Sweet Justice

“She’s on a vent. And her feet and legs—they’re badly burned. She has twenty percent of her body...burned. The pants she was wearing...and the shoes... They melted in the heat of the fire. How hot does it have to be to melt shoes?” Mallory shook her head and closed her eyes tight in a vain effort to banish the image from her head.

“They were bedroom slippers,” Andrew said. “Some sort of pink furry ones.”

She looked up in surprise. “Bunny slippers. They were bunny slippers. You saw her, then? When they pulled her out?”

His cheeks flared with color, and he ducked his head. “I—er—me and another firefighter, we were the ones who pulled her out. And you’re right. It was a really hot fire. This place—” he waved one long arm to encompass not just the waiting room, but the burn center itself “—it’s great. They can do miracles here.”

“You know it, then? It’s a good place?”

“Yeah, oh, yeah. My dad...”

A spasm of pain crossed his face as his words trailed off. He chewed on his bottom lip.

“Your dad what?” Mallory said. She needed to hear something hopeful.

“Well, he was here. There was this warehouse fire, see, and he got trapped in it—”

“Oh, so that’s why you’re a firefighter,” she guessed, laying a palm against his forearm. She should have realized it would be something like that, him giving back after seeing a family member hurt.

“Well, sort of, I guess. He was the fire chief. He—he went in to help rescue another firefighter.”

“He’s okay now?”

“Uh...no, I’m afraid not. He didn’t make it. But—” He turned to her, his own hand covering hers where it lay on his arm. “He was a lot worse than Katelyn sounds—he had burns on nearly three quarters of his body, and, well, it would have taken a miracle for anybody to survive that.”

Mallory sagged back into the stiff, unforgiving chair. It wasn’t quite high enough to rest her neck, and too straight to find a good position in. “Oh. I’m sorry. This has to be hard for you to come here.”

She couldn’t have done it—gone to the hospital waiting room in Macon, back home, where she’d heard the news of her parents’ passing. Maybe she should have been strong enough, but ever since then, she’d given a wide berth to hospitals of any sort, especially that one.

Andrew’s face creased into an aw-shucks-it’s-nothing smile. “No. I wanted to come. When you’re part of the club—this awful, awful club—you know what somebody else is going through, and you... Well, you want to make it better. I’m just sorry you haven’t had more encouraging news.”

“I haven’t had much news at all, but I expect they’re busy, and I... To tell the truth, I haven’t been here that long—only since about, oh, a little after noon.”

Andrew chuckled. “It’s after five o’clock already. You’re lost to Hospital Time.” He squeezed her hand, seemed to realize what he was doing and then moved his own from hers. Mallory felt the waiting room’s chill air bite into her at the absence of his warm hold.

Andrew was ducking down, pulling up the bag. He placed it in his lap. “My mom put a care package together for you—she’s good about stuff like that. She thought you might need a few things.”

“Oh, she shouldn’t have—” Mallory protested.

“No, she wanted to. She remembers, see? How it was with her when Dad was...well, here. And she knew the family probably wouldn’t want to leave, not this first night anyway. Say, where is the rest of the family?” He craned his neck around, spied the old man. “Am I disturbing your... Is that your dad?”

Mallory’s throat closed up on her, and this time, she couldn’t hold back a tear as it slid down her cheek. Embarrassed at her loss of control, she swiped it away. “Uh, no, that’s somebody else. This is it. Just me. Katelyn and I lost our parents in a car wreck nearly five years ago.”

“Oh, man.”

Andrew’s eyes held so much compassion that she had to look away. “It’s okay. We get by.”

And they had. Until now, they’d made it. It had been tough. It had meant short-selling the house they’d grown up in, letting go of some dreams, working two jobs at times, getting creative to make her paycheck stretch. Katelyn always complained that Mallory pinched pennies so hard that they’d spit out nickels.

She’d kept Katelyn out of the foster care system, and she’d managed to put food on the table, and keep Katelyn in school...

I’ll do anything. Anything. Just please, please, pull through, Katie-bug. Please.

“Well, uh...” Andrew cleared his throat. “Ma wasn’t sure how many folks you’d have with you, so she sent a lot.” He reached down and patted the cooler.

“I—I don’t know what to say.”

“Nothing to say. Here—this bag, it’s got, hmm, let’s see...a blanket, a pillow...oh, and Ma sent a toothbrush and toothpaste and some hand sanitizer.”

“Oh, wow. I was just wishing for a blanket. She must have read my mind.”

“Ma says to tell you that the nurses will give you another blanket if you ask—the waiting room can get kind of cold. Oh, and don’t forget that the Southeast Burn Foundation will put you up. Just ask the nurses, and they’ll get you hooked up with the right person. They’ve got this hospitality house for the families, and they provide one good meal a day.”

Mallory felt herself blinking back still more tears. So much kindness, and when she’d been feeling pathetically sorry for herself.

“Ma knew, if you were anything like her, that nobody could pry you away from this place tonight, and you’d probably headed up here without much thought of anything but getting here.” Andrew patted the lid of the cooler. “She sent, hmm, fried chicken, butter beans, mashed potatoes and sliced tomatoes, and some apple cobbler for dessert. Oh, and tea. I hope you like iced tea, because she sent a whole thermos of it.”

“There’s no way I can possibly eat all of that...”

Andrew nodded toward the man on the couch, who was now snoring gently. “Share it, then. That old fellow looks as though he could use a good meal. And the apple cobbler will keep for your breakfast.”

“Please, won’t you have some with me?” Mallory asked.

“Uh...” Andrew ran a hand over his close-cropped hair. “Ma’d skin me alive if she knew I’d eaten up some of the food she sent you.”

“I don’t want to eat by myself.” The confession surprised her. What was it about Andrew Monroe that made her feel so...not alone?

“In that case, even Ma would tell me to join you,” he said with a grin and a definitive nod. “She’d surely want me to encourage you to eat.”

She managed a small portion of the delicious supper, swallowing it past the lump of fear in her throat. Every time a person in a white coat or scrubs walked by the door, Mallory found herself tensing. Her mind simultaneously prayed they were coming to tell her something and hoped they would go past if it were bad news.

Then, as Andrew was helping her stack the food back into the cooler, the door opened. There stood the doctor, her phalanx of white-coated interns and medical students behind her.

Mallory froze. She felt Andrew take the plastic container of mashed potatoes from her. She turned and numbly accepted the doctor’s outstretched hand in its proffered shake. The woman sat in the chair across from her.

“Okay, well. She is...stable. It’s been a real battle, I won’t lie. We’ve got her on three pressors to keep her blood pressure up, and she’s continuing to need maximum support from the vent. We’ve assessed the burns to her legs and feet, and, as I told you before, we’re dealing with twenty percent of her body surface. The burns are...well, the majority of the higher ones are at least second degree, and she has third-degree burns on her feet. That is serious. Also...do you know if she came in contact with a live electrical wire? She has burns on her hand and torso that appear to be from electric shock.”

Mallory shuddered. “I—I wasn’t there—I—”

“No,” Andrew spoke up. “I was part of the responding fire department. The house didn’t have power. We always check and get the power company to shut it off. There’s no way she could have gotten an electrical shock. She was fine when I heard her—she was conscious and alert when I had to evacuate a fellow firefighter of mine. She got burned in the time it took for us to go back in after her.”

The doctor gave him a dubious look. “The burns on her hand and arm and torso are consistent with, say, a frayed extension cord. Maybe she came in contact with an exposed wire and it knocked her unconscious? It’s the least of her worries, but it makes me concerned that we may have missed deeper wounds.”

“I can assure you,” Andrew insisted. He was leaning forward now. “There was no power to that house, not that I know of.”

The doctor held his gaze, turned to take in the curious faces of her flock of junior doctors, and shrugged. “I’ve seen a lot of electrical burns in my time. And this? Despite what you say, it looks like one. We’ll treat it as we see it and keep an eye out for anything else.”

She rose from her chair and looked at Mallory. “Do you have any questions?”

“When can I see her?” Mallory husked. “And—and is she—she...” She couldn’t form the words.

“You can see her briefly in a few minutes, but I warn you, we have her in a medically induced coma. The next twenty-four hours are critical. Please rest assured that we are doing all we can. It’s a miracle that she’s made it this far, but...well, if it makes you feel any better, we’ve seen worse burns.”

Then she was gone, her coterie with her.

“That makes no sense,” Andrew muttered. “How could she get an electrical burn? She was fine—well, not fine, but—”

“I don’t understand.” Mallory managed to pull her focus back to Andrew’s words. “What happened?”

“It was—well, a little hairy. See, the guy with me fell through the floor.”

Mallory put her hand to her mouth. “Is—is he okay? Is he—is that why you’re here?” The idea that she’d not even thought of anyone else being injured shamed her.

“Oh, yeah—it was a scare, I tell you. I pulled him up, got him to the front porch. And he’s fine. A cracked rib, a bump to the head. He’ll be raring to go in a day or so.”

“Oh, well—that’s good.” Relief sluiced over Mallory.

“Yeah, so—well, just before my buddy went down, we heard her—your sister. We were in the foyer, right at the stairs. She was calling for help on the landing above us, running around like a jackrabbit. Instead of going out a downstairs window, she must have gone upstairs, maybe to escape the smoke? And then she panicked, maybe couldn’t find her way out? I know she was conscious and alert then, and the power was switched off. We always check. Anyway, I had to get Eric to the front porch. I got him out, let the EMTs check him out and then I told the Captain I’d go back in and look for her.”

“Wait...wait.” Mallory struggled to understand the timeline. “You heard her? Right above you? And...you left her? You left my sister in a burning house?”

“Well...yeah, it’s protocol.” Andrew shrugged one shoulder. “Order of priority. We go after fellow firefighters first, civilians second and property third—a really, really distant third. And she obviously had air—so that meant we had time.”

The warmth Andrew had given her with his reassuring smile and his care package coalesced into an icy block within Mallory.

“Protocol?” she choked out. “Why would your...protocol dictate that a civilian is saved after a firefighter?”

Andrew blinked. “A firefighter wouldn’t be down in the first place if it weren’t for having to go in after the civilian. And—I mean—he’s my buddy. I got his back, he’s got mine. He would have done the same for me.”

“You’re saying...that since my sister is a—a civilian, she gets left in a burning house?” This blindsided Mallory. It didn’t square with her idea of firefighters running into houses that were aflame or rescuing cats up trees. It didn’t sound in the least heroic.

“I guess you could say that,” Andrew said slowly. He had a wary look on his face, as though he realized all of a sudden that he had said the exact wrong thing.

“I am saying that!” The ice grew inside her, a cold fury that rivaled the chill outside. “You took the time to help your buddy to the front porch, and you ignored my sister?”

“It was a bad injury, and the stairs were too much of a risk for us to go up that way, so Captain said we’d use a ladder—”

“You just said your buddy was fine—a broken rib, a bump on the head—didn’t you? Did I hear that right?”

Andrew stood up, took a step toward the door. “Uh, maybe it was a bad idea, me coming here. I just—felt bad. You know. For Katelyn. Because she—” He broke off, ducked his head.

“Because you left her. All this—” She swept her hand at the cooler, the blanket. “It’s because you feel guilty, right? You knew you shouldn’t have left her.”

Andrew passed a hand over his hair, not meeting her eyes, his mouth grimacing. “I didn’t want to leave her. I do feel bad. But—I mean, my buddy. I had to take care of him.”

“Your buddy is fine! And Katelyn—Katelyn may die.” Split-second decisions—with no thought to the consequences—like the guy in the eighteen-wheeler who’d thought he could make the light and instead T-boned her parents’ car.

And now another decision just like that—another one was going to cost her the last bit of family she had left on this earth. “You were there,” Mallory sobbed. “In the house. And you heard my sister calling for help—”

Andrew’s face tensed. “Look, I don’t expect you to understand. You weren’t there.”

“Apparently,” she shot back, “you weren’t there, either, not for my sister. Your buddy? Well, he had gear, right? Gear to keep him from getting burned, and a mask to help him breathe, and—and training—he knew what to do in a fire—it was his job—but my sister...she’s just a kid! And all she had on was—was yoga pants and the pink bunny slippers I gave her for Christmas—”

Mallory felt the dinner she’d just eaten rise in her throat, her stomach churning. She put her hand to her mouth and ran from the room. She had to get away—away from Andrew Monroe.

CHAPTER THREE

Three months later

THE EARLY-JANUARY sky stretched out in a deceptive azure blue over the country road Mallory drove down, the sun bright as it shimmered across the asphalt. A sky like that called to mind balmy temperatures, not the forty degrees it was, made even colder by the brisk breeze that feathered through the tall thickets of pines on both sides of the road and buffeted the canvas top of her convertible.

Beside her, Katelyn riffled through the stack of papers. “Yeah, this is the road. See? Stanton Mill Road.”

Mallory dared a glance at the brochure from the therapy facility that Katelyn had shoved into her line of vision. The ugly scar on her sister’s small hand—a starburst with a long tail—gave Mallory a fresh jolt.

And that’s the least of her scars. Mallory pushed away the thought. No, she had to be positive. Katelyn was here, in this car, able to talk, able to get around in her wheelchair. She’d come so far, first at the burn center, and then in an in-patient rehab facility.

And maybe this last round of therapy would actually get Katelyn up, out of that wheelchair, and on her way back to college.

Focusing her gaze back on the road ahead, Mallory said, “So we just keep our eyes peeled for the sign—Happy Acres Farm? Right?”

As if she didn’t know. As if Katelyn hadn’t begged and wheedled and pleaded, like she was so good at doing. When she’d first mentioned it, Mallory had thought she’d lost her mind. Hippotherapy? She’d never heard of it.

Somewhere, somehow, Katelyn had gotten hold of the shiny, colorful brochure featuring uplifting photos of kids and grown-ups on horses.

Katelyn had always been crazy about horses—why, Mallory couldn’t say. Anything that big and hulking, that could tumble you off and trample you, couldn’t really be a pet, could it?

Whether it was Katelyn’s horse obsession or someone’s assurance that hippotherapy would get her out of that wheelchair, the brochure hadn’t left Katelyn’s possession. Over time, the corners had become dog-eared, the folds so frail that one of them had to be mended with cellophane tape. The brochure had become Katelyn’s talisman. Happy Acres Farm, the thing she’d work toward when nothing else would motivate her, when she’d wanted to simply give up.

Mallory couldn’t blame Katelyn for those times. Her sister’s screams of agony as nurses cared for her burned legs and feet still echoed in her head. And even now, Katelyn had days of unrelenting pain.

There’d come a point during a particularly bad day of therapy when Katelyn had given her scarred legs and feet a disgusted grimace.

“Nobody’ll ever want me,” she’d said. “I won’t ever be able to walk again. What’s the point? Maybe I should just be happy with what I’ve got. I’m alive, okay? Isn’t that enough for you, Mallory?”

It wasn’t. Mallory had to give her sister her life back—she owed it to their parents. Their mom and dad would expect that, would want her to do whatever she could.

Even if it means getting lost in the middle of the pinewoods of south Georgia trying to find a horse farm.

“Hey! There it is!” Katelyn pointed. She jumped up and down in the seat beside Mallory. “See? Happy Acres Farm! You found it, sis!” She gave Mallory an ebullient punch on her arm.

Sure enough, a big wooden sign with a silhouette of a horse announced the facility. Mallory followed a long post-and-rail fence down to the sign and bumped along the gravel driveway. Here she saw the green metal roof of low buildings—stables, she assumed, and hopefully an office.

“Oh, wow! It’s pretty, isn’t it? Ooh, Mallory! Look! Horses!”

It was pretty—Mallory had been worried that the place wouldn’t live up to the bucolic photos in the brochure. The rehab facility surely hadn’t—no happy, smiling staff members and triumphant patients to be found in all their time at that facility.

Happy Acres Farm appeared as advertised. Horses frolicked in the cold, crisp air across pastures of impossibly green grass. Beyond them, a pond reflected the blue sky, with clouds of fog still hovering close over its surface.

The stables—if that was what the long, low building was—were fastidiously neat, light green, with dark green trim and shutters. Everything seemed perfectly groomed—and perfectly deserted.

Where were the other patients? Where was the staff shown in the photos? The discharge planners at the rehab facility had warned Mallory that Happy Acres Farm was a small clinic, run by a single owner-operator. Mallory had tried to talk Katelyn into choosing a similar, bigger facility nearer to Macon, where the two of them had grown up and Mallory had lived up until now.

But no. Katelyn wanted this hippotherapy facility. And the discharge planners had told them that the therapist was highly qualified—certified in both traditional physical therapy and hippotherapy, and she had certification in counseling. Plus...it was close to Katelyn’s college. Maybe her old school friends would encourage her to get better and get back into her classes.

Mallory surely hadn’t been able to accomplish that.

“Can you help me with my chair, Mal?” Katelyn’s grin was so big, it practically hung off either side of her elfin face. Mallory’s heart melted, and her reservations about the place evaporated. Believing it was half the battle—maybe Katelyn would be able to walk again here.

“Okay. We’re early, though—”

“I want to see it! I want to go pet the horses!”

Mallory shuddered. Horses were great from a distance—beautiful and graceful. Close up, though?

She loved animals—how many dogs and cats had she and Katelyn fostered over the years? Horses, on the other hand, had big teeth and sharp hooves and eyes that seemed to stare straight through you. She was embarrassed to admit such a phobia, but there it was.

Still, she knew better than to argue with her little sister. The therapist could establish the rules, and Katelyn would certainly listen to her more than she would Mallory. After all, Katelyn had demonstrated time and again that she thought Mallory was an uptight fussbudget who worried too much.

I didn’t worry enough.

She took in Katelyn’s excitement. Her sister was pink cheeked for the first time in months, her coppery hair, so like Mallory’s own, fluffing out around a thinner, still-gaunt face. It was like looking at their mom’s photo as a teenager. Katelyn and she had both inherited their mom’s auburn hair, but Katelyn had drawn the delicate elfin features of their mother, while Mallory resembled their dad’s side of the family, taller, with stronger features.

She sighed and opened the car door. The cool morning air snaked in and she pushed up to a standing position. The cramped confines of her little convertible had been trouble on her knees. She patted the red painted finish, thinking again of the happier day her parents had given the car to her as a high school graduation present.

Not even a year later, and they were gone. She’d struggled to make the payments, not willing to let this last gift from her mom and dad go the way the house had. Now it was paid off—hers forever, or as long as she could keep it going.

She hauled Katelyn’s wheelchair out of the tight fit of the trunk. A bag containing their bare essentials and Katelyn’s many, many medications was the only other thing stuffed in there. Mallory had hired her former boss’s husband and his truck to bring the rest of Mallory’s belongings to the apartment Mallory had found in town.

Today...today was a chance to get Katelyn introduced to her new therapist and then settled into the apartment.

She struggled to get the chair unfolded and wheeled up beside Katelyn’s door. The wind had picked up, and now it sliced into her and yanked at her hair, pulling it out of the French twist. She’d hoped to appear neat and tidy and organized when she met the staff—the only way people ever took you seriously, she’d found.

Katelyn would have opened the door, but Mallory waved at her to wait. No need for Katelyn to get chilled while Mallory struggled to set the stubborn brake—

“Here, let me—”

A man’s hand appeared over hers, big and muscular, competently setting the brake and yanking the chair into instant submission. Half embarrassed at her ineptitude and half eternally grateful, Mallory pushed the hair out of her eyes and extended a hand.

“Thank you—I’m not sure I’ll ever get the hang of—”

And then she looked him in the face, saw who he was.

Tall, even against her five-foot-eight-inch frame. Solidly built, with the arms to prove it, which, courtesy of the short-sleeved T-shirt he wore even on this chilly morning, were bare and tanned. The cleft in the chin, the sky-blue eyes, the close-cropped hair—and yes, even the cowlick at the crest of his head.

There was no doubt about it.

This was Andrew Monroe.

CHAPTER FOUR

“WH-WHAT ARE you doing here?” she sputtered.

Before Andrew could answer, Katelyn’s attempts to get out of the car on her own diverted Mallory’s attention. She swung around from Andrew to see Katelyn dragging herself and her useless legs out of the car and to the too-distant wheelchair.

“Wait, Katelyn! Stop!” Mallory warned. “The chair—”

Andrew was two steps ahead of her. While Mallory stood frozen with panic at a possible fall, Andrew had picked up the chair and moved it closer to the car. And then he stepped back, leaving Katelyn to scramble into the chair as best she could.

Just like he did with the fire.

Over the months since the accident, Mallory had thought about what she would say to this man if she ever saw him again. The idea that he would abandon a helpless kid in a burning house... It boggled the mind. Her rational mind could see his point—but her rational mind left her whenever she heard Katelyn’s pitiful moans and screams of pain.

So yeah. Mallory did blame Andrew Monroe for Katelyn’s agony, for her lifetime sentence in a wheelchair, for each and every angry scar that rippled across her feet and legs and body.