Gemini Read Online Free PDF Page A

outside.”
    Rex, their pointer, must have decided by then that Bo was no threat. The dog danced around the boy’s legs as they went out into the yard, running to grab sticks for them to throw, bowing down on his front paws to drop them at Bo’s feet like he was making offerings to a king. Raney could tell Bo didn’t own a dog—he’d reach tentatively for whatever Rex dropped, like the dog might change his mind again and bite. But she granted that Bo had a pretty good arm for a boy who was so pale and skinny you wondered if they let children play outside in Seattle.
    The sun had broken through the clouds and the yard was alive with jays and crows and the hum of dragonflies. A cluster of hot-pink hollyhocks seeded ages ago by Raney’s grandmother swayed with blooms as big as saucers. Grandpa’s long-dead Mercury rusted in a patch of morning glory at the edge of the woods and the faded red paint and twisting vines with their white trumpet-shaped flowers, all illuminated in a beam of sunshine, looked more glorious than decrepit to Raney. This was how she saw her house, their land, and felt acutely awkward to know she hoped Bo could see it the same—brilliant and vital and not at all lonely. And Bo was lit up, too, pitching rocks and plastic bottles for the dog, loosening his body more with every throw like the sun had oiled his joints, whooping at that hunter as if he needed any encouragement to race and retrieve. Later, Raney wondered why she couldn’t just enjoy the moment as long as it lasted. Instead she did it to him again. She slipped inside the barn and disappeared from Bo’s sight.

• 3 •
    charlotte
    Felipe Otero, one of Charlotte’s partners, rapped on the metal frame of Jane Doe’s sliding glass door before stepping inside—a small gesture of courtesy uniquely his own, Charlotte thought. Most of the other doctors breezed in and out of the ICU cubicles, barely pausing unless family members were present, subconsciously claiming this property as their own, this time their own, even the moment it took to pause at the doorway too valuable to squander.
    “Full house today. You had a busy night.” He nodded at Jane, still unconscious and immobile, and spoke in a half whisper barely audible over her ventilator and the bustle in the hallway and nursing station, filled with personnel as the nurses changed shift. “Want to sign out? I can take over.”
    Charlotte glanced at the clock. “You still have time for breakfast. Why so early?”
    “Easier to be here than at home some mornings.” He grinned at this reference to his teenagers, who Charlotte knew had been giving him hell. “Ethics board had a meeting this morning. I heard about the new patient.”
    “The ethics board is already discussing her?”
    “No. Helen Seras asked me if I’d seen her yet. KING-TV called her.”
    “The accident was five days ago.”
    “Yes, but there’s no TV station in Forks.”
    “West Harbor. Do us all a favor and keep Helen out of my way this morning. You know the whole story?” Felipe shook his head. “Hit-and-run pedestrian found beside the highway. No ID—”
    “That much I know,” Felipe interrupted.
    “She was alert when the medics got her to the ER. Arm and leg fractures. And now . . . this.” She looked at Jane’s pale, bloated body. “I think she threw a fat embolism in the OR when they were fixing her femur fracture.”
    “Just pulmonary or to her brain? She’s had an MRI?”
    “I’m sure it hit her brain. She never woke up after surgery. MRI is at nine o’clock this morning. Echocardiogram this afternoon when they can fit her in. Her lungs are getting worse by the hour. She’ll need a tracheostomy soon.”
    Felipe looked at the numbers on the flow sheet in front of Charlotte, then walked to Jane’s bedside and in one sweep of the monitors saw enough to know that Jane would be here for weeks before they could guess her ultimate outcome—if they could keep her alive that long. Then he