Turning Point by Danielle Steel
Chapter One
Bill Browning had been on duty in the emergency room at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center for five hours and had just finished surgery on his third gunshot wound of the day. This one was going to make it, the first one had too, but the second patient had died, a sixteen-year-old victim of gang wars in San Francisco, and the drug trade the gangs engaged in. It was Christmas Day and business as usual at San Francisco General. They got the roughest cases in the city, brought in by ambulance, by the police, by paramedics, or by helicopter from highway accidents or any major disaster in the area. They were set up for multi-casualty incidents, in the jargon of the trade. San Francisco General was the best hospital in the area for severe trauma cases. It was a public institution with the benefit of private funding, in partnership with the Department of Public Health and the medical school at the University of California, San Francisco. All the physicians who practiced there were UCSF faculty as well, which kept the standards high. It was a teaching hospital, and private donations had provided a new building that doubled the capacity of the trauma unit and the patients they could treat to three hundred. The old facility was still in use.
The original building was notoriously grim. Almost every door in the hospital was locked with electronic access codes, and it wasn’t unheard of for injured victims from rival gangs to shoot each other in the emergency room once they were brought in, or pull guns on members of the staff and threaten them. There were metal detectors, but in spite of that, occasionally visitors were able to sneak weapons in. It was an added element at General that the medical personnel had to deal with, along with some of the worst emergencies and traumas in the city.
The care of trauma victims was their strong suit, and Bill Browning was the head of the trauma unit. He signed up for duty in the ER for most major holidays, since he had nothing else to do. It was his gift to his colleagues, allowing others to be home with their families. Holidays meant nothing to him when he didn’t have his children with him. Now thirty-nine, Bill had specialized in trauma for his entire medical career. He was the senior doctor on staff on Christmas Day, and would be again on New Year’s Eve. He only got to have his daughters for Christmas every other year, and this was the off year.
The nurses had decorated the emergency room and the visitors’ waiting room in the old facility with tinsel and assorted holiday decorations, which no one seemed to notice. Their patients were usually too severely injured, and their families too distressed, to care about the slightly forlorn evidence of the holiday scattered around the unit. Patients with the flu, food poisoning, bronchitis, or a sprained ankle ordinarily went to other hospitals. Only the most severe injuries, and a steady flow of the homeless population who were injured or ill and brought in by the police, went to SF General. The work was challenging for the medical staff, and a valuable learning experience for UCSF students. Bill Browning had seen just about everything that humans could inflict on themselves and each other during his career as an ER and trauma doctor. Nothing shocked him anymore. But it still saddened him to see the victims of the gangs. Their deaths were so senseless, such a waste, and evidence of young lives gone wrong. He had signed the death certificate of a sixteen-year-old boy only two hours earlier.
He hadn’t stopped moving or sat down in the five hours he had been on duty, since ten that morning. It was a hell of a way to spend Christmas, but his two little girls, Philippa, called Pip, and Alexandra, Alex, were in London, where they lived with their mother. They were nine and seven years old. Their mother, Athena, was British. She had left San Francisco when Alex was three weeks old, the earliest date their pediatrician would allow her to travel so far with a newborn. Athena couldn’t wait to leave. The marriage had been dead long before that, although Bill had tried valiantly to hang on and convince her to keep trying, but their union had been doomed from the first.
Since the divorce, he had plunged himself into his work more than ever, and didn’t see his girls nearly enough. He had them for a month in the summer, Christmas on alternate years, and whatever other time he could manage to fly to London for a few days. His ex-wife didn’t like sending the girls to San Francisco to see him. They’d been divorced for six years, she had remarried a British lord a year later, and now had two-year-old twin boys. Her second husband, Rupert, was exactly who she should have married in the first place. Her family referred to Bill as “The American,” and considered him her “youthful mistake.”
Athena had been twenty-three when they met in New York. He’d been visiting his parents for a week during his residency. After medical school at Columbia, he’d done his internship and residency at Stanford, and stayed on in San Francisco afterward when he was offered a job at SF General. It wasn’t cushy or glorious, but it was the right place for the trauma work he wanted to do. He had no desire to return to New York. He enjoyed the weather and the outdoor sports he could pursue in San Francisco in his time off, hiking, windsurfing, sailing year round. And he particularly liked the hospital where he worked, and the kind of patients they treated.
His parents were part of an elitist, snobbish social world that had always made him uncomfortable. He avoided it at all cost. While visiting them, under pressure he reluctantly agreed to join them at the party where he had met Athena. He was twenty-nine years old and dazzled by her. She was spectacularly beautiful, a little eccentric, outrageous, and a rebel. She had grown up in a sophisticated, glamorous, international jet-set world, and was visiting friends in New York.