“He’s adorable,” Mia said, but she didn’t look at me.
“What was your sex life like in L.A.? Movie stars?” Tracy, one of the front desk staff, asked.
“No movie stars. I did date an agent once though,” Mia replied.
I wanted to kick that agent’s ass. Even as I thought it, I knew it was ridiculous to be jealous. Mia and I had been over for years. Still, maybe it was because we’d been young, or that I’d been her first, a part of me still thought of her as mine. Maybe it was because she was the first woman, the only woman, I’d ever loved.
“Have you met movie stars?” Peggy asked.
“I’ve seen them, but I don’t know any of them.” Mia wiped condensation from her glass.
“We get the occasional movie star up here,” Candace said.
“Don’t you get bored going through all that legal mumbo jumbo?” Dr. Comstock said. His inability to stick to the conversation at hand may have been one reason his wife left him.
Mia shrugged. “It’s not mumbo jumbo to me. And no. Today I read through vendor contracts and saw all the places you’re potentially screwed.”
“What?” We all said.
“Take your EMR system—”
“I don’t want it.” Peggy’s face pinched into disgust.
I had to agree. The software was a pain in the ass. “What about it?”
“In the contract, the hospital indemnifies the software manufacturer of all liability,” Mia said.
“What does that mean?” Candace asked.
“It means if the software fucks up, they can’t be held liable,” I said, wondering why the hospital would agree to something like that.
“Has it fucked up?” Mia asked, surprising me as the woman I remembered didn’t use the f-word.
“There was the time the biopsy of cancer was entered on the wrong patient,” Peggy said. “It was figured out pretty quickly, but the woman did spend three agonizing hours thinking she had cancer.”
I winced. “Mostly the system is a pain in the ass. We spend way too much time taking notes and filling in information. In an ER, we can’t be wasting our time on all that, especially on a system that isn’t user intuitive.”
The other members of the staff nodded their heads at my statement.
“What about the person who did have cancer. If they went without necessary treatment based on EMR error—“
“I think that was a lab submission error,” Peggy said.
Mia shrugged. “The point is, if the software messes up, the hospital is liable. You could be liable. At my firm in L.A., we always negotiated some sort of shared liability. The EMR companies don’t want to do it, but like you said, they’re not infallible and they need to be motivated to make sure the software is up-to-date and working.”
“So are you going to do that for us?” I asked her.
“That wasn’t the vendor contract that the hospital is currently renegotiating, but it is on my list to talk to the hospital administrator about.”
“It’s so good to have you home, Mia.” Peggy gave her another hug.
I had to agree. Seeing Mia again was nice. To know she was well and happy. I watched her interact with the others, and while she’d been gone for many years, she seemed to have settled back into life in a small town. I had the desire to get her alone to talk with her and find out how she really was. Before, she hadn’t wanted to return to small town living. Was this a hardship or was she ready to change her lifestyle?
I leaned forward. “Wanna dance?” I asked it before I assessed the wisdom of it.
Mia’s eyes flashed with surprise.
“Go dance with him,” Peggy urged.
“Yes, okay.” Mia finished her drink.
I stood and waited for her. We made our way to the tiny dance area where two other couples were dancing. The music was a fast dance song from the 1980’s. It was too loud to actually talk to her, so I danced, taking in every sway and shimmy of her body.
I leaned forward. “Remember that night we went to the dance at one of the frat houses at Stanford and won the dance contest?”
She laughed. “Oh God, that’s right. I’d nearly forgotten. I hadn’t realized you had moves, Nick.” There was a flare of heat in her eyes that made me wonder if she was remembering other moves I had.
The music ended and slow song from the 1990s came on. Before she moved to go back to the table, I reached out for her.
“One more?”
Her body tensed slightly but then she nodded. “Sure.”
I pulled her in, trying not to groan as her soft body and sweet scent assaulted my senses. “I didn’t get a chance to tell you how sorry I was about your mom when you were here last. Eli didn’t want me around.”
Her smile was bittersweet. “I should have sought you out, but I wasn’t here very long. I heard you were there when she was brought in.”
I swallowed the lump as the memory of Jane Parker’s battered and bruised body was wheeled into the emergency room filled my brain. “I was.”
“Was she conscious?”
I nodded. “Yes.”
Mia’s eyes filled with tears and I hated that this reunion was veering down a sad path. “Did she know … that she was going to … you know.”
I closed my eyes. “Everything that could be done—“
“Did she know?”
I inhaled a breath. “She knew it wasn’t good.”
Mia laid her head on my chest, and I gave her a soft kiss on her head. So soft, so she didn’t feel it, but I knew I’d given it.
She pulled back and looked up at me. “You were with her?”
“Until she went to surgery.”
She gave me a wan smile. “I’m glad you were there. That someone who cared for her was there.”
I waited for her to blame me like Eli did, but instead, she rested her head on my chest again and simply swayed with me to the music.
“Get your fucking hands off my sister,” Eli’s voice echoed through the bar.
Instead of releasing her, I gripped her
