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though, her mother ran out of steam a few moments later. She sniffled loudly. “They’re not telling us anything!”
    “I could go and find out....” Charli hesitated. Should she leave her mother alone in the state she was in? “Why don’t we see if Lainey—”
    Her mother was on her feet in an instant and headed for the door. “You go! They said I couldn’t see him, but they have to let you because you’re a doctor!”
    Inexplicably Charli’s feet felt nailed to the ground. Did she want to see her father as sick and weak as she’d seen other patients?
    Violet threw open the door to reveal Neil Bailey still in the waiting room. He’d sat down in a chair in front of the door. Now he and Charli stared at each other.
    She was embarrassed that he’d caught sight of her on the floor, as though she’d collapsed from emotion. Scrambling to her feet, she joined her mother. “You’ll wait here?”
    “I can’t take that room a minute longer,” Violet insisted. “The walls are closing in on me.”
    Charli agreed, but still was uncertain what to do with her wreck of a mother. She craned her neck to find Lainey, but didn’t see her.
    “Hey, if you like, Mrs. Prescott, you can wait here with me,” Neil offered.
    Violet swooped through the door and dropped into the chair beside Neil. A flicker of irritation poked through the welter of Charli’s emotions. Why did her mother insist on latching on to men for support? She’d done it all her life with Charli’s father, and here she was now, already gripping Neil Bailey’s arm with her neat little hands and gazing up into the man’s face as though he were her knight in shining armor.
    Honestly, her mother might as well have been a character off Madmen or a 1960s sitcom. Women’s Lib had completely passed her by.
    No need to look a gift horse in the mouth, though. At least her mother was calmer with Neil than she had been with either Charli or Lainey. Charli shook off the irritation and murmured a thanks to Neil. Gathering her courage, she walked toward the doors to the E.R. treatment areas.
    She heard it before she even got to the nurses’ station. It was a full code, expertly run, and she could predict the orders of the attending as he got feedback from each of his desperate attempts to restart her father’s heart.
    “Clear—shock him again!” came the latest order.
    “Rhythm still in v-fib!” a nurse called out.
    “Come on! Come on, old man!” the doctor shouted. “Don’t you give up on me now! Another push of epi!”
    “We’ve lost rhythm!”
    Again with the defibrillator. Again with more meds. Again with more compressions. Again with no sustainable rhythm.
    And over and over again, until the doctor choked out, “How long without a rhythm?”
    Charli couldn’t hear the nurse’s answer.
    The attending swore. In a quieter, more resigned voice, he said, “I’m calling it.”
    Silence descended in the tiny E.R. Not even an errant beep from a monitor seemed to penetrate the quiet.
    In the middle of that quiet came the doctor’s next words. “Time of death, uh, 11:31 p.m.”
    Charli put her hand to her mouth and felt her knees give way as she crumpled to the cold tile floor.

CHAPTER THREE
    C HARLI DRANK IN the silence of her car’s interior with guilty relief as she sat in her driveway. Nothing but the ticking of the cooling engine disturbed her. No chatter of helpful women, no well-meant condolences of her father’s friends, no bustle of people preparing food, or asking for the hundredth time if they could “fix you some little something, Charli? For heaven’s sake, you’ve got to eat!”
    Charli had spent the horrible, horrible week following her father’s death at her mother’s—who’d had a houseful of her friends hovering over her the entire time.
    Violet’s entourage had buzzed around Charli like a hive of bees, busy and industrious and trying to take care of her and her mother’s every need and whim. The incessant chatter had been