The Doctor's Reason to Stay. Dianne Drake

Edie and Rafe were laying out the picnic food. “Other than the fact that you’re a child life specialist and that my aunt thought highly of you…so does Molly, by the way, that’s about all I know.”

      “There’s not much to tell. I’ve been in Lilly Lake for a few months now. I work, I like to read, I have a cat…” She shrugged. Getting personal wasn’t easy for her because she’d spent most of her life trying to stay guarded. On purpose. One little slip of the tongue and the social workers had been on the doorstep, one misspoken word to her teacher that could be perceived as something wrong in her life and everything had gone crazy. The possibility had always been there that she could be snatched away from her mother, thrown into a foster-home where nobody loved her, and her mother forced into a nursing home until some kindly lawyer made it all better, or her mother died. Grim reality then, bad memories of it even now. “I’m from New York City originally. Born and raised there. Went to school there, didn’t ever have any call to wander very far away until I took this job in Lilly Lake. And I’m not married now, but you already know that.”

      “Not married now?”

      “Well, there were a couple of years in my life when I was. You know, naive schoolgirl meets big charmer. He wasn’t what I needed, I wasn’t what he wanted and in the end we didn’t even make any memories, good, bad or otherwise. So, you’ve never been married, have you? Your aunt told me you…”

      “She told you I avoid it like the plague. Right?”

      “Something like that.”

      “Well, she was right about that. I do avoid it, maybe not so much like the plague as I do like an entanglement I just don’t want to deal with. The thing is, Aunt Grace harped at me for my lifestyle, for being single. Yet she never married, and she never considered that a lack in herself.”

      “But she considered it a lack in you?” Edie asked.

      “I don’t honestly know.”

      “Maybe she just wanted to see you have a shot at something she missed.”

      He thought about that for a moment. Frowned. “She never seemed lonely, never really struck me as someone who wanted a permanent relationship in her life.”

      “Yet she was surrounded by so many friends, and she took in children all the time. She kept herself busy, Rafe, and she was devoted to the people in her life, but maybe, at night, when she went to bed, there were times when she would have preferred not going alone. It could be she didn’t consider your lifestyle a lack so much as she didn’t want you to go to bed alone every night either. I’d say that’s someone who truly loved you.”

      “I was lucky,” he said.

      “More than lucky. Blessed.”

      Rafe was quiet for a moment, his eyes fixed on something far off that wasn’t really there. Then he cleared his throat and drew in a deep breath. “So, what else is there to know about you?”

      “Not much, really. I’m taking some online classes in preparation for getting my master’s degree. I like gardening. Oh, and I’m thinking about getting a kitten to keep my other cat, Lucy, company, when I’m away.”

      Even to Edie, all the explanations sounded like uptight chatter. Nothing too significant, nothing too revealing…pretty much the way she’d trained herself to chat when people had insisted on it. It was all laid out, evenly rehearsed, rarely off the script. Reverting back to old habits was what she did when she was nervous. Rafe made her nervous.

      “No family?” he asked. “Parents? Brothers or sisters?”

      She shook her head. “Not any more. Maybe some distant relatives I’ve never met but, basically, it’s just me now. And you?”

      “Just Jess. And we’re not really too close. We talk occasionally, see each other whenever I get to New York City…he’s a firefighter there.”

      “I thought Grace said he was a doctor.”

      “He is…was. Trauma surgeon. But he experienced a loss in Afghanistan…his fiancée died in his arms, and he left medicine. Took up a more risky life. Don’t know why, and I’m not going to argue with him about it.”

      “Even though you think he should go back to medicine?”