Chapter Two

Harper’s mother turned with a cup of coffee in her outstretched hand just as Edward Rivers came through the kitchen door, greeting him as she had thousands of times before upon his return from a late-night call. He smiled, kissed her cheek, and took the coffee.

“Morning, Dad,” Harper said.

Edward sipped the coffee. “Mary and the baby doing all right?”

“Both fine.” Harper didn’t bother to ask how her father knew of Mary Campbell’s nightlong labor and early morning delivery. Somehow, he always seemed to know what was happening with everyone in the community, and certainly the condition of every patient in the hospital everyone still called the Rivers Hospital, as it had been named when her great-great-great-grandfather and several local mill owners had built it 150 years before. She hadn’t yet mastered his access to the local grapevine, but she was getting better every year. She’d only three years of medical practice to his thirty, so she didn’t feel too bad. “I’ll be heading back to check on her in an hour or so. Is there anyone you need me to see?”

He set down his cup, took off his suit coat—he always wore a suit and tie when seeing patients, in high summer or the dead of winter—and hung it on a peg inside the kitchen door. He rolled up the sleeves of his white shirt and took his usual seat at the head of the table.

“Nothing urgent. I’ll be making rounds myself midmorning.”

Tires crunched on the drive. Flannery’s Jeep, the top already off in homage to the long-awaited warm weather, appeared outside the window above the sink and disappeared again as Flann pulled under the porte cochere. Harper glanced at her mother. “Family meeting?”

“Edward?” Ida asked.

Harper’s father nodded slowly.

Ida said, “I’d better put on more coffee.”

Edward rubbed his face, and for the first time Harper realized he looked far more tired than a night up seeing patients should account for. Maybe her mother was wrong. Maybe he was ill. A spear of panic, completely unlike her usual steady, calm approach to a crisis, shot through her. Her father had been her hero, the primary presence in her life, for as far back as she could remember. She was the oldest child, the first he took on rounds with him, before Flannery and then Carson, and now Margie. Kate had not lived long enough to join him. Harper couldn’t imagine the family without either of her parents—her father’s quiet anchor or her mother’s unbending strength—or her life without them. The day would one day come. Just not now.

“Dad?”

His dark brown eyes met hers and he smiled briefly. “Wait till you hear the facts, Harper. Listen to your instincts, but never disregard the facts.”

“Yes, sir,” Harper said, remembering one of the first lessons she’d learned at his side.

The back door swung open and Flannery blew in, energy pouring off her as it always seemed to do. The second oldest, she’d been in motion from the time she could walk, and she’d walked earlier than them all, their mother said—always the first to climb the tallest tree, the one to ride her bike the fastest, the rebellious teen pushing every boundary she could find. Harper’s father said he’d always known she’d be the surgeon, and he’d been right. Whereas Harper favored her mother in appearance, Flannery had the golden-brown hair and chocolate eyes of her father’s side of the family, and the temperament of a thoroughbred born to race. She looked like the soccer player she’d been in high school, with a little less height than Harper and more breadth in the shoulders. She kissed her mother, squeezed her father’s shoulder, and pulled out a chair next to Harper at the table.

“I’ve got an eight o’clock,” she announced to the room in general.

“You’ll make it,” Edward said. “Routine hernia, isn’t it?”

“That and an appendectomy to follow that Harper picked up in the ER last night.” She nodded to Harper. “Good call, by the way. Thanks for letting me sleep.”

“I was there with a delivery. No reason for both of us to be awake.” Harper had called Flannery at five a.m. after seeing Bryce Daniels at three when the ER nurses had stopped her for a curbside consult. The sixteen-year-old had the classic signs of appendicitis, and she’d gotten his workup started before waking her sister.

The swinging door from the dining room pushed open and Margie, wearing a loose T-shirt and soccer shorts, came in rubbing sleep from her eyes. At fifteen she was rangy and still a little coltish, but destined to be the prettiest of them all with shoulder-length curly blond hair and vivid blue eyes. She shuffled toward the refrigerator and pulled out a bottle of milk. “How come everybody’s here?”

“Your father has news,” Ida said.

Margie sat on the far side of Harper as the last vehicle, Carson’s Volvo, pulled in outside. Her nephew Davey’s laughter carried through the open window, and a second later, Carson ambled in with the ten-month-old perched on her hip. She leaned down and kissed her father, then her mother, and took the coffee her mother held out to her before settling into her usual place on the opposite side of the table from Flannery. Slim-hipped and ivory-skinned, she looked more Margie’s contemporary than ten years her senior. She kept her auburn hair short and feathered at the temples, giving her a touch of innocence that belied her core of steel. A soldier’s wife, she’d been battle tested as the war in the Middle East dragged on.

“Thanks, Mama,” Carson said when Ida handed her a cracker for Davey.

The room was silent save for the baby’s chortling while Ida laid strips of bacon in a cast-iron pan on the stove. She turned the heat down low, poured her own coffee, and took her seat at the opposite end of the table from her husband, the four sisters ranged between them. “Well then. Edward?”

As if he’d been waiting for his wife to give him permission, he cleared his throat and looked at each of his children in turn.

“The board of trustees has sold the hospital.”

For a second, Harper couldn’t think above the exclamations and one pointed curse word from Flann.

“Flannery O’Connor, we’ll not have that language at my table,” Ida said without raising her voice.

“Sorry, Mama,” Flannery muttered.

Everyone quieted.

“What do you mean,” Harper said, “sold the hospital. Sold the hospital to who?”

“Can they do that?” Flannery interrupted.

“Wait,” Carson said, shifting Davey in her lap as she pushed her coffee cup beyond his grasping hands. “Why haven’t the staff been informed? A lot of jobs are at stake, not to mention our patients’ welfare.”

“It’s complicated,” Edward said, “but like most community hospitals that were started by a few individuals, the hospital transitioned to a for-profit institution sometime during the middle of the last century. The bank and a few major shareholders and the board of trustees control the business side of things. Apparently, the hospital’s profits have been declining and the sale is the only way to pay our creditors.”

“Well, decreased profits is to be expected,” Harper said. “With the fall in reimbursement from insurance companies and the cost of new equipment, that’s true everywhere. Our beds are always pretty full—” She glanced at Carson, who’d opted for business over medicine and now headed patient admissions. “I think?”

Carson nodded. “We run at eighty percent capacity most of the time and sometimes close to one hundred.”

“So why wasn’t the staff informed?” Flann reached for a biscuit and glanced at her mother. “How long to bacon?”

“Until I put it on the table.”

Flann grinned. “Soon?”

Ida’s eyes softened as she rose, stroked Flann’s hair, and went to the refrigerator.

Carson started to get up. “I’ll get that, Mama.”

“You sit.” Harper rose. “You’ve got the baby. I’ll get it.” She took a carton of eggs from her mother. “I’ll do this. I can hear from here.”

“Keep the heat low so the eggs don’t get rubbery.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

As Harper cracked eggs into the skillet and listened to the questions and her father’s quiet answers, a hard knot settled in her stomach. The hospital was as much the center of her life as her family. Her friends and her colleagues there were her community. She knew the halls and stairwells as well as she knew the paths and streams that ran through the land she’d grown up on. The hushed murmur of voices in the dimly lit corridors at night and the steady beep of monitors from open doorways were as familiar as birdcall in the morning and the lowing of cows outside her bedroom window at night. The hospital was an extension of her world, and she’d never wanted to be anywhere else. Her father and his father before him and his before that had been the chiefs of staff, and she had known from the time she was twelve that one day she would be too. The hospital was her destiny, and she’d never considered any other path.

She flipped the eggs and tuned out discussions of profit and shares and stockholders and other things she didn’t care about. She cared about her patients, cared about the community she served, and the rest was of no matter to her. She wasn’t interested in profit. She’d never been interested in money or paid much attention to it at all. She lived in what had once been the caretaker’s house on four acres of land a quarter mile down the road from the big house. She had four rooms that were plenty of space until she met the right woman to start a family with, a garden where she grew her own vegetables in the summer, apple and pear trees, a dog who slept as often at her mother’s as he did on her back porch, three cats who’d claimed the woodshed, and chickens who roosted in a coop beside it and gave her more eggs than she could eat. Her life was going just according to plan.