* * *
Grace was very aware that a new patient had been placed on the other side of the curtain, a woman who’d barely answered the nurse’s questions with more than a syllable. There was a man with her, too, who’d loudly done most of the talking. Now that the nurse had left them alone, he was keeping his voice to a vicious whisper, but Grace could still hear him.
She wished she couldn’t.
“You already know what I’ll do to you, bitch. You want to see what I’ll do to your kids?”
Grace looked at Sophia in a panic, but she was lying on her bed, twisted away from her, typing madly away on the precious phone Grace had retrieved.
The unseen man on the other side of the curtain was obviously trying to be quiet, but he wasn’t quiet enough for Grace’s ears. “You tell the doctor you fell down the stairs. Say it. Now.”
“I f-fell down the stairs,” the woman said. “But we don’t have stairs.”
“The effing doctor doesn’t know that, you dumb-ass.”
Grace was paralyzed in her vinyl chair. She’d be horrified if this were a movie scene, but this was even worse. This was real life, and she was no Sophia Jackson heroine. Grace didn’t know what to do.
“Say it again, like you mean it.”
“I fell down the stairs.”
“Smile when you say it. You get me in trouble, I will hunt your kids. You send me to jail, and they’re dead when I get out.”
Grace couldn’t move. Couldn’t make a noise. The man clearly didn’t know someone was sitting inches behind him on the other side of a cloth curtain. If she made a sound, he would.
What would he do? Would he hurt those children that were apparently waiting somewhere in a one-story house?
Frantically, she reached forward to tap the mattress of her sister’s gurney, but her sister only hunched her shoulders and kept tapping away on her screen.
“Don’t worry,” the woman said, sounding so pitiful as she tried to soothe the man who had hurt her, who was threatening her still. “Everything will be okay. You can trust me, you know you can. I would never want you to get in trouble. I’ll fix everything.”
On her gurney, Sophia coughed.
Grace froze.
There was utter silence on the other side of the curtain, and then the curtain was pushed aside. “Who the hell are you?”
She had to do something. Her sister’s back was to the angry man, so before Sophia could roll over and reveal her famous face, Grace jumped to her feet and faced him. “We’d like some privacy.” She dared to grab the curtain and whisk it shut, right in the man’s face.
The silence on the other side of the curtain was more frightening than the angry whispers had been. Her heart was already pounding out of her chest when she heard more curtains being pushed aside on their metal rings. Not hers—the ones next door.
“Good afternoon, I’m Dr. Gregory. What brings you in today?”
“I fell down the stairs.”
Her sister chose that moment to emerge from her absorption in the phone. “How slow is this place? Didn’t you tell them to bring the X-ray machine up here?”
Frantically, Grace put her finger against her lips to silence Sophia. Shh, shh, shh...
“What is wrong with you?”
“Nothing.” Grace leaned in close to her sister’s ear, so she could whisper. “I want to hear what they’re saying next door.”
“What for?”
She cringed. Every normally spoken word sounded like a trumpet blast to Grace. She could hear the man doing most of the talking next door. The woman’s voice sounded so timid. The third person, the one who’d said he was Dr. Gregory, had a better voice. Calm and confident. He spoke with the good cheer of someone who didn’t know his patient was in danger.
“We’ll need a few X-rays because you might have one or more fractures. There’s a bit of a wait for radiology right now.”
Sophia spoke loudly. “This X-ray is taking forever.”
Grace whirled around and pleaded for silence with her finger on her lips. It figured that Sophia had just now started paying attention.
Dr. Gregory kept talking. “While you’re waiting, Mr. Burns, you can get the paperwork taken care of. You’ll be able to leave sooner that way.”
The curtain rings made their sliding sound again.
“Loretta, perfect timing. Could you show Mr. Burns to admin while we’re waiting to take Mrs. Burns to X-ray? He needs to fill out the spousal consent forms.”
“The spousal consent forms? If you’ll just follow me, Mr. Burns.”
After another swish of curtain rings, the violent Mr. Burns was gone with the nurse.
“We’ll take care of you,” Dr. Gregory said to the woman. “It might have sounded like I was rushing you out of here, but you can stay as long as you need to.”
Grace held her breath, willing the woman to tell the doctor the truth while her attacker was gone. She heard only silence.
“I’ll be back shortly.” The doctor was leaving.
Grace needed to be brave. She should do something. Say something.
But she didn’t. She was no superhero. Maybe she could write a note and pass it to a nurse or something...
Behind her, Sophia called out. “Dr. Gregory.”
There was an audible sigh in the aisle. Then it was their curtain that was being pushed aside, and a man far younger than Grace had expected stepped into their little space. He was around thirty, bespectacled and bearded. Not the trendy kind of full beard that men in Hollywood were wearing this year, but the dark shadow of a man who’d perhaps worked a twenty-four-hour shift.
“Yes, Miss Jackson?” He sounded as tired as he looked.
Sophia began complaining. The doctor listened to her sister’s demands without a flicker of emotion on his face, without so much as a blink of his eyes behind his brown plastic eyeglass frames. His white overcoat looked too big on him. He didn’t look like a man, frankly, who could handle the vicious Mr. Burns, but—
But, actually, he did.
There was something very Clark Kent about him. Tall, dark and handsome could have described him if he were in Superman mode, but as Clark Kent, he was too unassuming to be eye-catching, not the way he stood with his hands stuffed in the square pockets of his lab coat. Still, although he might not have bothered to shave, his jawline was defined, and the blue of his eyes was only dimmed a little bit by the glare of the fluorescent lighting on his eyeglasses.
It was the look in those blue eyes that gave Grace hope. He saw right through her sister. He wasn’t flustered by her beauty and he didn’t look awed to have a movie star in his presence. In fact, he was looking at her with quiet disapproval. If he could see through the celebrity aura that surrounded Sophia Jackson, maybe he could see through Mr. Burns. Grace just needed to be brave enough to tell him what she’d heard.
“So, um, you’re her doctor?” she began, forcing herself to smile when it was the last thing on earth she wanted to do at the moment.
He turned that blue gaze directly on her. A small eternity of silence followed.
“Of course he is,” Sophia said, exasperated. “I told him you’d fix everything when you got here. I need a private room. These curtains are so ghetto.”
He didn’t take his eyes