“What happened?” Kate asked.
“I don’t know. They won’t tell me anything. The usual patient confidentiality. I only got here about fifteen minutes ago. I was checking the operating room slate to see how many cases were lined up for tonight at the front desk when the porter from the blood bank came to drop off blood. I overheard him verifying her name and blood bank number with the unit clerk.”
“Who is in with her?”
“Gynecology.” His resentment was coming through clearly.
“Oh.”
“Is it a hemorrhagic ovarian cyst?” Kate asked.
“I don’t know, Kate. Like I said, they won’t tell me anything.”
She stopped asking questions and he wondered if she had come up with the same diagnosis he had. Either way he was grateful for the silence. He needed to keep his entire focus on Chloe.
Twenty minutes later Kate gently pushed Tate to the side and went through the operating room door. He watched the interaction, unable to hear the exchange between her and Erin Madden, but noting that she was getting further than he had. She pushed through the doors again, returning.
“She’s okay. They won’t tell me what happened, but they opened her up, stopped whatever was bleeding, and she’s stabilized. She is going to go to the Intensive Care Unit overnight because of the large amount of blood products she received.”
“Thank you, Kate,” Tate replied, his eyes still trained on the window, not budging from his spot outside the door.
“Tate, they have asked us to leave and I think we should. She is stable and there is nothing we can do except get in the way and distract the team.”
“I’m not leaving her.”
“We’re not leaving her, Tate. We’re helping her by getting out of the way and letting them do their job. The same thing we ask other people to do for us.” She grabbed his arm and pulled him a little, to ease him away from his spot. “Tate, we need to go. You know Chloe would never want us to see her like this.”
His mind replayed all the ways he had seen Chloe and he knew she was right. Staying away from her had been the hardest thing he had ever done, but it was for her he’d done it. God knew that every time she had tried to talk to him there’d been nothing he wanted more than to take her in his arms and kiss her, to see if everything they had done together had been real and not just a memory that had reached fantastical proportions in his mind.
Who was he kidding? In truth he was terrified of the feelings she’d brought out in him and what it would cost him to have and then lose her.
He looked back at Kate, feeling nothing for her. How could he have been such a fool? He respected Kate, and intellectually she made perfect sense, but he had never been in love with her and she had never sparked the intensity of emotion that Chloe did in him. He had asked her to marry him because it had seemed like the next logical step, just like the series of steps he had taken in his training. He was tired of the single life, needed a wife, wanted a family and Kate met the criteria he was looking for. His use of logic had failed him for the first time in his life. Kate’s rejection had angered him and wounded his pride at the time. Now he was grateful for the near miss.
“Are you in love with Matt McKayne?” he asked, without emotion.
She seemed surprised by the question, whether it was at his directness or his reference to the man he knew she was in love with, he didn’t care.
“Yes. I think I always have been—even when I hated him.”
“Then you should be with him. Forget everything that has gone wrong between you and be together.”
“It’s not that simple, Tate. I can’t trust him.”
“Kate, that’s not simple,” he replied, pointing toward the door. Then he took one last look through the window and walked away—from both Chloe and Kate.
His steps were slow and purposeful as he returned to the front desk and the unit clerk he had spoken to earlier. He took a deep breath, steeling himself for the response he was dreading. “Am I up next after the ruptured ectopic pregnancy?” he asked as casually as he could while his heart was racing.
He held his breath as the unit clerk double-checked the confidential surgical slate that listed patient names, procedures and diagnoses. “Yes. As soon as they are done with Dr. Darcy we will be sending for your patient, Dr. Reed.”
“Thank you,” he mumbled and he kept walking, not thinking about his destination but more of the confirmation he had hoped not to receive. Chloe was pregnant—or had been pregnant. Was he the father? Was he responsible for the pregnancy that had almost killed her?
The door to the operating room opened again and Ryan Callum walked through.
“Is she still in?” Ryan asked, with a coldness Tate had not expected emanating from him.
He wasn’t in the mood to play games. “Yes. Do you know what happened to her?”
“Yes.”
Tate waited, but no more words came from the other man and new hostility radiated from him. Ryan, who had never been confrontational, had changed from the direct, no-nonsense man he had been. The question was why? In a night with so many unanswered questions it was the last thing he needed.
“I’m asking,” Tate replied, not trying to escalate the conversation, knowing he had a thin grip on his temper.
“If Chloe wanted you to know something she would have told you.”
Told him what? That there was a reason Ryan Callum knew about her pregnancy and he didn’t? It was a thought he couldn’t stomach and he wanted it out of his mind.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You’re the brilliant surgeon, Tate, figure it out.”
He didn’t want to have to think about any more than he already was. At the moment he would much rather be the father of her life-threatening pregnancy than think there was a possibility that Ryan was.
“So I’m to blame? Is that what you think?”
“She said your name, not mine, as I carried her near lifeless body to get help. That is what I think.”
The image flashed before his eyes, and judging from the scene in the operating theater Tate knew Ryan’s characterization was right. Before he could respond Ryan walked past him toward the bank of theaters, which was fortunate because he had no response. Did that mean he was the father? Ryan hadn’t ruled himself out, but what did it say about Chloe that she would ask for him as she lay dying?
EVERYTHING HURT. IT was her first thought as outside sounds began to intrude. She tried to move, to ease the ache, but nothing in her body responded. She took a breath and became immediately cognizant of pain and pressure in her mouth and throat. She tried to pull at it, but couldn’t move her hands. When she finally moved she felt the resistance of straps on her wrists.
A monitor rang out and it calmed her as a familiar sound. She felt a hand curl around hers and tried to hold it.
“Chloe, it’s Kate.”
Kate. She didn’t know where she was, but Kate was here. She heard her friend’s voice again, but couldn’t make out the words. She strained to understand, wanted to move, to breathe, but everything was so hard and met with such resistance.
She heard the alarm ring again as she struggled.
Someone with a voice she didn’t recognize entered the room and she could hear Kate directing the woman