Well, at least it wasn’t taps, she thought.
Chapter Two
Simon Sheffield frowned as he tried to hurry into his clothes. His alarm hadn’t gone off. Or, if it had, he’d shut it off in his sleep, instinctively attempting to escape from the annoying sound.
Uneasiness arrived the moment he was awake. The same question he’d been grappling with for the last week assaulted him again. Had he made a colossal mistake by uprooting the girls and moving here?
But then, what choice had he had? Seeing all those familiar surroundings in San Francisco had slowly ripped him to pieces. The entire city was fraught with memories for him and while some people could take comfort in memories when they’d lost someone, Simon found himself haunted by them.
Haunted to the point that he was having trouble focusing in order to function properly. And focusing to the exclusion of everything else was crucial in his line of work.
Time and again he’d find himself frozen in a moment that whispered of Nancy and all the things they had once had, all the plans they had once made. Nancy, who was the light of not only his life but the lives of everyone she came in contact with. Nancy, who was the embodiment of optimism and hope, who could almost heal with the touch of her hand, the warmth of her smile. Nancy, for whom nothing was impossible.
Except coming back from the dead.
And she was dead because of him.
Dead because his urgent sense of duty and ethics had prevented him from keeping his prior promise to Doctors Without Borders. A much sought-after and gifted cardiovascular surgeon, Simon had willingly signed up to donate fifteen days of his service, going to a wretchedly impoverished region on the eastern coast of Africa. But when the time came for him to go, one of his patients, Jeremy Winterhaus, had suffered the collapse of one of the new valves that had been put in during his emergency bypass surgery. Always a man who saw things through, Simon hadn’t felt comfortable about leaving Winterhaus in the care of another surgeon. Nancy, a general surgeon herself, had immediately stepped in and told him not to worry. She’d urged him to see to his patient, and she’d happily taken his place in the program.
And died in his place when the tsunami, born in the wake of the 8.3 earthquake that had ripped through Indonesia, swept away her and more than two dozen other people less than three days later.
Edna had been the one to break the news to him, tapping on his door the morning that the tsunami had hit, her eyes red-rimmed from weeping. Edna O’Malley had once been Nancy’s nanny and was now nanny to their two daughters, Madelyn and Meghan. She had come into his bedroom and in her soft, quiet voice said the words that ended the world as he knew it.
“Our Nancy was swept out to sea by a tsunami, Doctor.”
He’d stared at her in disbelief, then felt as if he’d been repeatedly stabbed in the gut with a rusted serrated knife.
Thirteen months later, he still hadn’t healed. He knew that if he had a prayer of moving forward and providing for their girls, he needed to start somewhere fresh and lock away all the memories until such time as it wouldn’t hurt so much to be confronted by them.
Because of her ties to Nancy, he’d almost left Edna back in San Francisco, as well. But he needed someone to look after the girls while he was away at the hospital, someone he trusted. As a cardiovascular surgeon he couldn’t lay claim to an average nine-to-five existence, and he needed someone to be there to fill in the gaps. Finding a new nanny was much too time-consuming.
Besides, Edna needed something to keep her going, as well, a reason for waking up in the morning. Simon was well aware that in her own way, Edna had loved Nancy as much as he did, as much as a mother did. And she loved the girls, as well. To lose all three of them in thirteen months would have destroyed the woman, and God knew he didn’t want someone else on his conscience.
Simon felt he already had more than enough guilt to deal with.
He had to get moving, Simon upbraided himself. It was late. Getting out of bed in the morning was still unbelievably difficult for him. Especially when, for just a glimmer of a moment, when he first opened his eyes in the morning, he didn’t remember.
And then he did.
The full weight of remembering oppressed him to the point that he had trouble breathing. But it was slowly getting easier. Not easy, but just easier, and that, he knew, was all he could logically hope for.
If he was going to be of any use to his patients and the hospital where he would be working, Simon knew he needed to get back to the business of living.
Which was why being late for his first meeting with Dr. Edward Hale, the chief of surgery at Blair Memorial, was not a very good idea.
When the doorbell rang with its odd, teeth-jarring chimes, it was just one more thing for him to be annoyed about.
Now what? he wondered impatiently as he shrugged into his jacket. The obligatory necktie was stuffed into his pocket, knotted and ready to be pressed into service should he need it. As a rule, he hated ties and saw them as an unnecessary evil.
A sneeze in the distance told him that Edna was making her way to the front door. The last couple of days, she seemed to be coming down with a bad cold despite her protests that she was fine.
When it rained …
“I’ll get it, Edna,” he called out. Edna already had more than her hands full, Simon thought, just getting Madelyn, eight, and Meghan, six, ready for school.
But even though he’d just told her that he would open the front door on his way out, he knew Edna was too stubborn to retreat.
Sure enough, there she was, hurrying to the door. Dedicated right down to the soles of her excessively sensible shoes, Edna O’Malley appeared a bit older than her sixty-seven years and was, to the undiscerning eye, the epitome of the comfortable, capable British nanny of decades past. Not exactly plump, but far from thin, at five foot ten Edna cast a considerable shadow.
“I’m not dead yet, Doctor,” Edna told him firmly, refusing to tolerate being coddled in any manner. She struggled to stifle the deep cough that insisted on rumbling inside her chest.
Simon shook his head. “You will be if you don’t take it easy,” he warned her.
Edna spared him a reproving glance. “If that’s the kind of medical advice you’re dispensing, Doctor, it’s a surprise to me there’s no wolf at our door. But wait, perhaps that’s him now,” Edna amended glibly as she opened the massive door. Lights danced in through the beveled glass, casting multicolored bursts on the wall. “No, no wolf. A waif instead,” the nanny pronounced after giving the slender young woman standing on their doorstep a quick once-over.
The next moment, Edna quickly turned her head toward the door and sneezed loudly enough to befit a person twice her size and girth.
“Bless you,” Kennon said automatically. “I have an appointment to see a Dr. Simon Sheffield.”
Edna sneezed a third time, sighed heavily as she dug into her deep pockets for her handkerchief and blew her nose before giving the young woman another critical once-over.
Sniffling, she wadded the handkerchief back up and shoved it into her pocket again. “I’m afraid the doctor doesn’t do house calls, miss—even from his own house. You’ll have to see him during office hours in his office.”
Okay, this was obviously a misunderstanding. “But I’m not sick,” Kennon began. She got no further.
“Good for you,” the nanny declared. “That makes one of us. Me, I’m feeling rather poorly,” she went on to confide as she lowered her voice.
Kennon tried to look sympathetic while wondering what any of this had to do with her appointment. She pressed her lips together. Had there been a mistake?