Chapter 1 — Fifty-Two Calls

The smell of iodine and the steady beep of a monitor were the only things holding me to the world.

I was flat on a gurney in the emergency ward of Harbor General in San Diego, my right leg locked in a fresh plaster cast, eight stitches tracking across my calf, my skin already going the deep violet of a bad impact.

A driver had run the light at the corner of Grand Avenue while I was in the crosswalk.

I remember the sound more than the pain — a flat, wrong sound, and then the sky.

Strangers had been kind in a way that undid me a little, in the after.

A woman I’ll never see again had knelt on the asphalt and held my hand and told me help was coming, that I was going to be all right, that she wasn’t going anywhere.

A man had directed traffic around me with his jacket.

The paramedics had been gentle and unhurried and had called me by my first name.

It struck me later that I had received more genuine care from four people who did not know me, in the twenty minutes on that street, than I had gotten from my husband in three years of marriage — and that the difference had nothing to do with money, which none of those strangers knew I had, and everything to do with the plain human instinct to be tender toward someone who is hurt.

Zane did not have that instinct where I was concerned.

He never had.

I just hadn’t let myself measure its absence until I was lying in the road and a stranger’s hand was warmer than my wedding vow.

The pain, though, was not the thing pulling my attention.

The thing pulling my attention was the phone buzzing against the metal tray beside me, over and over, the way a wasp throws itself at a window.

When I finally made my hand steady enough to slide my thumb across the screen, my husband’s voice came through before I could say a word.

“You broke your leg, not your hands.

Order a car and come serve the food.”