closed up for so long—I gather it’s been empty for six months. Anyway, I’m sure it will be fine. I just need to get some furniture in there. And dishes. And everything.” She laughed in a way that struck Jake as false.
“You didn’t come with anything?”
Dr. Walsh huffed a sigh that seemed partly self-deprecating. “Nope.”
“Why, if you don’t mind my asking?” If you don’t mind my asking was kind of CJ’s signature phrase.
Dr. Walsh paused for a long moment before answering. “Have you ever looked around and suddenly thought, ‘What am I doing? What is all this crap? This is not how I thought my life was going to turn out’?”
Yep.
CJ paused with one of the foil doodads in her hand, her head tilted. Jake could pretty much guarantee that CJ had never asked herself those questions. When you were Carol Dyson Junior and you loved doing hair, which CJ legitimately did, and your mom, Carol Dyson Senior, owned the town salon, life unfolded pretty much according to plan, he suspected.
CJ laid a hand on the doctor’s shoulder. “Honestly, Dr. Hon, I can’t say I know what that’s like.”
Jake did, though. Did he ever.
Chapter Two
Nora left the salon feeling lighter than she had in a long time. New hair always did that. And CJ had done a bang-up job. Nora had been a little apprehensive, but CJ had had the same brands of bleach and dye her much pricier Toronto stylist used.
She paused on the sidewalk and took a deep breath of the lake air. Toronto was on a Great Lake, too, but it didn’t smell like this, like…plants and earth. Which made no sense because it was a lake. Water. She laughed at herself, the city girl trying and failing to describe nature.
All right. It was Sunday morning. She was going into the clinic tomorrow to start getting organized, so she should spend today furnishing her house.
She wanted to get the bare bones, at least. A bed, a table, a few chairs. Some dishes. She smirked. She was going to be living like a bachelor, at least initially. She kind of liked the idea. She didn’t need a Kitchen-Aid mixer she never used, a shelf full of art books she never read, or an ugly, uncomfortable sofa that cost more than she made in a month.
No, Rufus needed those things. He needed specific things. The right things. He was forever throwing away perfectly good things—her ancient hand mixer that was more than sufficient for the one or two times a year they baked anything; her sofa, which, yes, was a little worn, but a slipcover would have done the trick—and replacing them with newer, shinier models. “Upgrading,” he had called it, and because she didn’t really care about mixers and sofas, she’d been happy to go along with it.
She had even let him talk her into “upgrading” during her residency from her planned specialization in family medicine to emergency medicine—which had added a year to her studies—so they could be colleagues in the emergency department at the hospital where he was already a staff physician.
And then he’d upgraded her.
And by “upgraded,” she meant “screwed a first-year resident on the ugly, uncomfortable sofa that had cost more than she made in a month.”
Tears prickled at the corners of her eyes, but she forced them back. She was done crying. He wasn’t worth her tears.
Maybe if she told herself that enough times, she would actually start believing it.
He also wasn’t worth losing the new-hair-don’t-care feeling she was rocking—she did believe that—so she got in her car and went shopping.
Three hours later, she owned a bed, a sofa, and a kitchen table and chairs, all of which were being delivered later, and was schlepping bags of dishes and groceries inside from her car when a pickup truck came vrooming down the road.
It was going way too fast for this quiet, residential street. This was more her stereotype of small towns: dudes in trucks with something to prove. Probably the sizes of their trucks were inversely proportional to the sizes of other things.
To her astonishment the truck screeched to a halt at the foot of her driveway and Aquaman got out. His hair was in a messy bun now.
“Dr. Walsh, there’s an emergency. A woman has gone into labor on the village green. She says it’s too early.”
Nora blinked, “Labor-labor?” Labor-labor being the technical term, of course.
“Seems like. She’s screaming bloody murder. Someone called 911, but I remembered you said you were living