Page 2

TWO

Rachel removed the needle, put a piece of gauze over the vein, and taped it to my arm. “There you go,” she said. “You survived another one.”

Survived , I thought. Interesting choice of terms.

She zipped up her bag and gave me a cheery “Have a good one.”

I wasn’t having a good one when you got here, and I’m certainly not going to have one now , I thought, but I opted for, “You too. Close the door on your way out.”

Minna Schultz would have to wait. I went to my laptop and typed into the Google search bar: How often do labs screw up blood tests . Google, always trying to stay one step ahead of me, immediately gave me some options to finish my question: in cats, in dogs, in criminal cases, in early pregnancy .

“This is not a good day to test me, Google,” I said, banging out the words in humans on my keyboard.

I got ninety-six million results. I scanned the first few till I found an encouraging number. Labs make twelve million mistakes a year.

Yes, but out of how many, I thought, trying to decide if twelve million was a life raft. I was about to explore Google’s credibility quotient by typing in How many dogs a year actually do eat homework , when my cell phone rang.

I looked at the caller ID and burst out laughing.

It said JIFFY ESCORT SERVICE.

My husband, Alex, the absolute love of my life, knows how to make me laugh. One of his favorite pranks is to sneak into my phone and change his name in my contacts. Today his timing was off. I stifled the laugh and answered the phone.

“I heard,” I said, throwing on my coat. “I’m on my way.”

“I’m at the pond,” he said. “How are you holding up?”

How was I holding up? I wanted to take him in my arms and say, “You run the damn hospital. Can you find out if some klutz in the lab spilled their Red Bull all over my last blood test, or am I a dead woman walking?”

But nothing sours Alex faster than a whiny patient having an “I know I’m going to die” episode. I let it go.

“It’s going to take us at least a week to get back to normal,” I said, “but I managed to get the County Environmental Commission to send two generator trucks, so I have the equipment I need to keep our little shitstorm from overflowing into the Hudson River.”

“Great. You can play that up when you run for reelection.”

Reelection . More dark humor. God was working overtime today.

“What’s going on at the pond?” I asked.

“A few dozen people braved the storm in the beginning, but the rain is finally starting to let up, and the crowd behind the yellow tape is starting to build.”

“Tell Chief Vanderbergen to take pictures. They’re all suspects.”

“I doubt it. I saw the body. No sign of trauma. I don’t think we’re looking at a homicide, Maggie.”

“Suicide?” I said.

“Not my call,” he said. “That’s for the medical examiner to decide.”

“Alex...”

“What?”

“How are you holding up?”

He let out a long exhale. “Minna Schultz has been a roadblock to everything we’re trying to do here at the hospital. That’s over now, but I would feel a whole lot better if we beat her in court. This... this just leaves a stain on the whole project.”

“If she did commit suicide, that would be her motive,” I said. “She knew she couldn’t win, so rather than lose publicly, she decided to piss all over your victory on her way out.”

“You sound like a lawyer.”

“A lawyer in desperate need of a hug,” I said. “I’ll be there in ten. Love you.”

“What an incredible coincidence,” he said. “I love me too.”

It was a tired old line, but it always made me smile.

I hung up, looked down, and it caught my eye. The gauze bandage that Rachel had taped to my arm.

I peeled it off and tossed it. But I couldn’t ignore it. It was a graphic reminder that I had been getting ready for this day for more than half my life.

The first time I found out I was a candidate for an early grave, I was seventeen. You’d think it would have destroyed me. Just the opposite. It was the perfect excuse to break away from my poster-child-for-teenage-excellence image. I was still president of my class, snagging straight As, going to church on Sundays, and rocking the SATs with a 1500, but once Dr. Byrne told me I had the markers for a fatal inflammatory blood disease, I developed an instant case of the fuck-its.

Sex, drugs, alcohol, rule-breaking, risk-taking? Fuck it. If I was going to die young, I was going to live life as hard as I can.

Of course, I couldn’t compete with my best friend, Misty Sinclair, a one-woman wrecking ball who’d call me and say, “Let’s crank shit up to eleven and break off the knob.” But I ran a pretty strong second. Because, hey... what the hell did I have to lose?

And then I met Alex Dunn, and suddenly I had an anchor in the insanity of my life. Three years later, when I gave birth to Kevin and Katie, my Mommy genes kicked in, and I found a purpose beyond the adrenaline rush of survival.

Dying young was no longer all about me. It was about them. What would happen to them if I died?

The more I ruminated about it, the more obsessed I became with their lives after my death. It was not a random obsession. My shrink confirmed what I already knew. It was PTSD.

When my mother died, I watched in horror as women circled my grieving father like hammerheads on a feeding frenzy. And when the wrong woman stepped in to take my mother’s place, the consequences were devastating.

I refused to let the same thing happen to Alex and my kids. I know it sounds insane, but the idea I’d buried in the darkest recesses of my brain became a priority as soon as the Angel of Death with her little pink umbrella showed up at my door.

I was going to spend my last remaining days on earth searching for the next Mrs. Dunn. I might not find her, but I would die trying.