The statuesque blonde pointed in the opposite direction. “She’s riding herd on a twenty-year-old in CAT scan. Baseball bat to the forehead.”

Mari winced. “Okay, thanks, I’m going to—”

“Excuse me.” A young, vivacious redhead who looked like she belonged in a Fortune 500 front office in her stylish royal blue suit and low heels homed in on Mari. “Are you Mari Mateo?”

“Yes,” Mari said.

The redhead smiled, her celery-green eyes sparkling. “I’m Carrie Longmire. I’m pretty sure I’m your cousin.”

Chapter Twelve

Mari stared at the redhead who regarded her with eager anticipation. Carrie. Carrie. Wasn’t that the name of Glenn’s friend—possible girlfriend—the only person other than Flann Glenn had actually mentioned? Cousin?

“Cousin? I don’t see how that’s possible,” Mari finally said. Nothing about this ivory-skinned, green-eyed Irish girl could be farther from her own Mexican American heritage. True, her mother was not Hispanic, but she couldn’t see any resemblance at all between her dark-haired, brown-eyed mother and Carrie. No, this crazy idea couldn’t be true. “I know all my cousins, and they’re all on the Mateo side of the tree.”

“I know, sounds wild, huh?” Carrie smiled again and grasped her arm. “Come on, I’ll buy you lunch. Have you had lunch?”

Mari shook her head, trying to keep pace with the rapid-fire conversation and Carrie’s supercharged energy level.

“Great. I’ll tell you all about it then.” Carrie gave Mari’s arm a little tug.

Mari glanced at the board again. Still only a few patients, all currently being seen, and the ER was probably the quietest it would be for the rest of the day. She had her phone, she’d only be a minute away. And she did need some food. Besides, Carrie’s wide-open friendliness and exuberance were hard to resist. “I don’t have much time—”

“Believe me, neither do I. Have you met my boss yet?”

“Uh, no.”

“Presley has two speeds—fast and hyperdrive.” Carrie grinned. “If I’m gone more than half an hour, it will take me a day to catch up.”

“Well, half an hour is about all I’ll have.” Curious and intrigued, Mari glanced at Nancy who, watching them with obvious interest, shrugged as if to say go for it. “Okay, sure. Lunch.”

Carrie was already striding away and Mari hurried to stay with her. By the time they’d raced down a hall, up a staircase, and into the cafeteria, she was winded. Definitely time to start running again. Getting back into a regular exercise regimen would be another step toward reclaiming her life.

The cafeteria was nearly empty and the hot food lines closed, but the salad bar was still open and a cold case held packaged sandwiches that didn’t look half bad.

“They make those at the café in town every day,” Carrie said, seeing Mari look them over. “They’re good. I get one sometimes to take home for supper.”

“If they’re anything like the croissants, I’m sold.”

Carrie laughed. “Chocolate or raspberry?”

“Um, both?”

“See! I knew we were related.”

Smiling but skeptical, Mari grabbed a sandwich and put together a quick salad. Carrie had picked a table next to the one Mari had shared with Glenn. That first conversation felt like a week ago.

Mari tried the sandwich. Carrie was right. Delicious. “I don’t see how we could possibly be related. I’m not even from around here.”

“Neither am I.”

“But how could I never have heard of you before now?”

“Well that’s the thing,” Carrie said nonchalantly. “Our extended family is a little dysfunctional.”

Mari laughed, not feeling the slightest bit of humor. “I don’t know about yours, but I think mine probably is.”

“Yeah, I actually think most are—except possibly the Riverses. I’ve never seen a family quite like theirs. But you can decide that for yourself when you meet them all.”

“Maybe you should start at the beginning,” Mari said, suspecting that with Carrie everything was a story. She liked Carrie’s energy, it was practically infectious, but totally opposite her natural tendency to be cautious and guarded. And she wasn’t one for believing in coincidences.

“Before I say anything,” Carrie said, her tone softening and her vivacious expression settling into one of gentle seriousness, “I want to start out by saying that I don’t want to create any problems between you and your family. So if anything I say is likely to do that, just tell me and I’ll just stop.”

Mari pushed aside the familiar twinge of pain, tired of paying the price for refusing to live a lie. “I don’t actually see how you could cause any more problems than I already have. My family has sort of shut me out these past few months.”

Carrie stopped eating and gave her a long look. “That sounds like it sucks.”

“More or less precisely.” Mari waved a hand. “Go ahead, tell me what you think is going on with us.”

“When Glenn mentioned your name…” Carrie paused, fork waving in the air like a conductor’s baton. “Oh, background…last night at the fairgrounds, I asked Glenn how the first day with the new job had gone and your name came up. Mateo caught my attention.”

“You and Glenn were talking about me,” Mari said carefully, hoping she sounded less uncomfortable than she felt. She wasn’t exactly sure how she felt being the topic of conversation between Glenn and another woman, but she was more surprised to discover Glenn and Carrie had been together last night. Glenn hadn’t mentioned it when they’d talked that morning. Mari gave herself a mental shake. Why should she expect Glenn to update her on what she’d done after she’d walked Mari home. Her personal, private time was just that—private.

“Don’t worry,” Carrie went on as if reading her mind, “there was no good gossip. Just the usual hospital stuff, you know how that is.”

“Oh, I certainly do,” Mari said dryly. It didn’t take her very long on her first clinical rotation to discover that hospitals were giant gossip mills, mostly due to the fact that everyone spent more time together there than they did with anyone else, including their families, and a lot of that time was stressful waiting when there wasn’t much else to do except talk, speculate, and pass on snippets of juicy news. Mari pushed the niggling annoyance away. “Okay—so you and Glenn were casually chatting and somehow you decided I was your cousin.”

Carrie laughed. “Not right away—by the way, it was totally professional, except of course, for the two of you having pizza together. That was news.”

“Really? Why is that?”

“Glenn leaving the hospital before nine at night for any reason other than softball is newsworthy.”

Mari smiled. She liked knowing Glenn’s friendly overtures had been unusual. “She was kind enough to keep me from starving.”

“Uh-huh. Anyhow, when Glenn mentioned your name, I didn’t see how it could be a coincidence. You’re from the West Coast, right? LA?”

“That’s right. I’ve lived there all my life. What about you?”

“I grew up in San Francisco. Where our moms did.”

“My mother did grow up in Northern California, but she never talked about her family except to say they were all gone. I’m sorry, is your mother deceased?”

“My mom?” Carrie’s eyes glowed. “Not by a long shot. She’s a political organizer, and when she’s not doing that, she’s the head of a large community food service, a nonprofit that provides meals to homeless and underprivileged people. My dad is a philosophy professor at Berkeley.”

“Our families couldn’t be more different,” Mari said. “My mother and father own a small grocery store and, other than going to church, don’t do much else.”

“Mine are sort of next-generation hippies, like my grandmom, but I don’t think they’re called hippies anymore,” Carrie said.

Mari’s head was starting to spin. “Well, that can’t be right, then, about us being related. I don’t have any relatives on my mother’s side. She told me that, told all of us kids that, whenever we asked about our other grandparents.”

“Your mom’s name is Diane, right? And your father is Hermano Mateo?”

“Yes, that’s right. That’s all in my hospital paperwork—”

“Oh, I didn’t get it from there,” Carrie said quickly. “That’s private information. I know because my mother told me about her sister’s family, the ones she’s not supposed to have any contact with.”

“But why?” Mari asked, her confusion turning to hurt. Could this really be true? Could her mother have actually lied to her about something so important? Could she really know so little about her parents? She’d thought the foundation of her life couldn’t get any shakier, but now she wasn’t so sure. “Why would my mother pretend to have no one?”

“Well, this is the part that I hope doesn’t cause problems, but apparently your dad didn’t get along with my mother and father. They’re atheists and socialists, and like I said, modern-day hippies, I guess. And your dad is pretty…um, traditional.”

Mari snorted. “That would be putting it rather mildly. My dad is extremely conservative and both my parents are very religious. But I can’t believe my mother would just break off ties with her sister because my father didn’t get along with her.”

“Well, she didn’t, not really. They talk on the phone at least a couple times a year, and I think this past year they might have even FaceTimed. However they manage it, my mom knows the names of her sister’s children. That would be you and your brothers and sister. So when I heard your name, I just had to believe that it was you.”

“Oh my God,” Mari whispered. “I can’t believe there’s—are there more of you, more of my mother’s family?”

“There’s my baby sister, Kelly, and I have an uncle James, so he would be your mom’s older brother. Your uncle. He lives in the UK and I don’t see him very often. He’s gay, and he and his husband moved there, gosh, probably twenty years ago. I guess I don’t have to point out where the problem would be there.”

“No,” Mari said softly. “You don’t.”

“My mom thought it was important for me to know that there was more family, even though she said we’d probably never meet face-to-face. That’s how I knew about all of you. I called her last night.”

“I don’t really believe in coincidences like this,” Mari muttered, but she couldn’t disbelieve the story, either. “We certainly don’t look anything alike.”

“I’ve seen pictures of our moms when they were younger, and they look a lot alike, but my dad is as Irish as they come and I got most of my coloring from him.”

“And I got mine from my father.”

Carrie nodded. “I love your hair, by the way. It looks like thick black velvet.”

“Thanks. I love yours. I always wanted curls like that.”

“It’s funny how we always think we want someone else’s hair.”

Mari grinned. “I can’t believe we’re cousins. I have others, most of them are in Mexico, though.”

“I’m not totally sure it’s coincidence, you ending up here, I mean.” Carrie fiddled with the cellophane wrapper of her sandwich. “My mom told your mom that I moved here because Presley’s company had purchased the hospital. Mom thought your mom might have said something to one of your old instructors about the new program here.”

“My mom? God, I can’t see her doing that,” Mari said, but she wasn’t really sure about anything any longer. She clearly didn’t really know her mother at all. Her program director had visited a lot, especially when she’d first gotten sick, and had helped her parents understand the medical system and the barrage of treatments that came on in rapid succession. Her parents liked him, and they’d become friendly enough she could almost imagine her mother mentioning something to him. She didn’t really know her parents at all, as she’d learned the hard way the last year. If her mother had been keeping a secret relationship with her sister all these years, one that Mari’s father disapproved of, she wasn’t nearly as passive and nonconfrontational as she’d always appeared.

“I don’t know whether to be angry at my mother, proud of her, or just plain sad.”

“It seems pretty terrible from the outside,” Carrie said, “but I guess we can’t ever know that whole story.”

“Well however it came about, I’m really happy to be here,” Mari said, “and I’m really happy to meet you too.”

“I know, it’s great, isn’t it?” Carrie touched her hand tentatively. “I hope I haven’t upset you by telling you all of this.”

Mari shook her head. “You haven’t. And crazy as it all sounds, somehow I can totally believe it. Nothing you told me seems too impossible given the way a lot of things happen in my family.”

“Now that you’re here, we’ve got to spend more time together. Glenn probably told you about softball. Do you play, by any chance?”