“You know, we are horrible, horrible people,” Eileen said with a wicked grin, enhancing the slight wrinkles on her face.
“How else was I supposed to get her home?” Bethel asked. “She’s so dang stubborn and thinks she can make it all on her own in some big city. It’s time for her to come home and settle down. Besides, I am a frail old woman.” The twinkle in her eye and the weekly dancing lessons she took belied her words. She did a mean cha-cha.
“Frail, my foot,” Eileen scoffed. The two women had been friends for over fifty years, and neither of them could get anything past the other. “Still, I don’t know about all of this. If Sage finds out—gets even an inkling of what we have planned . . .”
“It’s worth the risk, my dearest friend,” Bethel said. She called Martin and Maggie so the foursome could put Joseph Anderson on speakerphone and they could all go over the plans again. If Sage had known what was brewing, she wouldn’t be happy with any of them.
But a bit of matchmaking is what kept the five friends young at heart. They suppressed their feelings of guilt as best they could. It was painful, but what else could they do? They had a new mission—and it was a doozy.
The Montana road was familiar, but Sage Banks was tense as she drove for endless miles without passing a single vehicle. In the spring, summer, and fall, the area was usually spectacular and welcoming, with the wheat blowing in the wind, birds singing their magical melodies, and farmers smiling with a polite nod as you passed by.
It was night, however, and she was caught in the middle of a summer storm, making visibility basically zilch. The rain slashed across her window and the wind pushed her car around like a toy.
The blacktop looked treacherous. Thick puddles of water from the unexpected June storm formed small lakes on the asphalt. Sage kept her foot light on the gas pedal and her fingers clutched the steering wheel like a vise.
“Perfect. Just perfect,” she muttered as the car hydroplaned for a heart-stopping second before straightening out again.
She hated driving in this kind of weather, hated that it reminded her every single time of the loss of her parents and her grandfather, who had lost their lives too soon when their vehicle had slid off the road into the river.
She couldn’t think about that right now, couldn’t focus on something that would make her tear up, make her visibility even worse than it was. No. It was better to think about the fact that she was driving here in the first place.
She hadn’t wanted to accept what in her book counted as failure—to come back to the place she’d worked hard to move away from. She’d won a big scholarship, worked her tail off, and made it through medical school. Residency was her time to shine, but it was really hard to shine at a place where everyone had known you since you were a little girl.
Her boss, Dr. Thompson, was going to be the man who’d bandaged her knee when she took a tumble down Rice Hill, stitched her up when she fell off her bike, bruising her ego far more than her body, and seen her when, embarrassment of embarrassments, she needed her first “young woman” appointment. He had to be a hundred years old by now.
It just wasn’t fair.
Even to herself she sounded like a petulant child, but . . . She shook her head to change her focus. This topic wasn’t any better to think about. First she had to pay more attention to the road. And then she had to accentuate the positive. She’d get to spend more time with her grandmother, and she loved Grandma Bethel more than any other person on this planet. Bethel had always told her that when life handed you lemons, you got to make lemonade.
“I guess I’ll be making a lot of lemonade over the next several years,” she muttered with a strained laugh. It was time she accepted her fate with a smile.
But since her grandfather had died in the same wreck that had taken Sage’s parents, she had an unbreakable bond with her grandmother. They needed each other, and it had been just the two of them since she was ten years old.
Plus, it wasn’t like her to throw tantrums or to dwell on her “misfortunes.” She knew a number of good students who hadn’t received any offers of residencies, and she’d been offered several. She also knew that a lot of residents would never become full-fledged doctors. If she didn’t pull herself together, and fast, she could end up throwing everything she’d worked so hard for right into the garbage can.
She had chosen to accept this position. The thought of being two thousand miles away when her grandma needed her had been thoroughly unappealing. So, as much as she hadn’t wanted to come back home, it had been the right decision. She refused to regret it.
As Sage topped a rise in the road and neared the picturesque town of Sterling, she thought of the people she’d met in Stanford and LA—where she’d gone for her undergraduate and graduate programs—who would never consider being stuck in a town like Sterling, Montana.
Maybe they were right. But it was still home, and whether she liked it or not, she was back for at least three years. This won’t be so bad, she told herself with a determined glint in her eyes. Call it a midyear resolution.
As Sage came down the other side of the hill, another car turned a corner, and its lights temporarily blinded her. She focused on the wet pavement and the barely visible lines on the side of the road, but she turned the steering wheel too far to the left as she tried to regain her bearings.
A horn blared, and before she could stop the car, she felt her tires slipping on the water and loose gravel on the shoulder of the road. The ditch was quickly coming up to meet her, and it wasn’t looking too friendly.