Free Return by Karen Kingsbury

and she stifled a giggle. God, you did it. You did all of thhis. “Yes, of course. I’ll fig ure out how soon I can he there; then I’ll give you a call.”
    “That would be lovely.” The woman’s voice was kinder than before. She gave Ashley directions to the gallery-a small, con servative shop in Manhattan’s Upper West Side, not far from Central Park. “Ask for me at the front desk.”
    Ashley promised she would. The doorbell rang just as she hung up. She raced to the entryway, pulled on the handle, and stared wide-eyed at Erin and Sam.
    “What is it, Ash? You look scared to death.” Erin opened the screen door and stepped inside. Sam followed her and the two of them waited.
    “You won’t believe it! ” Ashley took a few steps back and did a little jump-skip across the living room, her fists raised in the air. “I’m taking my paintings to New York City!”
    52

CHAPTER FIVE
    JOHN BAXTER RARFi.Y worked nights.
    He’d been a doctor in Bloomington for enough years that the younger guys at the office handled the on-call hours. But tonight was different. One of his patients-a man who served alongside John on the elder board at church-had undergone triple bypass surgery two days earlier. The man had been moved from the car diac unit to intensive care, an upgrade that pleased John. But he wanted to make sure his friend was comfortable.
    It was just before seven o’clock when he stepped off the eleva tor onto the third floor and headed for the nurses’ station. A whiteboard posted on the wall nearby had the names and condi tions of each patient in the unit. John glanced at the list and saw that his friend was doing better.
    He was about to turn and head down the hall toward the men’s room when something caught his attention. One of the names on the list was Lori Callahan.
    Wasn’t that Luke’s girlfriend’s name?
    Why in the world would she be in the hospital? And in the in tensive care unit, no less. He spun around and met the eyes of 55
    one of the nurses behind the counter. “Lori Callahan? Is she a young woman, twenty, twenty-one?”
    The nurse studied the whiteboard for a minute. “Yes, I believe so. She’s new to the unit, Doctor. Let me check.” She sorted through a pile of files nearby and found the one she was looking for. “Yes … twenty years old, lives in an apartment off-campus.” The nurse continued to scan the report. “Says here she’s a fulltime college student.”
    John bristled and took a step backwards. His son was living with a girl who was so ill she was in the intensive care unit at St.
    Anne’s Hospital, and no one in the Baxter family even knew about it? John was a doctor, after all. He could’ve done something to help the girl if Luke had called.
    Things must’ve been worse than John thought, the chasm between Luke and his family wider with every passing hour. “May I see that, please?” John reached for the file. The girl
    probably had a bad case of food poisoning or pneumonia, maybe a bacterial infection gone haywire. College coeds didn’t wind up in the ICU every day. He scanned the admit sheet, past her name and address-the address she shared with Luke-past her date of birth. Then, in less time than it took to blink, he found itand his heart dropped to his knees.
    It was impossible.
    Lori Callahan was suffering from an infected uterus due to postabortion difficulties.
    Postabortion? The information had to be wrong, or maybe the girl wasn’t Luke’s live-in friend, because no matter how much he’d changed, Luke would never agree to something like this. John closed the file. His forehead was damp and his knees trembled. It had to be some kind of mistake.
    The nurse was watching him, waiting for the folder. “Doctor, is everything okay?”
    John handed over the file and steadied himself against the nurses’ station. “Is anyone in with the girl?” If Luke had been a 54
    i n g s b u r y s m a I l e y
    part of this, if the girl in the room was the same one he