LITMIR.BIZ

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you’d be able to help them when you came in wearing scrubs. They deserved that confidence.

      Washing up, she gloved, got supplies—some of which had been laid out for her by nursing staff—and moved over to get a look at what was going on with the patient’s leg.

      Christmas was hard for McKeag. It was still there in her head, behind her duties to her patient, but still there.

      She didn’t want it.

      She gingerly lifted the bloody gauze to see beneath, causing her patient to draw a sharp, pained breath. It hurt; she knew it hurt.

      “I’m sorry. I know it’s hard, but I need you to be still for this. I’ll be as gentle as I can to make it as easy as possible, but it’ll go quicker and cleaner if you lock that leg in place as best you can.”

      That was part of her job, even if it wasn’t technically codified in rules of conduct—to make the painful things easier for those who were suffering.

      Christmas was hard for McKeag. She’d seen that. Anyone could see that. But hearing Angel put it into words—now she couldn’t hold his behavior against him. Couldn’t curse him to a lifetime of mushy pasta or underwear that snuck into uncomfortable arrangements at inopportune moments.

      Before Angel, he’d just been someone who hated the holiday, now he was someone struggling with it.

      An important difference. If she’d had any distance, she should’ve seen that on her own. Nanna had said it to her and Noelle so many times, it was practically a family mantra, even if it’d started out as a way to explain to two hurt little girls why their mother had left them.

      Words said to make them understand it wasn’t their fault, because they didn’t remember her.

       People who hurt others needed extra kindness to get better.

      Their mother’s life had been too hard and her family too bad for her to know how to be a mother. Nanna made sure they understood Mama had become someone who didn’t really know how to love. That it was a tragedy she’d given up before all the love they and Dad had to give could transform her into the person she was always meant to be.

      People who hurt others needed extra kindness.

      Mama had been too far gone for quick fixes, and even now Belle couldn’t bring herself to consider looking for her. She wasn’t steady enough on her feet to take on that kind of damage. Besides, it felt like a betrayal to Noelle, who couldn’t make that choice anymore.

      Was McKeag too far gone too?

      The gash on her patient’s leg was deep but flayed open with remarkable precision. It barely grazed the muscle beneath; the only part that needed stitching was the cleanly sliced skin that now stood open.

      She had a patient. This patient. The one with a wound she knew she could stitch.

      She pulled a light down to see into the wound better, selecting one with a magnifying window so she could be certain the wound was cleaned out before she began stitching it.

      Maybe the person who had included McKeag in that gift thing had been trying to be kind to him. Not a bad idea, but the execution was problematic. A gift exchange forced him to do something in exchange for his gift, which wasn’t what someone reticent to participate in the season needed.

      She picked out a couple of little pieces of glass with tweezers. “I want to flush this with saline, Mr. Axler, to make sure it’s clean before I stitch it. I’m going to go ahead and numb it, so it’s easier on you when I work a towel underneath your leg.”

      “Whatever you think. Just want to go through this once.”

      “The shot will be the most painful part. A few quick sticks, and I apologize. I’ll make them as quickly as I can,” she said, prepping the needle and scoping out locations to numb.

      “Were you by yourself on the subway this morning?” Distraction was a useful technique for dealing with pain, and she’d use anything to save patients from pain.

      “I was on my way to work.”

      She injected twice during his answer, his words only pausing or faltering a second for each injection.

      “Are you married?”

      “Yes.”

      “Have kids?”

      “Two.”

      She finished the last injection and stood up to look down at him. “Injections over, should be feeling better any second. Boys? Girls?”

      “One of each,” he said a little more easily, his voice letting her know it was working. Not only did talking help by distracting, but it provided a connection that soothed fear.

      She found a couple of towels in a cabinet, got them under his leg and had flushed the wound to her satisfaction by the time Angel came in.

      “How’s it going?”

      “There was a little glass in the wound, but it’s clean now. I’m about to stitch it up.”

      “Great. I’ll go to my next patient and pop back over when I’m done.”

      “Is this your first day?” Mr. Axler asked.

      “It’s my first day at this facility, but I’ve been doing this for several years now,” Belle answered, smiling at him. “I was an RN before I went back to school. Even if I look like a kid.”

      “You do look young.” He chuckled but relaxed back.

      She kept him talking as she worked. How did he meet his wife? How old were their children? Was she coming to pick him up at the hospital after this?

      It worked. It usually did, and by the time she had him stitched and bandaged, that horrible anxiety from earlier had stopped chewing up her insides.

      She met Angel back at the monitoring station, where another nurse walked her through the hospital’s patient system, so the file could be updated. Then they were off to another patient.

      The morning continued this way, interspersed with patients and thoughts of McKeag. What had happened to him? Was he grieving too? Or trying not to grieve, like her?

      By the time lunch rolled around, the worst of the influx had been handled and Angel returned to seeing strictly children with Belle shadowing.

      Being busy always kept her from dwelling too much on the stuff she didn’t need to dwell on. This morning’s failure. Her reasons for coming to New York. The way Christmas now had a mood more suited to Halloween, but instead of ghosts and goblins, it was Christmas trees with teeth and murderous tinsel.

      Getting around the department meant she also saw McKeag growling at three other people before the day was up. Which helped shore up her resolve. It also helped negate her earlier estimation of his attractiveness. She might see and understand that he was wounded, and she might want to help him, but it did take the shine off his good looks and make his jaw seem less chiseled, more brutish.

      He needed someone to be kind to him, maybe even more than she needed someone to be kind to, to give gifts to this Christmas in New York when she should’ve been buying for her twin.

      Because she did need it and wanted to give to someone who might be a colleague for years to come. Someone she might be able to see change.

      Whatever the true definition of the twelve days of Christmas, she’d learned last year that the lead-up to the holiday was the hardest to get through.

      There were twelve more days left before Christmas Day. He might not be working that whole time, and she certainly wouldn’t be, but it had a kind of symmetry to it that appealed to her, even if she only managed to get him a few secret gifts before he took holiday.

      She’d give to him, her stand-in Noelle, an act her family would’ve been proud of. After work and on weekends, she’d visit the quintessential New York Christmas sites to

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