Page 3 of The Candle Palace (Jamison Valley 6)
“Yeah, me neither,” Felicity said. “Will you tell us?”
Not a lot of people knew our story. Milo had been so shy about his scars that he’d kept that experience in Spokane private. So when asked, I’d always told the story of how we’d met vague.
But Milo had opened up about it more and more over the past few years. He talked about the explosion. He wasn’t as compulsive about hiding his scars. And I knew he wouldn’t mind if I shared our story with my most trusted friends.
“Sure.” I took a long sip of my wine. “It all started at the Candle Palace.”
One
Twelve years earlier . . .
“Welcome back,” Kym said as I walked into the locker room. “How was vacation?”
“Oh, fine.”
Actually, my vacation had been a mess. Instead of having a week off to laze around my condo, bake cookies and binge-watch random television shows, I’d spent a week deep cleaning my mother’s house so my twenty-year-old brother, Denny, could move in with her. He’d been evicted from yet another apartment of his own.
I’d baked zero cookies. I’d watched zero minutes of TV. Because by the time I’d come home to my own bed each night, I’d been so exhausted from hauling boxes into storage and scrubbing walls coated with years of cigarette smoke that all I’d been able to do was shower and collapse.
But Kym hadn’t asked how my vacation was because she wanted those details. In the year we’d worked together, we hadn’t gotten past the superficial conversations as coworkers. She knew I was single and lived alone. I knew she was married to a banker with two teenage boys. Besides that, we talked about life inside this hospital. Particularly, life inside the burn unit.
“How was your New Year’s?” I asked, stowing my purse into my locker before sitting on a bench to untie my snow boots.
“Boring. The boys stayed up late. I was in bed by ten thirty.”
“I have you beat. I was asleep by nine.”
Kym laughed, closing her own locker. “See you out there.”
“Okay.” I nodded, swapping my boots for the pair of Nikes in my locker.
I put them on, made sure my badge was clipped to the pocket on my navy scrub pants, then swiped on another coat of mint lip balm and closed my locker. I was almost out the door when I spun around, remembering the tea light in my purse. With it safely in my pocket, I walked out and found Kym at the nurses station, chatting with the night-shift team.
It didn’t take them long to give us the night report then head for the locker room to go home for the day. The floor had been mostly quiet all night and our patient count was low.
“We had a new admit while you were gone,” Kym said as we walked the small loop of rooms that made up our unit. “He’s got third-degree burns on his arms and torso and a pile of second and firsts from head to toe.”
My heart ached for this stranger. Burns were slow and painful to heal, and he had a long road to recovery to walk. But like all the other patients who’d come in and out of these rooms, eventually he’d leave, mended. “What happened to him?”
“He was in an explosion.” She lowered her voice. We were alone in the hallway but sound tended to carry, bouncing off the gray-striped wallpaper and waxed linoleum floors. “I don’t know the whole story but I guess he’s a cop somewhere in Montana. The explosion happened at a meth house.”
I winced. “Are any of the burns chemical?”
“No. He’s been in and out of consciousness this week. His burns are so bad that he’s been on sedatives. But we began tapering them yesterday. Doctor Vernon wants the patient to be more lucid so we can assess pain and treatment. We’ve done the preliminary cleaning but haven’t starting debriding.”
Removing the dead skin and tissue from the burned area was a lengthy process that came with a lot of pain. We had a special bathtub to help, but if the burns were too severe, the only way to get the area prepared for a graft was with surgery. Then came the waiting. The burns had to be given time to restore good blood flow. A skin graft needed a healthy bed to latch on to.
The preparation for a graft took weeks. After the procedure, there’d be weeks to recover and monitor the new skin’s growth. Add onto that any physical therapy required, and it sounded like our newest patient would be here for a while.
“So how do you want to divide up the unit today?” I asked Kym.
“You can have Luna.” She gave me a knowing grin. “She’s been asking for you.”
“Thanks.” I smiled. We all had our favorite patients and Luna was mine. I’d never developed a personal relationship with a patient, but she was the exception. “Then I’ll take this side of the loop.”
“Sounds good.” Kym set off for her patients’ rooms with a wave. “See you later.”
“Bye.”
