Prologue
Edilean, Virginia
“I quit!” Heather said. “I cannot take any more of that man’s bad temper.”
She was in the outer office of Dr. Reede Aldredge’s medical clinic and she was talking to Alice and Betsy. Alice wanted to retire and she was nearly desperate for Heather, young, recently married, and new to Edilean, to take on her job. But Heather was having a difficult time adjusting to Dr. Reede’s sharp tongue. Betsy and Alice referring to it as his “perfectionism” wasn’t helping Heather to adjust. “He never says a pleasant word.”
“But what he does say is usually right,” Alice said, her face encouraging.
“Yes, but it’s the way he says it. Today I said, ‘Good morning,’ he says, ‘I’m inside so how would I know?’ And yesterday, he told Mrs. Casein that her only problem was that she ate too many of her husband’s pies.”
Betsy and Alice just looked at her. Betsy was in her late forties and had lived in Edilean since she was six. She was glad she wasn’t a nurse as Heather was. Instead, she sat at the computer all day and answered the phone—and that kept her away from young Dr. Reede for most of the workday.
Heather understood the looks the women were giving her. “I know, I know,” she said. “That’s true about the pies, but couldn’t he at least try to be diplomatic? Hasn’t he even heard of a bedside manner? Last week Sylvia Garland left here crying. He wasn’t at all sympathetic.”
The two women again gave her a look.
“What?!” Heather asked, exasperated. She’d moved to Edilean because her husband worked nearby and he said the small town would be a great place to raise kids. And Heather had been thrilled to get a nursing job so close to their new house. But that was three weeks ago and now she didn’t know if she could stay there. All this week she’d been saying she was going to quit.
Betsy spoke first. “Everyone in town except her husband knows that Sylvia Garland isn’t going out with the girls on Thursday nights. She’s sleeping around—and Dr. Reede told her so.”
“What business is that of his?”
“Communicable diseases, I guess,” Alice said. “Besides, he’s used to working with people who have serious problems, like elephantiasis and leprosy.”
Heather had heard about Dr. Reede’s work around the world, but she wasn’t going to be put off by that excuse. “If he thinks that small town illnesses are beneath him, why doesn’t he leave?”
Yet again the women exchanged looks, then Alice spoke. “He tried to get other doctors to take over the practice for him.”
“But doctors today want lots of money,” Betsy said. “And they don’t want to live in a tiny town and have to care for locals who talk too much, and tourists who get too many mosquito bites.”
“Although he did enjoy that rescue last month,” Alice said. “He had to climb down the side of a cliff.”
“Great!” Heather said. “If everyone jumped off the side of a mountain would that make him happy?”
For a moment Alice and Betsy seemed to consider the idea. They too were worn out by Dr. Reede’s nev
er-ending bad temper. In fact, though she’d never admit it, it was the real reason Alice was taking early retirement.
Heather dropped down onto a chair by the photocopy machine. “Doesn’t he have a personal life? A girlfriend? He’s a good-looking man. At least I think he would be if he weren’t always frowning. Has he ever smiled in his entire life?”
“Dr. Reede used to smile a lot,” Betsy said. “When he was a child he loved to come to the office to visit cousin Tristan’s father who was the doctor then. Reede was a very sweet little boy who always knew he wanted to be a doctor. But then . . . ”
“What happened?” Heather asked.
“Laura dumped him for the Baptist preacher,” Alice answered.
“Where?”
“Where what?” Betsy asked.
“Where did this Laura find a preacher so dynamic that she left a hottie like Dr. Reede?” Heather asked.
“A hottie, is he?” Alice asked. “Even though he never smiles?”
“If I just saw him I’d think he was gorgeous. But he opens his mouth and I can’t stand him. So what about this Laura? Where’d she go to find a man?”
“Nowhere. She lives here in Edilean. Her parents moved here in the 1970s.”
“Wait a minute!” Heather said. “You don’t mean Laura Billings, do you? The wife of the Baptist preacher here in Edilean?”
“The very one,” Alice said.
“But she’s . . . ”
“She’s what?” Betsy asked.
“Drab,” Heather said. “She looks like she was always somebody’s mother. I can’t imagine her being the Great Love of anyone.”
“But she was. She and Reede were inseparable from seventh or eighth grade and all through college. Then he went away to medical school and she took up with the new pastor.” Betsy lowered her voice. “The rumor is that Dr. Reede was so depressed that he tried to kill himself, but he was rescued by Dr. Tris’s wife. This was before they were married and she was still a teenager.”
“Wow!” Heather said. “Drama in a small town. Are you saying that Dr. Reede has been sulking ever since Mrs. Billings ran off with another man?”
“More or less,” Betsy said. “Although he’d never admit it. For years he was a world hero.”
“Everyone falls back on that,” Heather said. “Africa, Afghanistan, and countries I’ve never even heard of, but that doesn’t excuse him now.”
“If you ask me,” Alice said, “that boy was trying to go so fast that he’d outrun his past.”
“And now he’s stuck back here in Edilean,” Betsy said with a sigh.