Twelve Days: A Dark Romance
Ava Calderon
Jessie Reeves has twelve days left on her travel nursing contract in Hardin, Texas — a town so small the ER has one doctor, one charge nurse, and no secrets. She came to work her shifts and leave clean. Then a sixteen-year-old walked in alone at 2 AM, and Jessie did what she's done before: she helped. A phone number. A bus station. Nothing she'll admit to. She's already packing.
Nate Aldridge is the only emergency physician for sixty miles. He's the man who stays — through his brother's death, his father's decline, and the slow hollowing-out of a town that can't afford to lose him. When he pulls Riley Guthrie's chart and finds the gap Jessie left, he should report it. He's a mandatory reporter. One phone call and his conscience is clear. He doesn't make the call. And now his silence has made him an accessory to the same crime she's pretending she didn't commit.
The girl's mother files a complaint. The hospital launches an investigation. The state Attorney General's office sends an investigator who knows exactly how to turn a small-town nurse's instinct into a felony conspiracy. Every hour Jessie and Nate spend together — in the ER, in his father's living room, in the charged silence of a 3 AM shift — turns his clinical judgment into something a prosecutor can reframe as personal bias. Being together is the evidence that convicts him. Being apart might be the only thing that saves them.
But Jessie has a secret that goes deeper than one girl and one phone number. And Nate has been carrying a weight that explains why he chose silence — a weight that has everything to do with a seven-year-old boy named Cody Wilson and the last time he trusted the system to protect someone.
Twelve days. A countdown that doesn't care what they want, what they've risked, or what they're becoming to each other in the space between what's legal and what's right.
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