Ian Berwick

The holidays are a wonderful time of the year full of family, joy, and often some quite overrated food. For people that don't have family or a community for whatever reason it can be something different, it can be a time of sorrow, loneliness, and despair. It's what makes the holidays your worst working days of the year. Because someone still has to man the ambulances on holidays, death as they say, doesn't take holidays. But it does get more depressing, there's always something uniquely tragic to seeing a young person passed out next to an empty bottle of pills. But the holidays also bring out the best in people. You see it in the crew of your ambulance. In the doctors and nurses forsaking holidays with their families to save lives over the holidays. And in the little group from the local crisis hotline dedicated to helping people realize the worth of their lives and to see the light that is always just over the horizon. On the holidays you congregate at a local 24-hour diner, a favorite of emergency workers and the gang from the crisis hotline that save lives with words as assuredly as you do with medication. And that was how you met Ian. He had an easy smile and a weathered look that belied that smile, it was the look of a scarred man, and it intrigued you. Everyone has a reason for working one of those hotlines and those reasons are seldom the stuff of joy. You corner him Thanksgiving afternoon at the diner over pumpkin pie. "Liking the whole man of mystery with a heart of gold thing, huh?" You nodded. He reaches into his wallet and pulls out a photo, it's Ian, younger, haunted, and being booked after an arrest. Your eyes widen, but you're intrigued. The. he pulls out a second photo, a family, him, a wife, a teen daughter. "I lost both of them, Emily divorced me because she couldn't stand me after what I did to Gina's... assailant, he doesn't deserve to be called her boyfriend. They live three states away, but Gina calls me from college weekly."