She worked her shift, making up reports, checking vitals, providing comfort and care to all her little patients. She was looking forward to seeing Bess out of surgery. She frowned as she looked at the clock. Surely the surgery was over by now? It had been several hours. She hadn’t noticed because she’d been so busy.
As she started to go off duty, she saw the surgeon who had performed the operation on Bess. She smiled as she asked him how the child was. The smile faded when she saw his expression. He looked devastated.
He explained, tight-lipped, that the child had gone into cardiac arrest during the surgery, and none of their efforts had been successful in bringing her back. They’d lost her due to an undiagnosed heart condition that nobody had even suspected she had.
He walked away, his expression betraying his sorrow. Surgeons sometimes went off by themselves for hours after they lost a patient, Sunny knew. They took it hard when they couldn’t save one.
Sunny gave her report to the next shift, tidied up her things and left the hospital in a daze. Bess was gone. Sweet little Bess, who’d always been smiling and happy. She fought tears. Nurses were taught not to get too close to their patients. It interfered with duty, one of the senior nurses had told her, because attachment led to grief when a patient was lost. But Sunny had never learned how to separate her heart from her job, and she mourned.
* * *
The apartment was lonely. It was her second Sunday off in two weeks, a lucky break, and she was off the next day as well. Nurses worked long shifts during a very long week before days off, but they were fulfilling ones. Usually. Not today.
She had plenty to do. There was laundry to sort, cabinets to clean out. She could vacuum. She could bake a pie. But none of those mundane tasks helped the hurt.
In the end, she did what she always did when she was depressed and unable to cope with life. She took a cab to the San Fernando Cathedral and went inside to light a candle for her late father, who had been Catholic.
She smiled sadly at the memory. He’d been driving a cattle truck for a rancher down near Jacobsville when a dog had run into the road and he’d swerved to avoid hitting it. The truck had overturned and killed him instantly.
Sunny and her mother, Sandra, and her little brother, Mark, had been devastated. Like now, it was the holiday season, which just amplified the loss as families gathered around Christmas trees to sing carols.
Her father, Ryan Wesley, had been a lifelong Catholic. Her mother had been a staunch Methodist. But the differences in faith hadn’t dulled the feeling her parents had for each other. It was truly a love match. They’d met in grammar school. They’d always known that they’d marry one day and have kids.
Sunny smiled at the memory. Her mother had loved to take out the family album and sit around the apartment with Sunny and Mark and tell them the stories that went with the wealth of photographs going back to Sandra’s own childhood, and Ryan’s. They’d been very close after the accident, so it had hurt terribly when Sunny lost her mother and brother in a tragedy that still had the power to bring tears to her eyes six years afterward.
She walked slowly to the front of the church and lit candles for all three of them. She looked up at the pulpit. She’d come with her father to Mass from time to time, just as she attended services with her mother at the local Methodist church. It had been faith that kept her going when she was ready to throw up her hands and just sit and give up. She truly believed that everything had a purpose, even tragedies that seemed without one.
She stood in front of the candles. She’d left her hair loose, since she wasn’t at work. It flowed down her back in a thick, pale curtain around the black dress and coat she was wearing off duty. Most women wore pantsuits when they attended services, but Sunny had stayed with her grandmother after school every day when Ryan and Sandra were working. After Mark came along, he stayed with her as well. Their grandmother had always worn dresses to church and funeral homes, and she instilled that custom in Sunny from childhood.
It had been a blow when the old lady fell suddenly to the floor with a stroke and nothing known to medical science could save her. She’d died in the Hal Marshall Medical Center, in fact, next door to the children’s hospital with the same name where Sunny worked. The woman had been a fixture in San Antonio society, the widow of one of the city’s best loved police officers who’d died on the job. Her funeral had been attended by dozens of people, and the flowers had covered the area around the pulpit. It had made her family proud, to see how much people loved and respected her.
In fact, Sunny’s family had been some of the first settlers in south Texas, immigrating from Georgia in the aftermath of the Civil War. The Wesleys were a founding family.
All those thoughts buzzed in her mind, all those memories tugged at her heart, while she watched the candles burn bright in the darkness of the great cathedral, the oldest in the city. It was founded in 1731 by Canary Islanders, although construction of the great edifice only began in 1749. It had an amazing history.
She heard the heavy front door open, but she didn’t turn. Many people who weren’t even Catholic came to light candles in memory of lost loved ones. It was rare for anyone to be alone for long in the church.
She heard a deep, melodic voice calling to a priest, and deep laughter following as the men conversed. Sunny couldn’t hear what they were talking about. Her mind was drifting into the past, into happier days, happier times, when the holidays had meant shopping for a special Christmas tree and cooking cakes and pies and turkey in the little house outside the city where her family had lived before her father’s death.
She said a silent prayer as she stood at the altar, her brown eyes sad and quiet.
Footsteps sounded just behind her, echoing in the cavernous depths of the church. She knew the sound of footwear. Those were boots. She smiled to herself. A cowboy, probably, stopping to light a candle for someone...
“A strange place to find you, rubia,” came a familiar laughing voice. It was oddly soft, almost affectionate.
She turned and looked up, her breath catching. It was the man in the shepherd’s coat, the gorgeous man who’d taken her onto the dance floor at the Christmas party.
“Oh,” she stammered, flushing. “Hello.”
He studied her for a moment before he replied. “Hello.” He glanced at the candles. “I come here every Christmas season to light them, for my people,” he said quietly. “You, too?”
She turned her attention back to the candles, nodding. “Yes. My mother and father. And my little brother,” she said softly.
He scowled. “All of them?”
“Yes,” she said quietly. “My whole family.” She forced a smile. “My father went here all his life. My mother was Methodist. They were both stubborn, so I went to services at both places when I was little. I learned the Mass in Spanish, because that’s how la Santa Misa is said here.”
“My father brought me here when I was a boy, too,” he replied. He didn’t add that he’d once brought his own son, Antonio, who was eleven. But now, the boy didn’t want any part of religion. He wasn’t keen on his father, either. Since the death of Ruiz’s wife, three years ago, the relationship between him and his son was difficult, to say the least.
“It wasn’t because you’re, well, because you’re Latin,” she stammered. “The dance, I mean. I...I...”
He looked down at her with an oddly affectionate expression. “I know. It was because you didn’t think such a gorgeous man would want to dance with somebody like you, is what you told one of the nurses,” he said outrageously.
Her face went scarlet. She turned, her only thought to escape, but he was in front of her, towering over her.
“No, don’t run away,” he said softly. “I’m not embarrassed,