LITMIR.BIZ

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walked slowly instead, opened the door like an automaton. Rodrigo was there. With a wheelchair. She sat down without a word.

      In silence, he wheeled her through his space-age center to a gigantic elevator that could accommodate ten gurneys and their attending personnel. This was obviously a place equipped and staffed to deal with mass casualty situations. She stared ahead as they reached the vast entrance, feeling every eye on her, the woman their collective boss was tending to personally.

      Once outside the controlled climate of the center, she shivered as the late February coolness settled on her face and legs. He stopped before a gleaming black Mercedes 600, slipped the warmth of the cashmere coat she realized had been draped over his arm all along around her shoulders as he handed her into the back of the car.

      In moments he’d slid in beside her on the cream leather couch, signaled the chauffeur and the sleek beast of a vehicle shot forward soundlessly, the racing-by vistas of the Spanish countryside the only proof that it was streaking through the nearly empty streets.

      None of the beauty zooming by made it past the surface of her awareness. All deeper levels converged on him. On the turmoil in the rigidity of his profile, the coiled tension of his body.

      And she couldn’t bear it anymore. “I’m …so sorry.”

      He turned to her. “What are you talking about?”

      The harshness that flickered in his eyes, around his lips made her hesitate. It didn’t stop her. “I’m talking about Mel.” His eyes seemed to lash out an emerald flare. She almost backed down, singed and silenced. She forged on. “About your loss.” His jaw muscles convulsed then his face turned to rock, as if he’d sucked in all emotion, buried it where it would never resurface for anyone to see. “I don’t remember him or our relationship, but you don’t have that mercy. You’ve lost your best friend. He died on your table, as you struggled to save him….”

      “As I failed to save him, you mean.”

      His hiss hit her like the swipe of a sword across the neck.

      She nearly suffocated on his anguish. Only the need to drain it made her choke out, “You didn’t fail. There was nothing you could have done.” His eyes flared again, zapping her with the force of his frustration. “Don’t bother contradicting me or looking for ways to shoulder a nonexistent blame. Everyone knew he was beyond help.”

      “And that’s supposed to make me feel better? What if I don’t want to feel better?”

      “Unfounded guilt never did anyone any good. Certainly not the ones we feel guilty over.”

      “How logical you can be, when logic serves no purpose.”

      “I thought you advocated logic as what serves every purpose.”

      “Not in this instance. And what I feel certainly isn’t hurting me any. I’m as fit as an ox.”

      “So you’re dismissing emotional and psychological pain as irrelevant? I know that as surgeons we’re mainly concerned with physical disorders, things we can fix with our scalpels, but—”

      “But nothing. I’m whole and hearty. Mel is dead.” “Through no fault of yours!” She couldn’t bear to see him bludgeoning himself with pain and guilt that way. “That’s the only point I’m making, the only one to be made here. I know it doesn’t make his loss any less traumatic or profound. And I am deeply sorry for—everyone. You, Mel, his parents, our baby.”

      “But not yourself?”

      “No.”

      The brittle syllable hung between them, loaded with too much for mere words to express, and the better for it, she thought.

      Twenty minutes of silence later her heart hiccupped in her chest. They were entering a private airport.

      With every yard deeper into the lush, grassy expanses, tentacles of panic slid around her throat, slithered into her mind until the car came to a halt a few dozen feet from the stairs of a gleaming silver Boeing 737.

      She blindly reached out to steady herself with the one thing that was unshakeable in her world. Rodrigo.

      His arm came around her at the same moment she sought his support, memories billowing inside her head like the sooty smoke of an oil-spill fire. “This is where we boarded the plane.”

      He stared down at her for a suspended moment before closing his eyes. “Dios, lo siento, Cybele—I’m so sorry. I didn’t factor in what it would do to you, being here, where your ordeal began.”

      She snatched air into her constricted lungs, shook her head. “It’s probably the right thing to do, bringing me here. Maybe it’ll get the rest of my memories to explode back at once. I’d welcome that over the periodic detonations.”

      “I can’t take credit for attempting shock therapy. We’re here for Mel’s funeral.” She gaped at him. He elaborated. “It’s not a traditional funeral. I had Mel’s parents flown over from the States so they can take his body home.”

      She struggled to take it all in. Mel’s body. Here. In that hearse over there. His parents. She didn’t remember them. At all. They must be in the Boeing. Which had to be Rodrigo’s. They’d come down, and she’d see them. And instead of a stricken widow they could comfort and draw solace from, they’d find a numb stranger unable to share their grief.

      “Rodrigo.” The plea to take her back now, that she’d been wrong, couldn’t handle this, congealed in her throat.

      He’d turned his head away. A man and a woman in their early sixties had appeared at the jet’s open door.

      He reached for his door handle, turned to her. “Stay here.”

      Mortification filled her. She was such a wimp. He’d felt her reluctance to face her in-laws, was sparing her.

      She couldn’t let him. She owed them better than that. She’d owe any grieving parents anything she could do to lessen their loss. “No, I’m coming with you. And no wheelchair, please. I don’t want them to think I’m worse than I am.” He pursed his lips, then nodded, exited the car. In seconds he was on her side, handing her out. She crushed his formal suit’s lapel. “What are their names?”

      His eyes widened, as if shocked all over again at the total gaps in her memory. “Agnes and Steven Braddock.”

      The names rang distant bells. She hadn’t known them long, or well. She was sure of that.

      The pair descended as she and Rodrigo headed on an intercept course. Their faces became clearer with every step, setting off more memories. Of how Mel had looked in detail. And in color.

      Her father-in-law had the same rangy physique and wealth of hair, only it was gray where Mel’s had been shades of bronze. Mel had had the startlingly turquoise eyes of her mother-in-law.

      She stopped when they were a few steps way. Rodrigo didn’t.

      He kept going, opened his arms, and the man and woman rushed right into them. The three of them merged into an embrace that squeezed her heart dry of its last cell of blood.

      Everything hurt. Burned. She felt like strips were being torn out of her flesh. Acid filled her eyes, burned her cheeks.

      The way he held them, the way they sought his comfort and consolation as if it was their very next breath, the way they all clung together …The way he looked, wide open and giving everything inside him for the couple to take their fill of, to draw strength from.

      Just when she would have cried out Enough—please, the trio dissolved their merger of solace, turned, focused on her. Then Agnes closed the steps between them.

      She tugged Cybele into a trembling hug, careful not to brush against her cast. “I can’t tell you how worried we were for you. It’s a prayer answered to see you so well.” So well? She’d looked like a convincing postmortem rehearsal last time she’d consulted a mirror. But then, compared to

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