Of Flesh and Blood (22 page)

Theodora grimaced. “What are you planning, child?”

“I must speak to him.”

Theodora considered it a moment and then nodded her approval. “Sounds about right.”

Olivia brushed her teeth twice, but she could not shed the acidic taste at the back of her throat. She slipped into her favorite blue dress, noticing that its waist felt tighter than before. Staring at herself in the mirror, she was overcome by self-doubt. She undressed and changed into the green dress that she had worn the day Evan and she had shared their first kiss.

Olivia left the house, walked the mile and a half to the nearest cable car stop, and rode it up to Capitol Hill. She had never been inside Evan’s ground-level office, but she had often walked by, concocting excuses to visit the area. Even during those secret visits, she had never been so nervous. Her heart was in her throat as she neared the door to the office.

Inside, the older receptionist accepted Olivia’s story that she had come
to see the doctor regarding intestinal colic. She led Olivia into the examining room.

Evan sat at the desk in the far corner with his head down, writing furiously on the pages in front of him. “Dr. McGrath, may I introduce Miss Alfredson,” the receptionist said.

Dropping his pen, Evan snapped his head up. “Of course.” He banged his knee loudly on the desk as he sprang to his feet. “Thank you, Mrs. Mickleson. That will be all.”

The woman turned and left the room without another word, shutting the door behind her.

Mouth parched and hands damp, Olivia gaped at Evan from across the room. Despite her nerves, she was so elated to see him again that for a moment his facial wounds did not register. Then she suddenly recognized the extent of his injuries.

“Evan!” She rushed toward him. Up close, the distortion of his handsome face appeared far worse. Black and yellow bruising encircled his eyes like a raccoon’s mask. He had a cut across the bridge of his nose and his upper lip was split and scabbed. “What happened?”

His swollen lip parted into a sad smile, revealing a markedly chipped upper incisor. “I slipped on the ice and landed headfirst on the ground. I could not have been more clumsy.”

The explanation rang false to Olivia. She reached out to touch his face, but he drew away slightly, and she dropped her hand to her side in embarrassment.

Evan looked down at his feet. “Olivia?”

“Yes?”

“Listen, Olivia, I am a man of science, not words,” he said stiffly, without looking at her. “So I cannot begin to describe the depth of my feelings for you. My words would be inadequate and hollow.”

Despite his flattery, dread welled in her chest at the undercurrent of finality that accompanied his tone. She tried to swallow away the lump filling her throat.

Evan looked up at her, his eyes full of the same longing and adulation she had seen before at the Sherman Hotel. But unlike previous times, he did not reach for her with those gentle hands. “Olivia, I wish with all my heart that our circumstances were different . . .”

“They are different now, Evan,” Olivia croaked.

His bruised face crumpled with pain. “No.” He sighed. “I mean I wish I had the freedom to pursue a life with you.”

“Evan, you have to know—”

Evan stopped her with a raised hand and a shake of his head. “Anything you say will only deepen the hurt.” He dropped his hand back to his side. “My wife has suffered so much in her short life. I simply cannot add
this
to her misery, Olivia. I will not.” His voice cracked. “It would kill Ginny. Do you understand?”

An unwanted image of his helpless wife sitting crumpled in her wheel-chair flashed to Olivia’s mind. As always, a wave of shame—as though she had taken something precious from a little child—overcame her. She lowered her head. “Yes, I do.”

“I was so wrong to have misled you.” He touched his chest. “Olivia, you must know that if it were up to me alone, I would give up everything to be with you.”

She nodded slightly.

“I have come to realize that it is not my decision to make.” He paused and added quietly, “No matter how painful, sometimes the needs of others have to come first.”

Olivia said nothing. A statue could not have been more still.

“When spring arrives, I intend to move Virginia back to San Francisco.”

A sense of loneliness consumed Olivia, even worse than the moment she heard that her mother had died. But with the emotional void came sudden clarity. Evan was right about the needs of others. Suddenly, Olivia saw a way to realize so many of those needs all at once.

Olivia reached out and brushed her fingers over the large bruise near Evan’s left eye. He winced slightly but did not pull away. She smiled lovingly. “You need to take care of yourself, too, Evan,” she said. “That is just as important for Virginia’s sake.”

He raised his hand to his cheek and caught hers, squeezing it.

She pulled his fingers to her mouth and kissed them, lingering for a moment at the feel of the soft hairs against her lip, and then released his hand. “Good-bye, Evan.”

“Olivia . . .”

She pivoted and rushed for the door without looking back.

Out on the street, Olivia shed no more tears. She had much to do, and little time to accomplish it. She silently vowed to never let Evan know about his child. However, she had no intention of “going to visit relatives in the country” (the popular euphemism used for unmarried women sent away to have their bastard children out of sight), nor would she dream of slinking off to some backstreet butcher who might illegally terminate the pregnancy.

Her plan was as simple as the man central to its success: Arthur Grovenor. Poor sweet Arthur still doted on her like an abandoned puppy might. Though he did not challenge her intellectually or emotionally, Arthur had a good heart. He was even charming in his own way. His greatest shortcoming was that he was not Evan. But he was now the only future Olivia could envision. And she was prepared to accept his open-ended marriage proposal, on one condition that had nothing to do with Arthur.

As heartsick as she felt, Olivia took comfort and even pride in realizing how well her scheme might unfold for everyone other than herself, even her unborn child.

As soon as she reached home, Olivia went off in search of her father. She found him in his upstairs office, chomping his cigar more than smoking it as he scanned through the large black ledger on the desk in front of him. When Olivia walked into the room, he lowered the book. “Hello, Olivia,” he said coolly. As gruff and temperamental as her father could be with others, Marshall usually softened in her presence, but in the past few weeks he had treated her with a cool reserve she was unaccustomed to.

“Hello, Papa.”

“You look very flushed,” Marshall grunted. “You do not have another fever, do you?”

“I am fine,” she said.

They stared at each other for a few moments. “Well?” Marshall finally asked. “What is it?”

“Papa, I would like you to reconsider Dr. McGrath’s clinic.”

Marshall’s eyes locked on hers. With his still-bandaged hand, he crushed the remainder of his cigar in the waiting ashtray. “Did you see
that
man after I forbade you?” he asked hoarsely.

For the first time in her life, Olivia felt afraid of her father. She hesitated and then steeled her nerves. “Yes, I did,” she said. “I continued to see him up until last week.”

He sat very still in his chair, but his expression darkened. “Do you honestly expect your complete disregard for my authority—and your own decency—will convince me to throw money at him and his rattlebrained schemes?” His voice grew louder with each word.

“No.”

He slammed a hand against the desk so hard that Olivia almost jumped. “
Hell and damnation!
” he bellowed. “What are you thinking, child?”

Olivia had never heard her father swear. Trembling slightly now, she stood her ground. “I am thinking about the future of the Alfredson family.”

“I believe that is one factor that you have not considered at all!”

She held his gaze. “On the contrary, Papa. All I’m thinking about right now is our family.” She paused and then rested a hand on her belly. “And the future generation of Alfredsons.”

Marshall glared at her, angry and confused, but then his eyes lit with sudden and catastrophic understanding. His face fell and he slumped back in his seat. “Oh, Olivia, no. Not that! Do not dare tell me . . .”

Her wordless stare was confirmation enough. He closed his eyes. “Thank God your mother is not alive to hear this,” he whispered.

“Papa, everything will be all right.”

“How is that possible?” he asked miserably.

“I am prepared to accept Arthur Grovenor’s marriage proposal.”

Marshall’s eyes popped open and he sat up straighter again. “Of course you will!” he said, suddenly recognizing an escape from social calamity. “We will have the reception here at the house. We will make it a New Year’s Eve event! It is only a few weeks away. Yes, of course. That will explain the short notice. It might work. Yes, it just might!”

The words struck Olivia as being as damning as a prison sentence.

“Of course, we will need invitations printed immediately,” he went on. “And I will need to meet tomorrow with James Grovenor to finalize a guest list. There will be many people not to forget . . .” Marshall was almost smiling as he ran through the permutations in his head. He seemed to have forgotten his anger, or even Olivia’s continued presence.

“Papa?”

“Hmmm?”

She took a long, slow breath. “I will not go through with this unless . . .” She faltered.

His eyes darted over to her. “Unless what?” he snapped.

“Unless . . . you agree to invest in Dr. McGrath’s clinic.”

Marshall jumped up from his seat and stormed toward her, stopping only a few inches away. He raised an open hand over his head, like a broken branch that was about to fall on her.

“After all you have put me through, you would force me into this dev il’s compromise?” he growled. “How dare you!”

She looked up at the towering figure over her. He had never before laid a hand on her in anger, but she had no doubt that he would not hesitate now. “If you agree to this, I will marry Arthur.” She swallowed. “And I will never see Dr. McGrath again.”

“And if I do not?”

She steeled her nerves with two more deep breaths. “I suspect there are many places far from Seattle—towns where a qualified doctor and his new wife and child would be welcomed, without questions being raised about either of their pasts.”

Daggers shot from Marshall’s eyes. Olivia instinctively flinched, expecting to feel the blow from her father’s open hand at any moment.

As Tyler’s car wound and whined its way around the seventh floor of the Alfredson’s parking garage, he continued to try to convince himself that Nate Stafford’s outcome was inevitable and that such cases were unavoidable in his job. He mentally cataloged other heart-crushing tragedies he had already seen in his career: parents who had struggled for years to adopt a daughter from China only to lose her to cancer within months of her arrival, an eleven-month-old who died of leukemia the day before his first birthday, and a mother losing her battle with breast cancer who still lived long enough to see her teenage daughter die first, of a brain tumor.

He reminded himself that the only way to cope was to keep the emotional attachment at arm’s length and to focus on the success stories that mercifully outnumbered the losses by a significant margin. But Nate Stafford’s death seriously rattled him. Tyler could not distance himself from the loss because, for the first time in his career, he felt responsible.

He had hoped his return to the hospital would distract him from the guilt by keeping him focused on other patients who needed his attention. It hadn’t worked so far. In his head, he kept sifting through the events of the boy’s last hours, trying to discern what had set off his internal alarm that something was very wrong even before he slid the needle into Nate’s back.

Tyler knew Jill was right: Nate was going to die, regardless of the chosen treatment. Though her logic was impeccable, it brought him no solace. Without Vintazomab, Nate might have survived weeks or even months. A long time in the life of a child, and too many irreplaceable memories for a parent.

Tyler spotted the only open parking spot on the seventh level and tucked his car into the tight space between a van and a cement pillar. The sun had risen over Oakdale again and brought temperatures in the mid-seventies.
A light summerlike breeze carried the scent of fresh-cut grass. But Tyler had little interest in taking the scenic route through the grounds of the Alfredson on this perfect fall morning. Instead, he strode down to the basement floor and followed the underground tunnel along the most direct route to the children’s hospital.

Most days, he walked onto the sixth-floor unit with a sense of purpose verging on ownership. But today he slunk onto the SFU almost as if returning to a crime scene. His hands were sweating, and his heart galloping. He half expected to run into one of Nate’s parents, like he had so many previous mornings. Tyler had a flashback of that terrible moment when he broke the news to them in the ICU’s family conference room. He could still see Laura rocking, catatonic-like, on the couch while Craig, tears rolling down his cheeks, stormed up and down the room, stopping only to punch two holes through the drywall.

This morning, nothing on the SFU struck Tyler as out of the ordinary. He received the usual friendly greetings from other staff members. No one else appeared to be hand-wringing over the boy’s sudden death. The staff had accepted the naturalness of his passing, and Nate would soon be put out of mind like other children who had died before him. People who staffed the oncology wards were remarkably adept at looking ahead, and not dwelling on losses.

However, when Tyler reached the back desk of the nursing station, he spotted the first sign that he wasn’t entirely alone in his grief. In dark green scrubs, Nikki Salazar stood charting at the nearby countertop. Puffy black bags darkened the skin under her bloodshot eyes. She looked as though she had been crying recently. As he neared, she broke into a sympathetic smile. “Hi,” she said softly.