by Hero Bowen
Wish Hunter
Book One of The Savannah River Series
Hero Bowen
Jordan Riley Swan
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Call to Action
Acknowledgments
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, organizations, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Copyright © 2021 by Jordan Riley Swan. All rights reserved.
Published by Story Garden, Columbus. StoryGardenPublishing.com
ISBN: 9781735587523 (paperback)
ISBN: 9781735587523 (ebook)
ISBN: 9781735587530 (audiobook)
This book, or any portion thereof, may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written consent of the author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal.
Cover design by James T. Egan, BookflyDesign.com
Managing editor: Diane Callahan, QuotidianWriter.com
Copy editor: Crystal Shelley, RabbitWithaRedPen.com
Sign up for notifications of upcoming releases by Jordan Riley Swan at JordanRileySwan.com
To Dave—may all your wishes come true
Chapter One
Once she stole this jerk’s third wish, Nadia swore she would never invite another surgeon into her counseling office. She’d heard they could be egotistical butchers, treating their patients as little more than pounds of flesh on a table, but she’d always dismissed that stereotype—until she’d met Dr. Fitzpatrick. Not that Nadia claimed to be a paragon of virtue herself, but at least when clients left her office, they had all the pieces they’d come in with. As far as they knew, anyway.
“Mm-hmm, and how has the advice from our last session been working for you?” Nadia cracked her knuckles under the mahogany desk, jonesing for another double espresso to knock back. Anything to stop Dr. Fitzpatrick’s self-absorbed monotone from making her slide off her high-backed leather armchair in a comatose state.
The surgeon sprawled across the client armchair—no chaise lounges here—and seemed determined to possess it with every inch of his Tom Ford nouveau tweed number. “You should’ve just told me to stick a bomb under my marriage,” he huffed, pushing designer specs back up his nose. “Tell her my ‘true feelings’? Everyone knows that’s marriage suicide.” He waved a hand up at her framed accolades. “I’m starting to think you printed those degrees off the internet.”
“Did you follow the steps we talked through?” Nadia kept her tone professionally even, fighting down a smirk. Divorce was the last thing a successful marriage counselor wanted her sessions to come to, but man did she pity the poor woman who’d ended up with this pompous, middle-aged brat.
Many people made the incorrect assumption that marriage counseling was done in pairs, not realizing that the early stages were most productive on an individual basis. That way, partners didn’t have to worry about saying the wrong thing in front of their spouse and making matters worse while the situation was at its most fragile. However, the wife in question had yet to book her individual appointments. Maybe she already knew the marriage was over and had no intention of fighting for it.
Dr. Fitzpatrick folded his arms across his chest. “Oh, I did everything you suggested. Why else would I bother to pay you?”
“And?”
“And I told her what I really thought about her artwork.”
“How did she respond?” The stock question rolled off Nadia’s tongue effortlessly as she grazed her pen across her notebook.
“How do you think?” A pinkish hue painted the surgeon’s cheeks. Since it was October in Savannah, Nadia had the AC cranked up, so his flush couldn’t be due to the room’s temperature. The color in his face came from the palette of embarrassment. “It got heated.”
“In what way?” Nadia encouraged, tossing out another textbook response.
She glanced over at the collection of knickknacks she’d purchased from Picker Joe’s to add to the vintage feel of her Tiedeman Park office, though the moody cherrywood paneling, oxblood leather armchairs, and green-hooded banker’s lamps already accomplished that. Her gaze lingered on a still-ticking brass carriage clock for a few seconds. She needed to move this along.
Dr. Fitzpatrick cleared his throat, as if he had a frog of guilt lodged in there. “I might’ve said something along the lines of ‘Are you sure you’re not sniffing the paint stripper in that supposed studio of yours, because something’s making you blind to the rip-off Andy Warhols you’re calling art.’ I can’t remember verbatim. I wasn’t wrong, though.” He adjusted his tie. “And you know what the truth got me? A jar of dirty, brush-cleaning water flung in my face. She said I knew nothing about art if I thought her work was anything like a Warhol, and she made a nasty suggestion of what I could do with a soup can.”
“Why a soup can?” Nadia’s eyes drifted back to the clock.
“You know—Andy Warhol? The painting of the Campbell’s soup can.” When Nadia shrugged, he frowned as if she were an uncultured philistine. “Actually, never mind,” he mumbled. “Your art knowledge probably stops at Rorschach tests and so-called art therapy. The point is, I did what you said, and that made things worse.”
“Honesty can be painful at first,” she said, the steady tick of that carriage clock shifting her mental energies to the real task at hand.
“Honesty is never the best policy,” Dr. Fitzpatrick replied. “In fact, why don’t you go ahead and put that over your door so no other poor bastards make the same mistake I did.”
Nadia curved her lips into a rehearsed smile of sympathy, preparing to crack out one of her fortune cookie truisms. “I understand where you’re coming from, Dr. Fitzpatrick. But even though honesty hurts, acknowledging those wounds is often a necessary first step, rather than letting them fester. It invites you to heal together and stitch that wound without any lingering resentment.”
“Sounds more like a guaranteed stab to my back and my assets,” he said as he ran a hand through his carefully arranged salt-and-pepper hair.
“But you being here is the real first step,” Nadia reminded him. “If you thought it was over between you and your wife, you’d be in a lawyer’s office right now instead of with me.”
Dr. Fitzpatrick blew out a breath through his nostrils and shook his head, his tone shifting to the kind he probably used with his residents. “I’m not a quitter. Besides, I only came back to you because I bought these sessions at the three-for-one discount you offer up at the hospital. And since this is appointment number three, we’re running out of time to patch up my problems here.” Then came his usual mumble again. “Honestly, I don’t know why Dr. Pargeter sang your praises. Unless you save the good advice for women?”
Nadia thought of sweet, despairing J
enny Pargeter, an OB-GYN at Memorial Health who specialized in high-risk pregnancies and births. Her marriage had been a common, painful tale of romantic drift, the plates of a once-happy union sliding continents apart. But after session upon session of hard, raw honesty and several tissue boxes’ worth of tears, it had concluded in a loving reconciliation that Nadia counted among her best successes. She was fairly sure she owed Jenny a commission, thanks to all the marriage-weary clients the doctor had sent her way since then.
Dr. Fitzpatrick was right—they were running out of time, but for very different reasons. Nadia slipped a casual hand into her skirt pocket, turning the smooth, wooden compass coin that nestled there. It was warm to the touch, like her favorite coffee mug on a cold day.
She hid a smile, savoring that warm, pebble-like surface and the confirmation it radiated: Dr. Fitzpatrick had an unspent wish.
The surgeon resumed his body-melting sprawl across the armchair. “If I wanted to be ignored, I’d have stayed home and saved the money.”
Nadia let him stew in his own juices a moment longer, finding comfort in every turn of the wooden coin between her fingertips. Her goal had never been to fix Dr. Fitzpatrick’s obviously lopsided and doomed marriage, but to ensure that he kept coming back for at least three counseling sessions—hence the discount. She needed the full trio in order to steal all three of the wishes he’d earned by saving lives as a heart surgeon. Ironic, considering he lacked much of a heart himself.
Too bad there wasn’t a three-for-one package deal with wishes too. The more sessions she had with people, the more her pesky conscience came knocking at the back of her skull, eager to gain entry. But only one wish could be stolen at a time.
It wasn’t as if he would miss the wish once she stole it. Most people—Dr. Fitzpatrick included—didn’t even know that wishes existed or how to use them. Without her intervention, the three he’d had, including this last one, would simply go to waste. If she really thought about it, she was doing a civic duty by unburdening her clients of a weight they didn’t know they had and bandaging up a few nuptials as she went.
“Thanks to you, Jessica is extra pissed at me.” It appeared Dr. Fitzpatrick was eager to clamber out of the stewpot. Nadia marveled at the human need to fill a silence. It worked every time. “And then, she got all smug about ‘proving me wrong’ by selling her latest monstrosity of a finger painting to Miles friggin’ Hunter.”
“Did you offer your wife any support when she told you about this painting she sold?” Nadia asked. She’d heard of Miles Hunter. Everyone in Savannah had. He was basically Johnny Mercer’s successor in the Savannah music hall of fame, though she’d overheard a few old dames saying his music wasn’t to their taste.
Dr. Fitzpatrick scoffed. “You think I’d offer a word of congratulation after seeing that hideous splotch of colored canvas plastered behind Miles Hunter’s stage last night? I couldn’t get away from it, since she insisted on having the replay livestream on every TV in the damned house! She just sat there, glass of wine in hand, gawking at him. Oh, she said she just wanted to see her painting onstage, but unless it was down the front of his pants, I’m sure she was looking at something else.”
Nadia was about to respond when Dr. Fitzpatrick continued, gaining steam. “I even told her about the dangers of torsion and impotence from skintight leather pants.”
“What did she say?”
“She said that I wear loose pants all the time, so tightness can’t be the only cause.”
Nadia’s face strained like a pre-sneeze as she squashed a chuckle back down her throat, not wanting to antagonize him. She didn’t want him getting defensive and clamming up, since she still had to pry the pearl of truth out of him that would release his wish. He was probably just bitter that his leather-pants days were far behind him.
She grabbed a tissue and pretended to blow her nose so she could pull herself together. Her gaze caught the carriage clock again. Fifteen minutes until his time was up. Fifteen minutes to secure the wish. She really had to get her ass in gear.
With that in mind, Nadia took an ornate wooden box from the top drawer of her desk. Rustic charm radiated from the cherry-toned wood of the Polish keepsake box. On the lid, a ridged border of blackened lines alternated in horizontal and vertical rectangles. Burned into the center were hearts with leaves sprouting from the curved tops, a feature that had always reminded Nadia more of apples than hearts. Their tapered ends met at a ringed circle in the middle, from which corn poppies blossomed—a nod to the national flower of Poland.
“Ah, an old friend,” Dr. Fitzpatrick said.
“I thought it might be useful to do the box exercise again,” Nadia replied as she smoothed her fingertips across the lid, feeling those familiar indents.
He smirked. “It didn’t do much good the last two times. I thought it would be like one of those worry dolls where you write down your deepest, darkest secrets, and in the morning all your problems are gone.”
“There’s no quick cure.” Nadia softened her tone. “But the box exercise is still valuable, and I can see the changes from the last two times you did this, even if you can’t. As I’ve told you before, this is your chance to be honest with yourself, in private, and jot down the events and struggles in your life that you’d never say aloud to anyone else—me included.” It wasn’t entirely untrue.
“I don’t know. Seems like a waste of paper,” he said as she pushed a small blank slip toward him.
“Since this is your last booked session, why don’t we try it, just in case?” She rested a pen on top of the piece of paper. “After all, they say the third time’s the charm.”
His eyes fixated on the paper, but he made no move to pick up the pen. An amused smirk lifted the corner of his lips, and he sank back into the armchair, as if he intended to wait out the last fifteen minutes in silence. For the first time with him, Nadia felt a wobble of worry. Sure, she’d stolen two of his wishes already, but she couldn’t afford to let any wish slip past her. If he didn’t write on that piece of paper and put it in the box, she’d have hell to pay. And, considering it was unlikely she’d ever see him again now that his discounted sessions were up, she had to act fast and smart to get him back under her thumb. If superstition and niceties didn’t work, maybe his money-tight nature would.
“It’s part and parcel of the sessions you paid for,” she said. “It’s helped so many of my clients, I assure you. But if you don’t want to take full advantage of what you bought . . .” She pulled the paper back as if to throw it away.
He lurched forward. “Hold on, I didn’t say I wasn’t going to do it.”
Nadia pushed the scrap of paper over to him once more and sat back like she didn’t care what he wrote. The surgeon chuckled as he hunched over the paper and tapped the end of the pen against his teeth, the clacking sound an assault on Nadia’s nerves. The crucial moment had arrived, and the rest was out of her hands.
“What to write today . . .” He grinned. “‘My wife is an ungrateful cow who leaves paint on everything she touches’?” His amusement faded as he poised the nib over the piece of paper.
Nadia faked a laugh. “Remember, this is about you: your secrets, your fears, your demons. This isn’t about her, unless it’s related. This is your moment, your time, your release from any burdens you’ve been carrying.” She figured he’d like that—that this was entirely about him.
Dr. Fitzpatrick’s expression morphed into one of serious contemplation as his pen scratched across the slip of paper. For a fleeting moment, Nadia witnessed real humanity in the surgeon’s eyes, his tongue wriggling at the corner of his mouth as though he’d regressed to the boy he’d once been. The lines between his tidy eyebrows deepened.
Even jerks were people, just as flawed and sometimes vulnerable as everyone else.
She turned the box to face him and lifted the lid, sensing he was ready to put a heart secret into the shadows. With a sad little sigh, he placed the paper inside and closed the box before turning i
t back around to face her, like a briefcase of money for the kingpin to observe. But she had no intention of looking. That wasn’t the point.
“I miss who we were,” Dr. Fitzpatrick said quietly.
This happened sometimes. Though there was magic in the box, it didn’t have anything to do with fixing relationships. Still, every so often, the process of sharing something so deeply important to a person would open them up to introspection as they closed the lid. Sometimes the act of confession, however secret, actually helped marriages heal.
“Who do you miss?” Nadia asked.
“Jessica and me.” His head sagged like it was heavy with thoughts. “I miss who we were in college—before life and careers and all that other stuff got in the way. I trained to be a heart surgeon so I could help people, and that’s something she loved about me. But the expectations and pressures changed me in a way I didn’t expect. It deadened me.”
Nadia smiled a genuine smile. “You know better than anyone that a heart can be made to beat again.”
“How long have you been saving that one?” He mustered the ghost of a smirk.
“A while.” She chuckled. “But the point stands.”
He nodded slowly, as if contemplating his options, before lifting his gaze and blindsiding Nadia in a way she hadn’t braced for. “Have you ever been married? I looked for a ring, and you don’t have one, but I know that doesn’t mean much.”
Her insides wrenched. “I was, but . . . it ended.”
