Jodi paced the floor of the hospital room where she’d been for the last three hours. Mrs. Moore’s cell phone was pressed to her ear as she talked. “Yes, Doctor, I understand, but he’s mentally very sharp. I talk to him for several hours every week while we work on his pain management and flexibility. Studies have shown a strong correlation between a patient’s declining mental faculties and nursing home stays. He’s done one stint, he hated it, his wife hated it. Why should we jump to that as the default option here?”

She gave a tight smile to Mrs. Moore, who sat next to the hospital bed holding her husband’s hand while he slept, hopped up on painkillers for the fall he’d just taken with his new hip. He’d suffered a dizzy spell, tumbled down a couple of steps, and landed right on the damn hip that they’d been trying to rehab for the last six weeks.

Mrs. Moore had called Jodi in a panic, and she’d met them at the ER just as the ambulance pulled up. The last three hours had been nonstop arguing with paramedics, nurses, and now his orthopedic surgeon, while Jodi tried to get them all to stop the process that would place Mr. Moore in a nursing home for the foreseeable future.

“Yes, Doctor,” she said, rolling her eyes. “I do understand that if they leave the hospital against medical advice, his insurance will decline any further payments for this injury.”

She watched as defeat crawled across Mrs. Moore’s face and she began to cry.

Jodi walked out of the room and across the hallway into a small niche where nurses stood to update charts.

“Look, Dr. Revel, I know these people. They’re deeply attached. They barely made it through his last tour of the nursing home, and if you put him there again, it might not only kill him but her too. Do you have elderly relatives? Have you seen nursing homes? If we can come up with a plan to deal with his injury, including a way to keep it from happening again, will you at least consider a different course of action?”

She waited, listening to the pompous surgeon’s speech about all the patients just like Mr. Moore he’d treated. Of course, none of them were just like Mr. Moore because none of them were Mr. Moore. It was one of the flaws of modern medicine—doctors and nurses saw symptoms and diseases, not humans. Mr. Moore had the same symptoms as lots of other patients, but he wasn’t lots of other patients.

“Yes, sir, we can definitely live with that. We’ll give you another plan of treatment within the next twenty-four hours and then work from there. The family is very grateful. Thank you.”

After the call ended, Jodi took a moment to breathe deeply and recenter her thoughts. It had been nonstop panic since Mrs. Moore had called. They were without a doubt her favorite clients, and without any children, they had no one to advocate for them. When they’d called, she knew she couldn’t let them take on the institutional medical community without her help. So, she’d jumped in her car, rushed to hospital, and done nothing but soothe tattered nerves and discuss treatment options with hospital staff ever since.

She rolled her shoulders a couple of times before walking back across the hall and into Mr. Moore’s room.

“They’re going to make him go, aren’t they?” Mrs. Moore asked, her entire body telegraphing how exhausted she was.

“Not yet,” Jodi answered. “His surgeon has agreed to give us twenty-four hours to come up with an alternative treatment plan. I’ll put something together tonight, and discuss it with you first thing in the morning, then we’ll see what the doctor thinks.”

“Oh!” Mrs. Moore stood and moved to Jodi, grabbing both her hands and giving them a squeeze. “I can’t thank you enough. You’ve been so good to us. I know this isn’t part of your normal services. I just…I’m not sure how we can ever repay you.”

Jodi smiled down at the weathered face, thinking what a wonderful grandmother Mrs. Moore would have made. Maybe she could play that role for Katie since Jodi’s own mother certainly never would.

Then everything inside her went dark.

“Oh my God,” she gasped, flipping Mrs. Moore’s phone over in her hand. “What time is it?” She looked at the display that very clearly read five ten p.m. “Oh my God, oh my God, no, no, no.”

She jammed a hand into her hair, nausea rolling over her in waves.

“What is it?” Mrs. Moore asked, her eyes widening in concern.

“I was supposed to pick up my daughter at school two hours ago. Oh my God.”

“Okay, it’s going to be all right, sweetheart. The school won’t let children stand on the sidewalk alone for hours. They’ve certainly called whoever is on the contact list by now. I’m sure she’s with her father or someone else you’ve designated.”

Jodi’s stomach roiled. Oh God, how could she have let this happen? She looked around frantically for her purse, but she knew her phone wasn’t in it. She could picture it exactly where it lay on her desk where she’d been working when the Moores’ call had come through. She’d set the phone on the desk, grabbed her purse, and run out the door, never once stopping to think about her five-year-old waiting on the front lawn of the elementary school.

“I have to go,” she said hurriedly, shoving Mrs. Moore’s phone at her while she slung her purse over her shoulder. “Everything here is set for tonight. You make them get you a decent fold-out to sleep on, and I’ll be back in the morning.”

“Of course, sweetheart.” Mrs. Moore put a palm alongside Jodi’s cheek to stop her for a moment. “It will all be okay. I promise. You made a human mistake. You’re a beautiful person, and you love that little girl. She’ll forgive you.”

As she left the hospital, all Jodi could think was whether Ty would ever forgive her.

* * *

Modern cell phones were a curse, Jodi thought as she sped toward her little house. They kept you connected with more ease and speed than anything in history, but they also kept you tethered to them, because if you didn’t have them, you had no memory of anyone’s phone number. She hadn’t bothered to memorize Ty’s or Lynn’s numbers, and so all she could think to do was stop off at her house, grab the phone, and then call them while she sped to the ranch, praying the entire way they’d forgive her.

When she pulled up to her house, however, Ty’s truck sat in her driveway and the man himself sat on her front porch. Even from the driveway, Jodi could see the dark look on his face, and she took a bracing breath before exiting her SUV.

As she walked toward the porch, Ty stood, all six plus feet of him tense and vibrating.

“Is she okay?” Jodi asked without any greeting. She stepped up onto the porch and faced him.

“She will be. You want to tell me what the hell happened?”

“I got a call at about two o’clock. My best client, an elderly man, had fallen on his new hip and was heading to the ER. It was an emergency situation. Everyone was in a panic. They want to put him in a nursing home, we don’t think that’s where he belongs. I left my phone here at the house. If you go inside, you’ll find it right on the desk.”

“You could have borrowed a phone to call the school, me, Lynn. What the hell did you think would happen to her standing out on the front lawn waiting for her mother who wasn’t going to come?” The volume of Ty’s voice grew as did the furrow in his brow.

“I didn’t, okay?” she answered in anguish. “I didn’t think about what would happen to her because I forgot until five ten this evening. I forgot I was supposed to pick her up. I was so distracted—”

“You forgot.” His intonation was flat, cold, and final.

“I’m so sorry, Ty,” she whispered. “It was a terrible mistake. I’ll explain it all to her. I’ll make it right.”

“I’m not sure about all that, Jodi. I’m not sure you’ll be explaining anything to her. See, when you’re a parent, work doesn’t come before your kid. Friends don’t come before your kid. Your own needs don’t come before your kid’s. Barring you lying alongside the road unconscious, there is nothing that comes before your kid. You can’t ‘get distracted,’ you can’t forget, you can’t leave them standing alone in front of a school when they’re five fucking years old.”

Jodi’s heart stuttered, squeezing tightly, but she wasn’t going to fall apart. She wasn’t.

“I’m so sorry,” she said, nodding emphatically at his punishing words.

His gaze was cold, his words colder.

“I have to get home to my daughter, let her know you’re not dead on a roadside somewhere. All of our scheduling arrangements are off the table for now. I need to think about this. Figure out what’s next—if anything—for you and Katie.”

He stepped around her, careful not to touch her, and took the porch steps in one big stride.

“And what about us?” she asked, her voice strong even though everything else in her was about to crumble into dust.

He stopped at his truck, not turning to face her. His broad shoulders slumped, and his head dropped. “There was a point when I thought you might actually be lying alongside the PCH dead. Then there was the point at which I thought you’d skipped town because you couldn’t handle it all. Now I find out you’d completely forgotten her for hours. I’m not sure what I feel at this point. I’m not sure if I can be with a woman who does that.”

It was like a knife to her gut, digging deep, opening every wounded part of her she’d worked so hard to repair over the years. In one fell swoop, he managed to cut through it all and leave her bleeding on her front porch as he barreled away in his truck. Jodi sank to the floorboards of the old wooden porch, her knees to her chest as she watched the thing she wanted most in the world slip away yet again.