Just for the Summer (Part of Your World, #3)

by Abby Jimenez

She was beautiful. In her picture she was wearing light blue scrubs and her long brown hair was in a braid. She had hazel eyes, a broad grin. She didn’t look like a nurse. She looked like a movie star playing a nurse. She seemed pretty cool too.

“That would kill me, right?” he asked. “Like if I was really frozen solid.” I grabbed my red polish from the bathroom and shook the bottle on my way to the bed. “Maybe. We’d warm you up first to try and revive you. You’re not dead until you’re warm and dead.”

“She could have been dealing with postpartum depression, PTSD, complicated grief. Any of those things can make you impulsive and reckless. She might have been self-medicating to deal with it, taking things you didn’t know about. Trauma changes you.”

“Unhealed trauma is a crack. And all the little hard things that trickle into it that would have rolled off someone else, settle. Then when life gets cold, that crack gets bigger, longer, deeper. It makes new breaks. You don’t know how broken she was or what she was trying to do to fill those cracks. Being broken is not an excuse for bad behavior, you still have to make good choices and do the right thing. But it can be the reason. And sometimes understanding the reason can be what helps you heal.”

Maybe that’s why I was a good nurse. I had the gift of extreme empathy paired with detachment. I could deeply understand someone and anticipate their needs, but also never get close enough to them to feel it when they passed away or suffered or I moved on. I didn’t fall in love. Not with people or places. Not with anything, really. I mean, that was the curse we were trying to break, right?

“You’re not asking too much,” he said. “You were just asking the wrong person. Ask me instead.”