hurt
and resentment until the only thing left was want.
    She had to hand
it to him. He’d played his cards well. He’d known the sex would serve as a
potent reminder of the physical connection they’d shared. Now he was slowly
filling in the gaps with his tender, caring gestures that played on her
heartstrings like only he knew the chords. And didn’t he?   She’d never let anyone else get as close as
Ryan. His leaving had left wounds she never wanted to reopen, so she’d erected
barriers too impenetrable for any man to break through. Until now, when the one
person who’d been responsible for those barriers shredded them as if they were
made of tissue paper.
    “It
was my family, and I had no choice but to leave you.”
    That one
sentence kept running through her mind in an unending loop, punctuated by the
pain and earnestness she’d heard in his voice as he’d said it.
    She tried to
think of things her family could’ve done to her to make her drop everything and
go to them against her will, something that she wouldn’t want anyone else to
know about, not even those closest to her, and everything she came up with was
grim. Dark, deeply disturbing subjects like murder or sexual abuse.
    Ryan had a
younger sister, Dannie, who he was extremely close to. Tate had met her a few
times when she’d come to Atlanta for a quick visit with Ryan’s parents. She was
a beautiful, bright girl, full of joy and typical teenage enthusiasm for
everything. The thought of her being abused, physically or
mentally, made Tate’s stomach turn over. Dannie would’ve been around
thirteen at the time Ryan left. Could that have been it? Did their father or
mother mistreat her in some way and Ryan intervened? That would certainly be
something painful that would be hard to discuss. Everyone felt shame and guilt
in those instances, even when it wasn’t necessarily warranted.
    Tate buried her
fingertips into her stinging eye sockets in a futile attempt to rub away the
fatigue and accepted that she’d already been privy to too much darkness in the
ER. Her imagination had been seeded by all the horrific abuses she’d seen
firsthand. Now her brain was permanently corrupted. She’d become jaded about
the world, and that made her sad. On a few rare occasions she saw the good side
of humanity, but mostly she saw the awful. The attempted
murders, drunk drivers’ victims, domestic violence, and rapes. It was
hard to keep your perspective sometimes.
    Tonight was a
prime example.
    There’d been a six-car
pileup on I-75, instigated by a drunk driver crossing the median into oncoming
traffic, and Atlanta General had absorbed the brunt of the aftermath.
Everywhere Tate looked was carnage and death. Blood pooled beneath gurneys,
leaking from broken bodies faster than it could be replaced through transfusions.
Cries of agony became the soundtrack of the evening, punctuated by the monotonous
beeps and alarms of machinery and the shouted orders of staff members trying
their best to save the lives they could.
    During these challenging
times, Tate’s training took over, and she ran on autopilot, doing what was
necessary, blocking out the human emotions like sadness and frustration and
anger. There was no place for any of that to creep in during the heat of the
moment. Letting it in would only serve as a distraction, and those could cause
deadly mistakes in the ER.
    When the last
patient had finally been stabilized enough to transport to surgery, Tate
stripped off her gloves and looked down at her scrubs. She was splattered with
blood, the spots so thick in some areas they formed Rorschach patterns against
the blue background of the material. Her white leather Nikes were speckled with deep crimson droplets. Unfortunately, she hadn’t remembered to
put a spare set of clean scrubs back in her locker