Coming to a Crossroads

by Marie Ferrarella

  But somewhere along the line, that iconic and innocent belief of hers that had sustained her through so much had become a casualty. And with its passing, it had left her at the mercy of a darker, far more disturbing reality.

  “Okay, time to get a grip on your brooding thoughts, Lizzie, and reunite Dr. Ethan with the thoughts he felt were worthy of commemorating and putting down on paper. But first,” she said out loud, as if she was an old-time announcer on the radio, “it’s time to check those latest reviews of yours and see where you can improve your services to the world at large.”

  She was thinking about her latest Chariot ratings, fully aware that she would not be the only one who was looking at them. The people who ran the local office checked everyone’s ratings religiously—as did her mother, although Ruth Bellamy only checked hers, and for a different reason than the local office did.

  Her overly concerned mother checked her ratings because she was worried that one of the passengers she had driven somewhere might have made a derogatory comment or shared a dark thought that he’d had about his “beautiful” driver.

  Liz knew that if she could have gotten away with it, her mother would have wrapped her up in bubble wrap and kept her stored somewhere in the house. And while, in a very odd way, Liz could understand where her mother was coming from—she’d lost her husband, which in turn had taught her that nobody could control their destiny—living life isolated like that wasn’t living at all. And she knew that her mother knew that.

  It was just easier on her mother to wish that it wasn’t so.

  After turning on her computer, Liz went directly to the Chariot website. Once there, she accessed the ratings page for the local drivers. She didn’t have any time to read any of the evaluations sent in about the other drivers in her area—she never did. Instead, she went straight to her own ratings.

  Taking a deep breath, she braced herself and raised her eyes.

  Liz was a firm believer that it was always best to be prepared for the worst, just in case—because one time—just one time—she had been slammed between the eyes by some vengeful idiot who was completely disgruntled that he couldn’t get her to agree to earn a higher tip by taking him up on what he felt was a perfectly logical proposition.

  The key word there had been proposition.

  As prepared as she felt she was going to be, Liz pulled up her page and started reading.

  And then she smiled.

  While the other two ratings that had been input from that day were good in their own right, the one that obviously had to be written by her very last passenger of that fateful day was nothing short of fantastic—as well as heartwarming.

  She read the review with its accompanying five-plus stars again and again for a total of three times. She was smiling a little more broadly each time she came to the end.

  When she finished reading the review for a third time, Liz leaned back in her chair and sighed happily. “How about that?” she murmured. “You really are a good guy, Dr. Ethan,” she said, addressing the page on the computer as if it was the man she had dealt with the other night. “If nothing else, I’m going to get this notebook back into your hands as fast as humanly possible.”

  Glancing over the rating with its glowing words, she searched for any indication of an email address or some other avenue of communication she could use in order to get in contact with this man who was not just a feast for the eyes but, in her opinion, had a beautiful soul to match.

  But there was nothing.

  None of the multiple ways of conveying messages via social media were evident.

  For a few minutes, Liz felt exceedingly frustrated. But then she recalled that she did have another way available to her. The same one she had initially thought of before she had gotten distracted. It was an old-fashioned online device that she had used before when she had tried to track someone down. At the time all she had had was a general location, an approximate age and the person’s name.

  “Luckily, you’re not John Smith,” Liz said, addressing the notebook he had left in his wake. And she now believed that Ethan O’Neill was her passenger’s actual name.

  Wait, Liz thought suddenly. Maybe there was something in these pages that would give her a clue—or better yet, an actual address.

  She got as far as opening the book and flipping to the second page. In order to do what she wanted to, she realized that she was going to have to start reading what was on these pages. Of course she would be doing that reading for the most innocent of reasons, but when push came to shove, she knew that it was actually another excuse for an invasion of privacy.

  What if Ethan had shared his innermost thoughts about the path he was taking? Or maybe a woman he was dating? Or something even more serious.

  Did she have the right to do that? To invade his private thoughts like that?

  She wouldn’t allow her mind to go that route or come up with some fabricated reasoning allowing her to go ahead and start reading.

  She had no business reading his thoughts. They were his own, she silently argued.

  Still, when he had lost the notebook, it and the thoughts in it could be considered public property, right?

  Oh Lord, now she sounded like one of those lawyers—lawyers that Ethan had said he wouldn’t be caught dead being.

  Okay, back to the first method she had come up with, she thought. If that failed to produce the results she needed, then she supposed that she would be within her rights to see if there was some sort of an address or general location for Ethan in the notebook.

  Her conscience assuaged, Liz pulled up the website that she knew could at least get her some sort of information about Dr. Ethan O’Neill. She knew that for an extra fee, she could find out if he had ever been married, if he had ever been divorced and for another fee over that, she could also learn if Ethan had some sort of an arrest record on file.

  None of that interested her.

  All she wanted was to be able to find an address for the man so that she could return his notebook to him.

  A thought suddenly occurred to her. What if Ethan had only just now realized that it was missing? That would certainly explain why he hadn’t already called the local office asking about it, because they would have in turn called her.

  Poor man—if he did realize that his journal was missing, he was probably worried that he’d never see it again.

  Well, if nothing else, at least she could put that fear to rest for him.

  With a smile, she began typing.

  Quickly.

  Chapter Seven

  There were days when his work at the clinic really felt rewarding. It didn’t even have to be anything overwhelming or of major proportions. Sometimes the reward was the smile of a relieved mother whom he had reassured that her little boy or girl would recover from a high fever without any ill effects.

  Sometimes the reward was the gratitude he saw in a patient’s eyes when they were told that they didn’t have some sort of mystery ailment that would eventually eat away at their stomach lining—that what they had was just a case of really bad indigestion.

  Ethan had come to discover over the course of the months he had spent at the clinic that there were hundreds of tiny victories to be celebrated. Victories that were spread out over the days and weeks he worked here at the clinic, sometimes being the only physician there the entire twelve-plus-hour day.

  Most of the time, though, he wasn’t fighting the good fight alone. He could usually count on at least one of the volunteers coming in for part if not for the whole of the day.

  However, as it turned out, today had all the makings of what could be whimsically called—by someone with a sadistic streak—a perfect storm. At the last minute, the volunteer physician who was scheduled for that day couldn’t make it, and even Edna, always so dependable, was nearly an hour late getting to the clinic. Scowling like an ominous thunderclou
d, the nurse offered no excuse for her late arrival, but as a result, she was surly all day—or even surlier than usual.

  On top of that, the patients, usually at least happy about the medical attention they received if not downright grateful for it, were angry and annoyed at having to wait so long. And they seemed to have no qualms about voicing their displeasure in very vocal, sometimes graphic terms.

  Ethan didn’t have unreasonable expectations. He was used to the occasional vocal outbursts. What he wasn’t used to was a patient like Fred Hadley suddenly becoming physical and taking a swing at the patient sitting next to him when that patient insisted that he was supposed to be the next one to be seen and not Hadley. Out in the waiting room at the time, Ethan had to jump in between the two swinging, belligerent and cursing men.

  It was times like these that he really wished he had access to a security guard, at least somewhere in the area, maybe one who was charged with keeping the peace in general at the strip mall.

  But there was no such person, and he had to handle it all himself, much to the horror of some of his other patients.

  He had just managed to push the two men apart when Edna descended on all three of them, her eyes shooting daggers. The nurse sternly informed the two combatants that “Mr. Hadley signed in first, and since your complaints are both of the non-serious variety, protocol will be followed. There will be no extra points for whining.”

  Her words seemed to carry weight, but it proved to be too late for Ethan’s eye, which had been on the receiving end of the brutish Hadley’s fist.

  Ethan’s eye stung now as he drove home, hours after the incident, but he was relatively sure that his eye wasn’t going to swell shut. However, he did have one killer headache. That hadn’t abated over the course of the day, but as always, he still managed to push on through it.

  The amazing thing was that Edna had stopped by twice during the course of the afternoon to ask him how he was feeling. The first time he had believed he was hallucinating. Realizing that he wasn’t, he was rather gratified at the show of concern.

  There was a heart in that old crone after all, Ethan had thought with a small smile.

  Pulling up to his apartment complex now, he drove into his designated space, grateful that his apartment was located on the ground floor. He really didn’t feel up to having to climb up any stairs right now. As it was, he could have sworn that every step he did take reverberated in his temples.

  Getting out of his car, Ethan totally focused on putting one foot in front of the other until such time as he reached his apartment, when he intended to fall facedown in his bed.

  That was why he almost didn’t see it.

  As a matter of fact, he wound up stepping on the notebook before his subconscious alerted him that something was off. The welcome mat in front of his door wasn’t level.

  Taking a step back, Ethan looked down and was completely surprised to see what appeared to be a notebook partially tucked under his doormat.

  His notebook.

  Recognition instantly flooded over him, in part blocking out the dull throbbing in his temples. He had been so busy the last few days, he hadn’t even noticed his journal was missing. In his defense, he only wrote in it sporadically, so he wouldn’t have noticed it was missing until he reached for it and discovered that it wasn’t in any of his pockets.

  “Where have you been?” he murmured to the journal, flipping open the front cover.

  There was a small, neatly printed note tucked inside the journal.

  Unlocking his front door and opening it, Ethan held on to the journal and its note until he was inside. Once he was, he locked the door and turned on the light.

  And then he started reading.

  “‘I found this stuck under the front seat cushion. Hope losing it didn’t create too much trouble for you. Best, your Chariot driver, Liz.’”

  Ethan had thought he was far too weary to smile.

  He wasn’t.

  Especially when he saw what was written right beneath her name. The woman had included a phone number. Whether it was a number that would connect him directly to her, or the number at Chariot’s local office, where he assumed he could leave a message, he didn’t know. But he intended to find out.

  Funny how things turned out, Ethan thought, crossing to his sofa. He had been debating whether or not to act on Nikki’s suggestion about inviting the woman to be his plus-one to Joel’s wedding—a wedding he had learned was apparently still on despite Joel’s lone drunken transgression.

  This, he thought looking at the journal in his hand, was the omen he’d been waiting for.

  His dating skills were nothing if not dusty. He had never considered himself one of those charming rogues who were capable of approaching a woman and putting the moves on her as long as she had some sort of a pulse. If Ethan had to describe himself, he thought he was more of a wingman. Anyone’s wingman.

  But there was something about this woman who had gone out of her way to locate him because he’d lost something she thought he needed that really spoke to him and made him want to move outside his comfort zone.

  At the very least, he could take her out for coffee to express his gratitude, although he was still nursing high hopes about asking her to accompany him to Joel’s wedding.

  He glanced at his wristwatch. It was almost ten. That wasn’t late, but it wasn’t exactly early, either, he argued.

  Ethan told himself that logically he should wait until morning. He’d be fresher then, and with luck, this blasted headache burrowing holes into his skull would be a thing of the past.

  But then he recalled that tomorrow was his even earlier day at the clinic—he opened the doors at seven thirty, and the first volunteer wasn’t due in until nine thirty. That meant he wouldn’t be able to call Liz until who knew when.

  He rolled the thought over in his head, looking at it from all angles.

  Liz had said she had a crazy schedule as well, so after all this agonizing, he might still wind up connecting to her voice mail.

  Well, there was just one way to find out, he told himself. Placing the note she’d written on the coffee table in front of him, Ethan took out his cell phone and carefully input the neatly written numbers on the last line of the note.

  His cell phone connected to the number, and after a second, he heard it ring on the other end. Mentally, he began to count off the number of times it rang. He could feel his disappointment growing larger and larger with each ring.

  In his experience, most people had the number of rings on their phone set to four before voice mail kicked in. But the phone on the other end of his call kept ringing.

  “Five...six...seven...eight...” He made up his mind to give the phone on the other end ten rings, then give up.

  When he suddenly heard the other end being picked up, despite the hour, his exhaustion and his throbbing temples, Ethan instantly came to attention.

  “Hello?” he heard a woman’s melodious voice ask uncertainly.

  It had to be her!

  “Is this Liz—um—” It suddenly occurred to Ethan that he hadn’t gotten her last name the other night.

  Nice going, he upbraided himself.

  “Yes,” the melodious voice on the other end answered and then suddenly asked, “Ethan? Is that you, Dr. O’Neill?”

  Relief washed over him. He didn’t have to continue fumbling and possibly coming off like a socially challenged, tongue-tied fool. He and Liz had experienced a life-or-death situation in the short amount of time they had spent together. He could talk to her without being uncomfortably aware of the fact that she could shoot him down at any moment.

  He instinctively felt that Liz was, at bottom, a decent, kind person. And he could certainly work with that.

  “Yes, it’s me,” he answered. “I hope I’m not calling too late.”

  He heard her laugh, and the
sound instantly seemed to warm him. “There is no ‘too late’ in my world, Ethan. There’re just endless hours feeding into one another. I take it you found the journal I left for you—your journal,” she corrected herself.

  “Yes, yes, I found it,” he answered. “That was really awfully nice of you to go out of your way like that to return it to me.”

  He could actually hear the smile in her voice when she answered. “Again, I’m a Chariot driver. There is no ‘out of my way.’ Besides, I wouldn’t have felt right about not returning the journal to you once I found it and realized it was yours. It looked as if it was important,” she confided. “You had an awful lot of writing in it. Oh, and don’t worry. If you’re wondering, I did not read any of it.

  “Don’t get me wrong,” she explained, lowering her voice as if she was sharing a secret with him. “I was sorely tempted to read it, but reading it would have been a violation of your privacy.”

  “A violation of my privacy,” he repeated in total amazement. “You’re serious.”

  It was half a question, half a statement and a completely new experience for him.

  “Yes. Why do you sound so surprised?” she asked.

  Delighted by the woman he was talking to, Ethan couldn’t help laughing. “You, Liz, are definitely in a class all by yourself. I don’t know anyone else who would worry about invading someone else’s privacy, especially if they were in the least bit curious about what sort of thoughts a person might think needed to be written down.”

  Specifically, he was thinking of the way Catherine would have handled this situation. Catherine, who felt that everything fell within her purview to look into and investigate if she was so inclined. Catherine did whatever she damn well pleased.

  The only boundaries he knew of in his former fiancée’s world were the ones she kept around herself and her own personal information. That was somehow off-limits. But that certainly didn’t extend to him or, for that matter, anyone else who Catherine had dealt with.

  Catherine.

  There was a bullet he had dodged. Ethan congratulated himself, not for the first time. Admittedly, it had gotten too easy to just let things slide and go along with whatever she wanted rather than put up a fight or even raise an objection to something she wanted him to do or agree to.