Hidden Obsession

By Tanya Goodwin

After her husband dies, Boston emergency room physician Dr. Maura Kelly not only dreads returning to the hospital where she and her cardiologist husband worked, but also living in the house where they had planned a bright future. While contemplating to resume her duties, she receives a surprising call from Dr. Andrew Dodd, chief of emergency services at Miami’s Mount Zion Medical Center. With her whole energy focused on her husband’s illness, she had completely forgotten he had sent their curriculum vitas to the Miami hospital.

Dr. Andrew Dodd has his hands full. He has worked hard to downplay his wealth until his estranged father wheedles his way back into his life by funding Mount Zion’s future cutting edge new emergency room, horrifyingly to be named the Dodd Emergency Center. Complicating matters, several of his doctors have defected to more sedate suburban emergency departments, leaving his emergency room short-staffed. His quest to find an emergency room doctor who knows how to work in the trenches of a busy urban hospital ends when Maura Kelly’s information finally pops up in his email. He can’t get her beautiful face or her exemplary CV off his mind. She is not only the perfect candidate, but she would also make an excellent co-chief of the emergency department, allowing them to work even closer together.

The timing couldn’t have been better for Maura or for Andrew.

Maura takes the risk to change her life. She ditches a frosty Boston winter and trades her prominent position at Massachusetts General Hospital for one at Mount Zion Medical Center in sunny Miami. The tropical city agrees with her. But not everyone is happy to see Maura sign on, including Dr. Stacey Minkoff who has her own designs on becoming the co-chief.

Butting heads with Stacey Minkoff isn’t Maura’s worst problem. A stalker who begins to show his love for her in creepy ways is. He would do anything to see her crowned as chief of the department, including getting rid of anyone standing in her way.

While Maura has second thoughts of having moved to Miami, and Andrew feels guilty he’d pleaded for her to join him only to have her be the target of a psychopath, they work together with a detective, setting a trap to find the stalker before he claims Maura as his prize at any price.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tanya Goodwin
• Release date: Jul 10, 2016
• ISBN: 9781311339669

Tanya Goodwin

Tanya Goodwin writes romantic suspense with a twist of medicine, medical romance, and mystery. Her experiences as a physician are reflected in her characters and in her stories. Tanya is a graduate of the University of Miami School of Medicine and completed her specialty training as an obstetrician and gynecologist in Tampa, Florida. A former New Yorker, she now resides in St. Petersburg, Fl. Her present life as a traveling doctor allows her to switch from stethoscope to keyboard. Tanya is a member of Romance Writers of America, Mystery Writers of America, and Sisters in Crime.

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

HOME. After today’s funeral and reception, Dr. Maura Kelly needed to be where she could shut out the world and grieve in peace. She couldn’t stomach another well-meaning person saying, I’m sorry for your loss. After Sean’s long loosing battle with cancer, the words had no soothing effect. They hurt her more. Sean was dead, and she was the one left to deal with it once everyone went home.

As she struggled to find the house key in the jangling mess on her key ring, it slipped and landed on the silly welcome mat Sean had so loved to tease her about.

Damn, she whispered, and was reaching down to get them with a shaking hand when her throat and chest tightened on a sob, her eyes stinging and swimming with tears. She straightened and covered her eyes, taking a deep breath. And another one. After a moment, she wiped her eyes briskly with the back of her hand, leaned down, got the keys, and opened her door.

And there was her Charlotte, the tabby cat she and Sean had found during one of their rainy-day runs. She’d been so tiny, no more than a scruffy, yowling ball of wet fur and misery, but she quickly became an indispensable member of the family.

Now Charlotte was sitting and facing her with soulful green eyes and a tilt of her head. Maura set her purse down and squatted in front of the cat, cradling her face and smoothing her hands gently along the cat’s ears, onto her back, and finishing at the tip of her tail.

I’m so sorry.

Charlotte purred and sympathetically nudged against her, sensing Maura’s pain as animals do.

Maura kissed the top of Charlotte’s soft, furry head.

I love you, and I miss him too. But Daddy’s gone. We have to take care of each other now.

The cat let out a grief-stricken meow.

She gave Charlotte another comforting stroke, one they both needed, badly.

Then with a sigh, Maura stood and slipped off her coat, unwrapped the scarf from her neck, and shook the snow from her hat. After hanging her winter gear on the coat stand, she unzipped her boots and shoved them under her coat to thaw.

Sean’s empty peg loomed over her. Her heart suddenly felt too heavy for her chest. She wrapped her arms around herself as if to ease the ache, but it made no difference. Maura dropped her arms to her sides in surrender.

Charlotte hadn’t moved from her guardian spot. Sweet kitty had waited for her to gather her next thought. But she didn’t seem to be able to pull a thread of thought loose at the moment, so she abandoned the effort to make sense of why it all happened. Wondering was futile and merely fatigued her more. Sean was dead, but she was the one becoming spectral.

Sheer happiness, a smile, a laugh, all stood frozen in time. There was no way around the ache. She would have to dive into the pain and hold her breath until she emerged on the other side. How long that would take, she had no idea. Patients died all the time. That was part of medicine. Sean’s death? That was hopelessly personal.

Maura stood in the foyer and rubbed her temples, trying to silence the clatter in her head. There was no way to avoid it. She would have to sift through Sean’s belongings eventually. She wouldn’t be able sleep anyway.

Might as well get it over with.

****

Maura headed to the bedroom with Charlotte’s soft-paw patter shadowing her. Charlotte was following her. Thankfully, she would not be alone during this heartbreaking chore.

She paused in front of the door she’d left closed since Sean died, choosing, instead, to sleep on the sofa, unable to bring herself to lie in their bed, alone. Charlotte waited by her side.

Now she stood at the precipice of the room where they’d not only shared their most intimate moments, but also the times when they’d fallen into the bed exhausted after a heinously busy on-call night in the hospital. It was their sanctuary, the place where they would escape from the outside world—the good, the bad, and the somewhere in between. Maura took a deep breath and opened the bedroom door. She couldn’t stay on the sofa forever…or could she? Either way, it was time to venture inside.

Maura and Charlotte walked into the bedroom. She stopped in the middle of the room, lost. Her heart chugged in her chest. Maybe this wasn’t a good idea to do this so soon. She half-turned, ready to run out of the room, but then she looked, actually looked, about the bedroom she and Sean had worked so hard to make it their get-away, and changed her mind.

Between spending her waking hours at Sean’s bedside and her hospital duties, she’d forgotten the inviting warmth of the room.

Sean and she had purposely painted the bedroom walls a strong lemon yellow, wanting their sanctuary to be bright and cheerful. Maura grinned. What a day that was! Sean had smudged a line of yellow from the bridge to the tip of her nose. She reciprocated in kind. When she was finished with his war paint, Sean sported two streaks of yellow on each cheek, a lightning bolt check-marked on his forehead, and line down his chin where a glop settled into the cleft. In silly retribution, he smudged her cheeks with his cheeks before ending the paint battle with the best kiss. Maura brushed her fingertips across her lips sealing the memory of that crazy day.

Her happy recollection of that funny afternoon screeched to a halt when Maura stared at their bed. The bold blue, yellow, and green patchwork circles of the wedding ring quilt spread across the lonesome bed, staring at her like huge sad eyes, as if wondering why they were suddenly alone with no one to cover and protect from the cold. Her mother’s quilting club had fashioned the bright piece for them, honoring their request for nothing pastel. The loving work of art contrasted wonderfully with the lemon walls. The honey oak bedroom furniture pulled the decor into cozy harmony. But without Sean, it had become just another bedroom.

She skirted the bed and sat on Sean’s side of the bed, settling her hands on the quilt behind her and leaning back. Charlotte leapt onto the bed and circled a few times before nestling next to Maura. Maura petted the loyal kitty and gazed out the window opposite the bed. It was four thirty in the afternoon and winter darkness had spread across the window pane leaving only the halo of street lights in a distant line. Except for Charlotte’s breathing, silence roared in her ears.

An involuntary sigh escaped her. That happened a lot lately.

Maura pushed off the bed and strode to the dresser. She studied her reflection in the mirror and winced, hardly recognizing the wan woman staring back at her. She smoothed her fingers along her black hair, that had gone limp and had long lost its sheen, to the tips that grazed just past her shoulders. She leaned closer to the mirror. Why do that to herself? she thought. It was masochistic. But like a roadside accident, she had to look. Maura widened her eyes only to find a web of red had spread across the whites, blunting her once vibrant Irish green eyes. She idly poked her face and pinched her cheeks, hoping to resurrect color to it, but not a hint of palest pink appeared. Even the tiny freckles that sprinkled her cheeks, the same freckles Sean had teasingly tapped, had faded among her pallor. Worse, with her funeral black knit dress, black tights, and smudged mascara, she looked absolutely Goth. Maura pouted, catching her lower lip growing increasingly thick in the mirror. When had she become such a mess?

Suddenly she began to sweat, her entire body flushed. Maura scratched at her chest through the knit dress. It hadn’t bothered her earlier, but now there were splotches and welts all over her neck. She had to get out of this dress, quickly.

Maura stripped off the black knit dress and tossed it into the corner by the door. She would give it away. It was indelibly stained with a bitter memory, and she couldn’t bear to wear it again. She peeled the black tights from her legs, still cool from the outside, and threw it next to the dress. She’d keep those. She had several pairs of black tights. Soon these would be camouflaged among the others. She would be blinded to the difference.

She pulled open one dresser drawer after another and quickly rifled through her clothes, choosing an emerald sweater and jeans. She donned them and sighed with relief. The itch and splotches disappeared. Had it all been in her head? She smoothed her sweaty palms on her jeans and turned away from the mirror, bracing herself for the heartbreaking task ahead.

Maura stared at the stack of flattened cardboard boxes in the corner of the bedroom. Janie had brought them over some time this past week along with rolls of packaging tape and indelible black markers, waiting patiently for Maura to use when she was ready. Janie always faced crises head-on. That’s what made her the best damn ED nurse and her best friend.

Maura knelt next to the boxes and popped them open, sealing the bottoms. Today she would seal Sean’s belongings inside them. She needed to get this over with.

She stood and lined the boxes outside the closet door. Charlotte wound around her feet, and Maura bent over and scratched the cat behind her ears.

Are you ready, Charlotte?

Charlotte purred.

Me too.

Maura drew in a deep breath and flicked the light switch mounted on the wall outside of the door. A fluorescent beam illuminated the bottom edge of the honey oak accordion door. She placed her hand on the smooth, wooden knob and hesitated before pulling open the gateway to their rushed mornings.

Her and Sean’s daily life surrounded her. Her dresses, skirts, blouses, and pants hung in uniform fashion on the left-hand side. She didn’t think of herself as obsessively neat, but rather utilitarian. Jeans and sweaters lay stacked on wooden shelves, while her spring and summer clothes were stashed in bins aligned on an overhead shelf. Budding flowers, blue skies, and green grass seemed an untouchable future, a lonely future. She’d become single by horrible default.

Maura swung around to face Sean’s side. His jackets, shirts, and trousers were interspersed with irregular gaps because he hung up his clothes helter-skelter. When he arrived home from a long day at the hospital and office, his priority was grabbing every moment of fun and relaxation he could. He had no time for closet etiquette. Who knew that carefree attitude would serve him well in the end?

Her heart cramped when she saw his running shoes which had landed lopsided in the corner. Maura picked them up and held them to her chest. She would not part with them.

Their last run together replayed in her head. Autumn leaves of gold and red crackled beneath their feet with every stride as they ran side-by-side, their breaths puffing in mists of gray in the brisk morning hours. But that morning ended differently.

They’d just come inside for her to get ready for her emergency room shift and he for his morning hospital rounds when she saw him sitting on the bed in his running gear, holding his head. It was only a headache he told her. It would pass after an NSAID and a shower.  And he was right. It did. They ate breakfast and took their coffee on the run. It was their morning routine as usual until Sean had stumbled during rounds, walking into a wall before the first seizure struck.

The earth shook beneath her feet when Sean took his last breath. Now she was stumbling around, fighting to keep her balance. Her heart would ache for a long time, but her mind and her hands needed to keep busy.

At first, there had been so much to do. Funeral arrangements had to made. Who picks out a coffin and plot at age thirty? Then she had to chose the clothes to bury him in. She had picked out his gray suit jacket and trousers, a white shirt, and the salmon-pink silk tie. She wouldn’t bury him in the standard navy blue suit with a blue pin-striped tie. There was nothing wrong with that, but it wasn’t Sean. He adored his ties, collected them. He owned as many of them as she owned shoes. And the salmon-pink contrasted beautifully with his dark brown hair. It was one of her favorite ties. She nodded to herself. She had sent him off well.

Maura set the running shoes aside and stared at Sean’s suits. They were first on her mental list.

She reached out and fingered the tight weave of the navy wool jacket, recalling how his broad shoulders had filled it out until her chest grew heavy. The man had been able to make any suit one-of-a-kind before his face had become swollen from the steroids and his muscles had wasted away. Tears webbed across her eyelashes. The same suit she held in her hands would have made him look like a boy in his father’s clothes. Fucking cancer! She folded the jacket and put it in a box.

Maura plucked the remaining jackets and their matching trousers from their hangers and stacked them in the same box. Shirts came next. She slid each one off its resting place, one by one. Maura stopped at the last hanger and buried her face in collar of the white shirt. The scent of his deodorant and aftershave lingered in the cotton. How many times had she told him to put his shirts in the laundry instead of hanging them back up? Thank God he had recycled this one.

Maura slid the shirt off its hanger, pulled off her sweater, and put it on. Sean’s shirt drooped on her thin frame, and the cuffs hung past her fingertips, so she rolled up the sleeves and hugged the shirt around her.

Everything stilled for a moment before she fell to her knees, breath hitching, and then lay onto her side with her knees tucked into a mournful ball. Her sobs yanked at her ribcage, trapping the air in her lungs. Tears streamed across her upper lip and pooled wet between the crook of her neck and the closet floor. The outlines of the clothes above her blended into an indistinguishable haze.

Charlotte’s collar bell tinkled as she crept closer to touch her pink wet nose to Maura’s snotty one and then sat next to Maura’s head. Maura sucked in a long and hard sniff and pushed into a sitting position, pressing the heels of her hands against her wet eyes and swiping the tears along her temples. Maura sighed deeply and ran her fingers along the cat’s back in gratitude for the the kitty’s unwavering concern for her. She rocked to her feet. She had planned to finish this closet and that’s what she was going to do.

Maura sealed the box with a strip of packaging tape and wrote Suits with the black marker.

She nodded to Charlotte who swished her tail in approval.

Maura was nearly done, having only Sean’s closet shelves to tackle.

He was an all-weather kind of guy. Unlike her, he didn’t stow away seasonal clothes. He kept them sorted in stacked white closet cubicles.

Why bother? he would say. I’m going to wear them eventually. That way I don’t have to search for them. Boom! Right there when I need them.

Maura laughed. He loved to use the word, Boom.

Boom! Dinner’s ready.

Boom! Got the weekend off!

Boom! The Patriots scored again!

Boom! Race you to the bedroom!

Boom. She sealed another box.

CHAPTER TWO

THE brass clock on the living room wall ticked, its click, click, click, amplified in the vast silence of the room. Maura stared at the timepiece, a wedding gift from her aunt, remembering when she and Sean had opened it and had mounted it together in that very spot. There was no safe place for her to hide from those memories in their home.

It was eleven-twenty in the morning. She could have been inserting chest tubes and running codes by now, but instead she lay curled up in the corner of the couch, wrapped in a thick pink robe, and with her damp hair piled beneath a towel twisted into a turban. Bringing a sleeve up to her nose, she breathed deeply of Sean’s clean scent. She’d chosen to forgo her usual floral body wash for his no-frills one, and now his imprint permeated the cozy terrycloth.

Maura sank deeper into the sofa and leaned her head on the beige suede armrest. A week had passed since the funeral, and she couldn’t even manage to get dressed, much less put on scrubs. Thankfully, she was on a personal leave of absence which was officialese for take your time to get your shit together.

She gazed out the living room window at Boston’s anemic winter sky and twisted her wedding ring. She’d lost so much weight that the ring slipped easily around her finger. Since she was on leave from the hospital, she could keep it on her finger. She’d always preferred the sweet comfort of having it there. But when she was on ED duty, she usually kept her ring strung on a gold chain around her neck, mostly because the diamond had been known to poke through her gloves, a huge drawback when she stuck her hand into a chest she’d cracked open. Maura stuck out her hand and studied the gold wedding band that Sean had slid onto her finger five short years ago. She squeezed her lips together, trying to fight the tears threatening to push past her eyelashes, but the tears won. Maura licked the saline from her lips, brought the ring to her mouth, and kissed it. She’d buried Sean with his matching band on his finger where it belonged, forever.

Charlotte leapt onto the couch, breaking Maura’s trance, and walked across the cushions air-light. After a graceful half-circle, she pushed her back against Maura’s chest and settled into a warm snuggle. Charlotte purred beneath Maura’s fingers while she stroked the cat’s deep fur, and the rhythm in her chest wove in between the kitty’s calming vibration. She watched the cat’s eyes ease shut before she closed her own, and they breathed peacefully in tandem, neither bothering to get up for lunch.

Maura sighed. Her breath echoed in the emptiness of a living room from the past. Staying at Sean’s bedside in between her ED shifts had kept her bizarrely sane. It gave her a purpose. It also gave her that morsel of hope that after his surgery, the chemo, and the radiation, he would walk out cured. Even though she was a doctor, she had abandoned all scientific reasoning in favor of hope. Patients like Sean died, but he wasn’t supposed to.

But the daily rhythm of married life had changed when neither she or Sean were looking.

By one-thirty in the afternoon, both her stomach and Charlotte’s growled. They had to get off this couch.

Come on, Charlotte. I know you’re hungry. So am I.

Maura stood and stretched, pushing her arms over her head, and then linking her fingers as she slowly lowered her hands, and pressed them into the back of her neck. She used to enjoy yoga, but a simple stretch was the best she could do at the moment.

Charlotte, apparently somewhat inspired, leaped off the sofa and pushed her front paws forward, performing a cat stretch that made her body look twice its size.

Show-off!

Charlotte meowed and trotted toward the kitchen. Maura followed her.

The cat circled her empty bowl and looked up at Maura.

Yes. Yes. I’m getting it.

Maura walked to the cupboard containing all things Charlotte, opened it and retrieved her cat food. She filled Charlotte’s bowl and replenished her water. Now she had to take care of herself.

Hmmm. What to eat?

She’d slept in, again, since she didn’t need to get up for work. She hadn’t set her cell alarm in a week, and the dim, winter mornings failed to rouse her. Even Charlotte bypassed her usual pre-dawn pacing on her chest. Both their routines began to crumble once Sean became ill. But now with him gone, they would have to cobble together a new schedule. A new life.

Although it was past noon, Maura had skipped breakfast, but she was in the mood for eggs, anyway. At least her appetite was returning.

She brewed a single serving of coffee, fed a slice of whole wheat bread into the toaster, and cracked an egg into a frying pan.

Once her breakfast was ready, Maura set her plate down on her place mat at the kitchen table and sat. While sipping her coffee, she glanced over the rim of her cup at Sean’s place mat across from her, empty. Today it would remain unused. And tomorrow. And the next day. And the next day. And so on.

This was the way it was going to be. She’d made breakfast, albeit