“I did what Daddy told me to,” she answered. Her father laughed so hard he couldn’t stop, and her mother told him to go stand outside, like he was the one in trouble.
Her mother wanted to punish her. Her father took her out for the biggest ice cream sundae, instead.
Dad, she texted, are you still there?
. . .
. . .
. . .
Always, he wrote, and she exhaled.
—
THE SHOOTER HAD TAKEN EVERYONE’S cellphones and thrown them into the trash. He barricaded the front door with the couch and seats and coffee tables. Breathing hard, he turned around, leveling the gun at the others. “Do what I say,” he muttered, “and no one will get hurt.”
“No one else,” Izzy corrected under her breath.
She knew that he was watching her; his eyes felt like lasers. But Izzy didn’t care. She had kept up her end of the bargain, and there were people here who were hurt. She’d be damned if she sat back and let them suffer.
Janine still had her hands pressed on Bex’s chest. Izzy bent down, trying to see how much the wound was still bleeding. The woman’s whisper fell into her ear. “My niece. Closet.”
Izzy thought of the two faces, pinched and terrified, that had been staring up at her when she opened those doors at the gunman’s directive. She leaned over farther on the pretense of listening to Bex’s labored breath. “She’s okay,” Izzy murmured.
Bex’s eyes fluttered closed. “Need to tell Hugh.”
“Tell me what?”
Bex coughed, and then cried out from the pain that must have shot through her lungs and ribs. Izzy tried to distract her, because there was damn little else she could do but keep the woman comfortable. “What do you do, Bex?”
“Artist,” the woman whimpered. “Hurts.”
“I know,” Izzy soothed. “The less you can move, the better.” She glanced at Janine, and silently directed her to maintain her position. “I’m going to tend to someone else,” Izzy said, “but I promise I’ll be back.”
She inched across the carpet to Dr. Ward. The tourniquet that Joy had tied needed to be tighter and more durable.
“Vonita,” he said softly. “She’s gone?”
Izzy nodded. “I’m sorry.”
“So am I,” he murmured. “So am I.” He looked over his shoulder, as if he could see past the barrier of the front desk, where the body lay. “These women, they were all the daughters Vonita never had. Drove her husband crazy, how hard she worked at this place. He used to say they’d carry her out of here in a coffin.” His voice broke on the last word. “She would hate knowing that he turned out to be right.”
Izzy rolled the fabric from Dr. Ward’s pants leg around his thigh and tied it just above the wound. “Hold still, Doctor,” she said.
He raised a brow. “You just ripped my scrubs off. I think you can call me Louie, don’t you?”
Izzy placed a Sharpie she’d found under the couch at the center of the knot, then tied the fabric again. She began to twist the Sharpie, which wound the cotton around, tightening the new tourniquet. The blood flow trickled, stopped. “There,” she said. “That’s more like it.” She grabbed a roll of tape, awkwardly tugging it with her teeth so that she could secure the tourniquet in place. Then she looked at her wrist. It was just after twelve-thirty. Now, the countdown began: she had stopped Dr. Ward from bleeding out, but without arterial flow, there would eventually be ischemic damage to the tissue. If that binding stayed in place longer than two hours, there could be muscle or nerve injury. Six hours, and he would have to have his leg amputated.
Maybe by then they’d be rescued.
Dr. Ward patted her hand as she finished taping the tourniquet. “We make a good team,” he said. “Thank you.” He lifted his leg onto a chair so that it would be elevated above his heart.
She looked at Bex, still lying on the floor, deathly pale but stable.
Now that Izzy didn’t have a medical emergency to occupy her hands, they started shaking. She grabbed her right with her left.
“I haven’t seen you here before, have I?” Dr. Ward murmured.
Izzy shook her head. She started to answer, but then hesitated as the shooter passed by, talking to himself under his breath.
When he was on the other side of the room, the doctor spoke again. “You got a husband out there worrying about you?”
He was speaking quietly, creating a bubble of conversation just big enough for the two of them. “No,” she said. “Just a boyfriend.”
“Just a boyfriend?” he teased.
“Maybe a fiancé …”
“Maybe like you can’t remember?” Dr. Ward chuckled. “Or maybe like you haven’t decided yet?”
“It’s complicated.”
“Girl, I got nothing but time.” Dr. Ward grinned.
“It’s not that easy. We come from really different places,” Izzy explained.
“Palestine and Israel?”
“What? No …”
“Mars and Venus?” Dr. Ward asked. “Union and Confederacy?”
“Parker grew up eating caviar. I grew up eating when we had enough money for food.” Immediately, Izzy flushed beet red. She didn’t talk about her upbringing. She tried, on a daily basis, to forget it.
She and Parker had been together for three years. They hardly ever fought, and when they did, it always came down to the difference in their backgrounds.
There was the time they had only been dating a few weeks when she had come across him scrolling through social media on his phone. He’d murmured, Valencia looks nice.
Let me guess. She’s someone you went to school with. Jealousy had bristled through Izzy. Women with names like that had trust funds and ski instructors.
Parker had held out his phone to show her that it was the name of the new Instagram filter.
Someone’s jealous, he had teased.
I told you I’m not perfect.
Nope, Parker had said. But you’re perfect for me.
Another time, they had just moved in together and he’d put his glass on the coffee table they had just bought at a yard sale. How could you not use a coaster? she’d snapped.
It’s a twenty-dollar table, he had said, incredulous.
Izzy could not imagine spending that much on an item and not treating it like it was precious. Exactly, she’d said.
All the fight had gone out of him.
I’m an asshole, he had told her, and she never caught him without a coaster again.
She knew damn well why she had fallen for Parker. She just couldn’t, for the life of her, understand why he had fallen for her. One day, Parker would be embarrassed by her in the company of his friends, when she did something that revealed her upbringing. Or he would leave her and she’d be broken. Better to be the one to do the breaking.
Dr. Ward reached for her steady hand. “Well, look at that,” he said. “Someone’s forgotten to be scared.”
During this whispered conversation, which they might have been having anywhere and anytime, rather than in the middle of a hostage crisis, Izzy had stopped shaking. “What do you think he’s going to do to us?” she whispered.
“I don’t know,” the doctor replied. “But I do know you’re going to survive it.” He winked at her. “You can’t leave that poor boy of yours hanging.”
You don’t know the half of it, Izzy thought.
—
TRUTH BE TOLD, JANINE HAD been waiting for this day. She knew God would punish her; she just hadn’t thought it would be with quite this much irony.
She kept her hands pressed to the chest of the woman who had been shot. If she pushed hard enough, there wasn’t any blood. If she pushed hard enough, maybe she could shove back the secret that had been buried so far it felt like a false memory.