Rushing Waters by Danielle Steel Read Free Book Online Page A

many qualities, any woman would have wanted to be with Charles, but he didn’t care. He was oblivious to them—all he wanted was the marriage he had lost, and even he knew there was no hope of retrieving it. She seemed too happy where she was, with Nigel in New York. Her life there was everything she had hoped for when she left, although Charles wondered how long it would last. Nothing was stable in her new world. But after a year, Gina was still on a high, dazzled by it all.
    He walked around SoHo, and along the Hudson River for several hours, and still hadn’t heard from her when he got back to the hotel at four o’clock and turned on the TV again, to check on the hurricane. It was a perfect focus for his anxieties, terrified that the city would be destroyed. He had nothing else to do that day. But there had been no major change. The hurricane had made a small detour in the Caribbean but was back on course toward New York again, and had picked up a little speed. He tried to imagine where Gina might be with the girls, but he had done everything he could to contact her, several times. Now all he could do was wait. He ordered a hamburger from room service and sat staring at the TV, watching CNN. Hurricane Ophelia was being compared to Sandy, though seemed less ominous for the moment. But it couldn’t be dismissed as a potential threat to the city, albeit a lesser one. Even that didn’t reassure him, as he ate the hamburger and worried about his girls. And their mother’s lack of response to his messages was as maddening as it always was. And wherever she was, he wondered if she had her cell phone with her, or the battery was dead, which was frequently her excuse for not returning his calls.
    —
    On Saturday, Juliette Dubois had been on duty in the emergency room at one of the city’s three largest hospitals since noon. She was thirty-one years old, a resident and ER doctor. During Hurricane Sandy, she had been in medical school at NYU and was assigned to NYU Hospital. The hospital had been heavily damaged and had had to be evacuated, and she had helped to carry patients out of the building for transfers to other hospitals, when the backup generators failed. No one had expected the kind of damage they had experienced. No lives had been lost in the evacuation, but there had been some terrifying situations involving preemies in incubators and patients on respirators that had to be manually operated by hospital personnel until they got to the hospitals that took their patients. It had made a lasting impression on Juliette and given her a profound respect for natural disasters. And although Hurricane Ophelia didn’t seem as dangerous so far, a chill had run down her spine at the first reports and at the news that it was headed for New York.
    She hadn’t had time for a break in the five hours she’d been on duty. Saturdays were always busy in the ER. People who got sick during the week and hadn’t bothered to call their doctors took a turn for the worse on Friday night and had no recourse except to go to the ER over the weekend. A bad flu had been rampant in the city, which was a particular threat to children and old people. Household accidents abounded on the weekends, as did sports injuries, women who went into premature labor, and people who broke bones when they fell on city streets.
    They had two broken hips in the ER now, an eighty-four-year-old woman who had been hit by a bicycle in Central Park, and a ninety-year-old man who had fallen off a ladder while checking out a leak in his ceiling. Paramedics had brought them in, along with the usual assortment of heart attacks, minor injuries, asthma attacks, cuts that needed stitches, and a four-year-old whose mother thought he might have swallowed their pet turtle. Juliette loved the variety of what they treated in the emergency room, from serious injuries to minor ones, although at times the place was a zoo.
    At five o’clock she was having her first break of the