Free Spring Fever by Mary Kay Andrews

professor’s bratty nine-year-old twins, so that she’d have an excuse to stay in Raleigh year-round instead of going home—and facing the possibility of seeing Mason riding around town in that shiny red car with a new girlfriend.
    The summer before her senior year, she got an internship with a New York advertising agency and shared a roach-infested six-hundred-square-foot apartment in Brooklyn with two other girls from NC State. Annajane had herself a very large summer; got invited to house parties at the shore, and dated another intern, Nouri, who introduced her to Pakistani food and who promptly fell in love with her and begged her to transfer to Columbia and move in with him.
    Instead, Annajane returned to Raleigh in late September, with highlighted blond hair, a discreet butterfly tattoo on her right hip, and a tiny silver nose ring, which she quickly discarded after the shock value wore off.
    Somehow, she managed to avoid seeing Mason Bayless for nearly two years. Right up until the day Pokey got married. But that was another story.

 
     
    7
     
    True to his word, Max Kaufman was standing at the emergency room entryway when the ambulance pulled up the ramp at Passcoe Memorial Hospital. In his late fifties, with a close-shaven shock of graying hair and large, soulful brown eyes, Dr. Kaufman was already dressed in rumpled green surgical scrubs.
    After Sophie had been moved to a gurney and brought inside, Dr. Kaufman nodded a brisk greeting to Mason and Annajane, and then was all business, feeling the listless child’s forehead and gently probing her abdomen.
    Sophie cried feebly at his touch. “It’s okay, sugar,” Mason said, clutching her hand. “Dr. Max is going to make you feel better.” He leaned down, smoothed her hair from her face, and kissed both cheeks.
    “We’re going to take this little lady back and get her blood drawn right away, do a CT scan, and make her comfortable, but from what you’ve told me, I suspect it is her appendix, in which case, we’ll just get that bugger out of there,” Dr. Kaufman said. He nodded at the nurse hovering at his elbow, and she began to wheel Sophie away.
    “Well, Miss Sophie,” they heard the nurse say. “My name is Molly. And I’ve got a little girl just your age at home, and her name is Sophie, too. What do you think about that? I sure do love that pretty pink dress you’re wearing. Did you have a birthday party today?”
    “No,” Sophie said. “We were getting my daddy married, but then I throwed up.”
    Dr. Kaufman chuckled, looking from Mason to Annajane, raising one bushy eyebrow at the groom’s vomit-spattered tuxedo and his ex-wife’s ruined dress. “Everybody good now? Fine. Fill out the paperwork, get yourself some of our world-famous crappy coffee, and I should be able to let you know something about the surgery in a few minutes.”
    “Is this really necessary?” Mason asked anxiously.
    “What, an appendix?” Dr. Kaufman said, irritably. “Mason, nobody really needs an appendix, as far as we know. It’s not terribly common for a five-year-old to have appendicitis, but it’s not a rarity either. That said, if she does have a hot appendix, we need to remove it, or things will get really ugly really fast. So you need to let me go find out, all right?” Without waiting for an answer, he turned and disappeared behind the swinging door to the examining rooms.
    “Thank you,” Annajane called after him.
    “Prick,” Mason muttered. He turned without a word and went to the intake desk to start filling out the paperwork.
    Annajane found herself alone in the emergency room waiting area, a cheerless room with beige linoleum floors, beige painted walls, and a row of army-green straight-backed leatherette chairs that faced a wall-mounted television showing a video of proper hand-washing techniques. The only other entertainment option in the room was a beige metal magazine rack holding a handful of well-thumbed copies of Highlights for Children