displayed no sign or other identifying features; but, now, the front was marred by divots and patches of scorching. The front edge of the roof looked chaotically scalloped, as if some horror-movie monster had struck it with a claw. Otherwise, the building appeared to be intact.
Focused on the building with laserlike intensity, Susan nearly missed the other telltale signs of a recent catastrophe. Cued by her father’s worried glance around, Susan opened her mind to the obvious details. Blinking police caution tape enclosed the area, and hazard blockades sat at either end of the street. The burnt, twisted, and sodden remains of the glide-bus still occupied part of the street, where a police forensics team conferred, taking myriad tiny samples. A tangled array of metal stood like a perverted piece of art, jutting from blackened concrete; and it took Susan a moment to recognize the remains of the bus stop. A dark pool of blood marred the sidewalk, connected to an erratic trail. Susan remembered its origin: She had eased a piece of glass from a woman’s thigh, only to have her run in panic when it came free. Remington had had to tackle her to allow Susan to hold pressure on the injury.
The memory brought a deep frown to Susan’s face. She had never understood why desperate circumstances brought out the best in some people and the worst in others. In emergencies, Susan had always noticed time seemed to slow down for her. When a driver swerved into her path, or a patient went into cardiac arrest, she felt as if she had all the time in the world to take evasive action or to recall the sequence of emergency procedures. Some other people seemed to freeze and grow desperately pale, or dithered wildly and purposelessly, and still more screamed and ran in some random direction, which usually only served to worsen the situation. She had even seen fellow students, male and female, faint dead away in a crisis.
Susan appreciated that one’s reaction to disaster was a natural phenomenon, not under the control of the individual. Obviously, those prone to calm thought belonged in occupations such as law enforcement, military, traffic control, and medicine, where potentially life-threatening calamities arose often and required quick wits and action. She appreciated that Remington appeared to have nerves of steel. She could think of nothing more important for someone operating on people’s brains and spinal cords, and she did not know if she could have respected a man who panicked in a crisis, no matter how natural and understandable the reaction.
A hand fell to Susan’s shoulder. Startled from her thoughts, Susan looked up to her father, his face screwed up in pain.
Abruptly concerned, Susan grabbed his hand. “Are you all right?”
“Me?” Her father’s features shifted instantly from discomfort to clear confusion. “I was worried about you. Are you okay coming here so soon?”
“I’m fine. I can’t say it’s not weird seeing it again, but I’m not suffering from post-traumatic anxiety or anything.” Susan glanced past him at Remington, who seemed more interested in the USR building than in the wreckage. “Remy seems fine, too.”
At the sound of his name, Remington looked at Susan. “Hmm?”
“I said you don’t seem to be suffering from post-traumatic anxiety.”
“No. Should I be?”
“I hope not,” Susan said, “because I’m not, either.”
Apparently intuiting the original source of concern, Remington addressed John Calvin. “If anyone should know, she should.” He jerked a thumb toward Susan and whispered as if revealing a dangerous secret, “She’s a headshrinker.”
Susan’s father chuckled. “Yes, indeed she is. And a good one, so I’ve heard.”
Though merely banter, the words made Susan cringe. “Well, you didn’t hear it from me. I sent a psychopath home to murder her sister and maim her brother, then couldn’t talk a schizophrenic out of blowing up a bus.” Those two enormous failures would weigh heavily on her conscience, she believed, for all eternity. She ground her teeth as guilt swam down upon her again. In her mind, the blood of Misty Anson would always stain her hands.
“Ah,” Remington said. “So now we measure success and failure by whether or not crazy people act crazy?”
Susan turned him a withering look. “That is my job, Remy. To keep crazy people from doing crazy things.”
“First of all,” he reminded her, “Payton Flowers was never
Susan wanted to do that; but, while awake and in her dreams, she found herself reliving the moment when Sharicka’s mother had asked her opinion. “Who says I’m not moving on?”
“The person who watched you say nothing when a man announced his plans to blow us up.”
Susan wanted to clobber both of the men in her life. “What are you saying? That I was afraid to try to dissuade Payton because I felt inadequate after allowing Sh —” She caught herself, then continued. “That little girl a deadly home visit?”
Both men only looked at her, brows raised like psychiatrists who have just tricked a patient into breakthrough self-analysis.
Susan shook her head so hard, her hair whipped her face. “I didn’t act on the bus because I didn’t know Payton well enough. I didn’t know what would provoke or deter him. Besides, I didn’t really believe he had a working bomb.”
“Okay.” Remington said in that aggravating tone men use when they hand over a reluctant victory for the sole purpose of ending an argument.
Susan felt her limbs shaking. The whole ordeal seemed to crash down on her at once: the terror, the helplessness, and the realization she alone might have had the power to stop it.
Suddenly, Susan found herself enfolded in Remington’s embrace. “I’m sorry,” he whispered directly into her ear. “I’m sorry about what I said. I was wrong.”
Susan trembled in his arms, cursing her weakness. Tears streamed down her face. “You’re not wrong, Remy. I just didn’t realize it before. I consider myself so strong; but, when it came to preventing a tragedy, I froze.”
“You didn’t freeze. You just didn’t take a chance. As it turned out, your decision to say nothing wasn’t wrong.”
Susan had to admit the worst had not come to pass. “I might have stopped the whole process,” she choked out. “I might have saved his life.”
“Maybe.” Remington squeezed her tightly and closed his eyes. “Or he might have freaked out and detonated the bomb with everyone on board. My point wasn’t that it was in any way your fault. I’m just saying, if you start overquestioning your every decision because of one mishap, you deprive the world of your obvious and incredible brilliance.”
John Calvin stepped aside, wisely allowing Remington to handle the situation, though his fatherly instincts had to ache.
Susan sank to the ground.
Remington squatted in front of her. “You’re the one condemning both situations as personal failures and taking the burden of guilt on yourself. Medicine is an art, not a science. You use as much knowledge and thought as you can, but it reaches a point where you have to play the odds and intuition. A postsurg patient gets septic. Was it the glove that broke and had to be changed midprocedure? Was it the sneeze? Or was it simply inevitable? The Guzman procedure works best for sixty-two percent of people with early spinal cord separation. You use it on a patient, and he winds up quadriplegic. Could he have led a perfectly normal life had you gone with the Striker technique? Would the outcome have been exactly the same, or would he have died? Life has a lot of forks. Just because the consequences of choosing one was bad doesn’t mean the others would have been any better.”
Susan understood his point. “But had I not sent her home, her sister would still be alive. Her brother would not have had to undergo emergency neurosurgery. Her parents would not have been devastated.”
“Her parents were already devastated,” Remington said firmly. “Long before you came into the picture.”
“Yes, but . . .” Susan forced back the tears, and a sob shuddered from her in its place. “But things would have been so much better. At least, the sister would be alive.”
“Would she?”
The question seemed ludicrous. “Of course she would.”
