Where We Land by Abigail Barnette

Author:Abigail Barnette
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: romantic comedy, college, roommates, new adult, new adult romance
Publisher: Abigail Barnette

Chapter Eight

The nursing home on Christmas day was nothing short of depression itself. The first holiday season he’d worked there, Daniel had assumed that the loneliness of a care facility was an exaggerated, pessimistic stereotype.

It was not.

The families who visited for Christmas dinner didn’t want to be there. Not because they didn’t love their relatives, but because they all knew the high probability of this being their last holiday. Because they wanted to go back to warm family gatherings in the comfort of home rather than a stark common room with other miserable strangers.

Daniel could relate. What he wouldn’t give for another slice of his mother’s banoffee pie, which his father had always teasingly criticized as being “too American” and “not authentic.” To wake Christmas morning to find exactly what he wanted under the tree, and his parents more excited to watch him open presents than he was to receive them.

Mum and Dad putting on the stop-motion Christmas specials they’d loved as children, all of them snuggled together on the sofa.

“So, what are your plans tonight?” Curtis asked, breaking Daniel out of his reverie.

What had he been doing? He blinked down at the chart propped on the edge of the nurses’ station counter and cleared his throat. “Lauren and I are celebrating Friendsmas.”

Curtis leaned against the station, juggling a cellophane-wrapped popcorn ball from one hand to another. “She doesn’t have family?”

“She does. She’s slightly cagey about them. I have a feeling they don’t get along.” He’d asked her about them once, but she’d changed the subject, and it had been crystal clear that she wasn’t interested in sharing. “What are you doing?”

“Heading to my mom’s.” Curtis glanced down the hall. “Shit, Mr. Davis’s call light is on again.”

“I’ll go.” Daniel hadn’t been assigned to Mr. Davis’s hall, so he hadn’t had a chance to wish the man happy Christmas.

He didn’t get a chance when he came in, anyway. Mr. Davis sat up in bed, happily chattering away to no one. When Daniel came through the door, Mr. Davis immediately, asked, “Have you met my wife?”

“No, John, I can’t say that I have.”

“Honey?” Mr. Davis asked the empty air. “This is Tom. He’s my favorite male nurse in the place. Jim, this is my wife, Caroline.”

Shit.

When people started seeing their dead relatives, it was a bad sign. A chill crept up Daniel’s spine. He wasn’t spiritual, per se, but he’d been around enough dying people to know the cast of characters that they encountered when they were close to death. He’d take Mr. Davis’s vital signs as a precaution.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Caroline. I’m just going to take your husband’s blood pressure, and I’ll be out of your hair.” Daniel retrieved the rolling sphygmomanometer from outside the door, popped on his stethoscope, and wrapped the inflatable band around Mr. Davis’s arm. As the old man continued to chat with his dead wife, Daniel pumped the pressure up and listened for the pulse in his patient’s elbow to go silent.

He had to try three times because he was certain he was wrong.

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