Page 219 of Wrong Number Right Doctor

I unclip my seat belt and scramble out of the car on shaking legs, run around to the driver’s side, yank the door open. Alester sags toward me with dead weight I’m not prepared for. I catch him badly, panic rising so hard it makes my vision blur.

“Help!” I shout, though I don’t know to whom.

Then headlights cut across us. Dalton’s car. He stops abruptly and it half-skids, throws the door open before the engine has fully died, and is across the pavement in seconds.

“What happened?”

“He just—he dropped, I don’t know, he was driving and then he wasn’t⁠—”

Dalton is already on him. “Move.”

I do.

He gets one arm under Alester’s shoulders, the other at his chest, and together we drag him awkwardly out of the driver’s seat and down onto the asphalt. Dalton’s whole face changes the second his hands touch him. Everything personal drops away. The fear stays, but it sharpens into action.

“Call 911,” he says.

“I thought⁠—”

“Now, Maggie.”

I fumble for the phone again and do it. I give the location twice before the operator understands me.

On the ground, Dalton is checking airway, pulse, breathing all in one glance and touch. He tilts Alester’s head back, opens his airway, listens, feels, then swears under his breath.

“What?”

“Stay on the phone.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“Maggie.”

The tone stops me.

I clutch the phone harder and repeat directions to the operator while Dalton tears open Alester’s shirt collar, adjusts his position, checks again.

“Come on,” he says under his breath, more to the body than to the man. “Come on.”

Then he does something quick and practiced—head position, jaw, a hard check at the carotid again, two fingers pressing where he wants a response, his whole focus narrowed to one point.

“Is he breathing?” I ask the operator, which makes no sense, because the operator can’t see him and I know that, but my mind has left reason three miles back.

Dalton leans close again, watches, waits.

Then Alester coughs. It’s ugly and weak and far too human. His chest jerks. A breath drags in.

Dalton closes his eyes for one fraction of a second, then opens them again and puts one hand flat against Alester’s sternum as if to keep him anchored to the earth by force.

“That’s it,” he says, voice low and hard. “Breathe.”

Another breath comes. Shallow, but there.

The operator is still talking in my ear. Sirens now. Approaching.

Dalton looks up at me then, kneeling in the hospital light with Alester half-conscious on the asphalt between us. “He’s breathing,” he says.

I nod, then realize I’m crying. I don’t even know when it started.