MIRROR IMAGE

CHAPTER SEVEN

"I might bring Mandy to see you tomorrow." Tate regarded her closely. "Since the swelling's gone down some, she'll be able to recognize you."

Avery gazed back at him.  Even though he smiled encouragingly every time he looked at her face, she knew it was still frightful. There were no bandages to hide behind. As Irish would say, she could make a buzzard puke.

However, in the week since her operation, Tate had never avoided looking at her.  She appreciated that charitable quality in him. As soon as her hands were capable of holding a pencil, she would write him a note and tell him so.

The bandages had been removed from her hands several days ago. She had been dismayed at the sight of the red, raw, hairless skin. Her nails had been clipped short, making her hands look different, ugly. Each day she did physical therapy with a rubber ball, squeezing it in her weak fists, but she hadn't quite graduated to grasping a pencil and controlling it well enough to write. As soon as she could, there was much she had to tell Tate Rutledge.

She had finally been weaned from the despised respirator. To her mortification, she hadn't been able to make a single sound—a traumatizing occurrence for a broadcast journalist who was already insecure in her career.

However, the doctors had cautioned her against becoming alarmed with the assurance that her voice would be restored gradually. They told her that the first few times she tried to speak she probably wouldn't be able to make herself understood, but that this was normal, considering the damage done to her vocal cords by the smoke she had inhaled.

Beyond that, she was virtually hairless, toothless, and taking liquid nourishment through a straw. Overall, she was still a mess.

"What do you think about that?" Tate asked her. "Do you feel up to having a visit with Mandy?''

He smiled, but Avery could tell his heart wasn't in it. She pitied him. He tried so valiantly to be cheerful and optimistic. Her earliest postoperative recollections were of him speaking soft words of encouragement. He had told her then and continued to tell her daily that the surgery had gone splendidly. Dr. Sawyer and all the nurses on the floor continued to commend her on her rapid progress and good disposition.

In her situation, what other kind of disposition could one have? She could cope with a broken leg if her hands could handle crutches, which they couldn't. She was still a prisoner to the hospital bed. Good disposition be damned. How did they know that she wasn't raging on the inside? She wasn't, but only because it wouldn't do any good.  The damage had already been done.  Avery Daniels' face had been replaced by someone else's. That recurring thought brought scalding tears to her eyes.

Tate misinterpreted them. "I promise not to keep Mandy here long, but I believe even a short visit with you would do her good. She's home now, you know. Everybody's pampering her, even Fancy. But she's still having a tough go of it at night. Seeing you might reassure her. Maybe she thinks we're lying to her when we say that you're coming back. Maybe she thinks you're really dead. She hasn't said so, but then, she doesn't say much of anything."

Dejectedly, he bent his head down and studied his hands. Avery stared at the crown of his head. His hair grew around a whorl that was slightly off-center. She enjoyed looking at him. More than her gifted surgeon, or the hospital's capable nursing staff, Tate Rutledge had become the center of her small universe.

As promised, sight in her left eye had been restored once the shelf to support her eyeball had been rebuilt. Three days following her surgery, the sutures on her eyelids had been taken out. She'd been promised that the packs inside her nose and the splint covering it would be removed tomorrow.

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Tate had had fresh flowers delivered to her private room every day, as though to mark each tiny step toward full restoration. He was always smiling when he came in. He never failed to dispense a small bit of flattery.