I'm looking back and forth between the two of them, wondering what's going on, but I'm not sure I want to know. It sounds like it's wrong, whatever it is.
"Four million," he says under his breath.
Mom gasps for air. "How can we get away with that?"
"Easily," Daddy says with a raised brow and a smile I don't like very much.
"Haven, I'm just going to ask you a few questions and take down your vitals," the young nurse tells me. "What happened to you today?"
"It was dumb," I tell her. "I broke up with my boyfriend last night, and I ran off to a secluded spot in the woods this morning to get away and think for a while. The sun was hardly up, and it was hard to see what I was doing, so I slipped down a hill."
"Your hair is all wet. Was it raining?" She looks toward a window, observing the weather outside.
"I was beside a small lake and thought maybe the cool water would stop the bleeding since I was in the middle of the woods alone. Then, I felt faint because of the blood and the frigid temperature of the water. Next thing I knew, I had passed out. It was a bad decision on my part. I never should have been out there alone."
"Yikes," the nurse says, wrapping the blood pressure cuff around my bicep. "So, no one was with you?"
I just told her I was alone. "No…I was by myself, like I said."
"We have to ask every incoming patient this question: Haven, does anyone at home hurt you in any way? Either physically or emotionally?"
"No, ma'am, I'm pretty sure the only pain that's been caused was by me ripping my ex-boyfriend's heart out while he was proposing to me," I say through distressed laughter.
"Oh my, that sounds unpleasant," she says. "Is that man out in the waiting room your ex-boyfriend?" Raine and I were never girlfriend and boyfriend. We were friends with a connection I'll probably never have with another person again.
"No, he's just an old friend who happened to be in the right spot at the right time to help me."
The nurse jots down a few notes and places her pen down on the counter beside us. "Well, I'm glad to hear someone was watching out for you today," she says. "You’re lucky this wasn't any worse."
"I was thinking the same thing," I tell her.
"The doctor will be in shortly, and I'll send your friend in to sit with you if that's what you would like."
"Yes, please," I say, folding my shaking hands down on my lap. The irony of Bennett being a doctor who did nothing but talk about surgical stories, and the fact that I still can't deal with the thought of being in a medical facility just shows we were never meant to be. He loves blood, and it makes me pass out.
Raine is escorted into the small space, and I can immediately see the discomfort written across his face. "I feel like I shouldn't be in here," he tells me.
"You probably shouldn't be, but will you stay anyway?" Every time I see Raine, even if it's been less than ten minutes since I last saw him, my heart flutters around in my chest like a swarm of butterflies. No one else has ever given me that feeling before.
"Why?" he says. "Do you know how many times I've asked myselfwhysince the day I met you?"
"I have told you why, Raine."
"That's not enough."
Grasping for a deeper reason than a simple need, I remember back to the time I askedhimwhy. “You know when you see a sunrise?" I ask, grinning at him a bit. He narrows one eye, questioning me, but I'm not done yet. "A sunrise that's made up of so many colors that you wouldn't normally think would go together, but then it becomes the most beautiful thing you've ever seen. Every time I've looked at the sky in the mornings since—you went away—I wondered if the same colors would ever light up the world the same way again. But, I've determined that the sunrise will never look the same way twice, and forever, I will be comparing every sunrise to you." I never forgot when he said that to me, well most of it. He leans back against the wall with a lost look.
"Didn't I say that to you once?"
"You did," I tell him.
"I didn't say that last part though because that's something only a chick would say," he says while pressing his top teeth into his bottom lip in contemplation. "But, Haven—" I know. I have no right, none whatsoever to be saying those words to him, not after what I caused.
The doctor enters the room, interrupting a conversation I would have only dreamed of having before a couple of days ago. "How are we doing in here, Haven?" he asks. "I hear you may need some stitches?" He looks over at me, then Raine, who's kind of hidden in the corner. "Oh, hello there." The doctor eyeballs Raine for a long second, either recognizing him or wondering why someone like me would be with a man like him. That's how this town is trained to think. "I heard you had a little accident today. What were you doing all alone in the woods?"
"Running away," I answer honestly without hiding this matter's brutality.I'm a grown woman with a need to run away, and it’s a truth I can’t cover up.
"I see. And whom were you running from?"
