"She's going to need morphine," the doctor told the nurse in a grave tone as he unwrapped the red stained towel from around Emily's bloody stump of a hand. Even he seemed disturbed by the sight of the carnage. "This was an axe, you said?"
"A hatchet," Emily corrected between panting breaths. Between the pain and shock and massive blood loss, she was clearly on the verge of losing consciousness entirely, but was doing her best to fight the encroaching darkness.
As the nurse injected the morphine into Emily's IV line – the effects almost instantaneous – the doctor informed the two women, "Look, I can put you under or I can numb it and you stay awake." He was already grabbing for the anaesthesia, clearly expecting the former response.
The two women shared a glance, a silent conversation, the two of them knowing each other so well after all the time they'd been married that they simply didn't need words to communicate. Alex immediately understood what Emily wanted, even as the morphine was starting to make her confused and sleepy. "Awake," she answered for her wife.
"I'll stay awake," Emily confirmed, though the words were slightly slurred.
"Ma'am, you're welcome to wait outside," the doctor told Alex, gesturing with one hand towards the door to the waiting room.
"What?" Alex asked incredulously. She would be doing no such thing.
The local sheriff took his sweet time getting to the hospital. By the time he arrived, Emily had been all stitched up and was drifting in and out of sleep in her bed while Alex clutched tightly to her uninjured hand while she too drifted in and out of sleep in the chair next to the bed.
When he knocked on the hospital room door to announce his presence, both women were immediately wide awake, eager to tell their side of the story. He said nothing as he crossed the room to the foot of Emily's bed, his boots clicking across the linoleum with each deliberate step. "Well," he started, hooking his thumbs in his belt loops and heaving a sigh, "I've already been over to the Doyles', had a chance to hear their side..."
"Their side?" Alex interrupted to repeat the words, thinking she surely couldn't have heard that correctly. "Side of what?"
The sheriff didn't directly answer the question. What he did say was, "Their account is that Mrs. Prentiss here pulled a gun..."
"In self-defence!" Alex exclaimed. She looked from the sheriff to Emily and back with wide disbelieving eyes.
"That your service revolver Moira showed me?" the sheriff asked Emily, ignoring Alex's incredulity as if she were simply being unreasonably hysterical.
Emily, even in her half-drugged haze, did not seem surprised by the sheriff's lackadaisical approach to the assault. "I'm sure it is," she replied.
He nodded once. "You wore the badge once..." he started.
"She wore it over thirty years," Alex said scathingly, refusing to be kowtowed by this man's insistence on looking down his nose upon them because they were women or because they were lesbians or whatever bullshit reasons he had in his mind.
Still ignoring Alex, he said, "Well, then you know how the law works."
"I have a fair idea I know how it works here," Emily deadpanned. She could clearly see the road this conversation was travelling down and knew it was headed nowhere good.
"Moira claimed things got a tad rough convincing you to set your weapon down," the sheriff described the Doyles' account of events as if it were gospel.
For a moment's Alex's mouth hung open slightly in disbelief at the blatant lie. "They chopped her hand off!" she nearly shouted.
"The way they tell it, you two came here looking to take a child from its mother. First with talk – well, threats – then a gun."
Temper blazing with righteous indignation, Alex demanded, "Maggie – the boy's mother – did you see her?"
He nodded sagely. "Oh, sure, she was there."
"Did you speak with her?" she persisted. "She's terrified of them!"
Refusing to react to her anger, he asked, "She was married to your son, right?"
"Yes," Alex said slowly.
"He died, right? He's dead," he stated the fact, but with a certain air of judgment that Alex didn't like. "How exactly did that happen?"
Emily too disliked the way he phrased the question. "Why don't you tell us," Emily challenged, knowing he'd formulated some kind of opinion already, probably based on lies the Doyles had told him.
He hummed a note. "An accident, she said. He was thrown from his horse, broke his neck. Snapped in two." A beat. "An accident. Like that's an accident," he added, pointing to Emily's hand. He shook his head, clicked his tongue. "Boy, you know, Moira expressed real concern about how accidents follow your family... She fears for that little one she's looking after now. The longer you two stick around, the chances of something happening to him...well, those chances they keep creeping up. I don't even want to contemplate what a tragedy that would be. There's nothing smaller in this world than a kid's casket."
"Get out," Emily ordered. She wasn't going to be threatened like this. She wasn't going to stand for it.
The sheriff said nothing, merely turning on his heel and sauntering to the door. "The consensus over there is that you two won't be causing any more trouble around here and 'cause you're family, by way, the Doyles won't be pressing any charges, so you're free to go..."
A tear rolled down Alex's cheek. She'd understood those words to be a threat, a promise, and she felt her stomach churning with the implication that if she wanted to protect her grandson from harm, she would never see him again.
"If I were giving out advice..." the sheriff started, pausing once he'd reached the door.
"Save that," Emily snapped. She was in no mood to hear whatever bullshit the Doyles were feeding him.
"Well, see, I'm thinking of your grandson here..." he said with a shrug. "He's a Doyle now. It's best you put Gladstone behind you. Just as quick as you can."