“Really?” she asks, as though she’s afraid to believe it.
“Yeah,” I reassure her. “Everything looks normal. Nilesh thinks I was just working too much.”
Ally throws her arms around my neck, and I pull her in for a hug.
“Drew, I’m so glad,” she murmurs into my shoulder.
“Yeah. Me too,” I admit.
“So he really thought it was all stress?” she asks, as we walk out of the clinic to the elevators.
“Uh huh. Even my blood pressure was normal today.”
“Really?”
“Yep. Now I can go back to the family doctor for follow-up.”
She giggles. “You realize that doesn’t make sense? Your blood pressure’s normal, so you’re going for follow-up?”
“It makes perfect sense. I don’t want to go to the doctor if he might say there’s a problem.”
“This is why everyone says doctors make the worst patients.”
“No one says that, Ally.”
“Right,” she says with a knowing smile.
We walk out of the hospital into the sunshine, and I feel happy enough to float off the sidewalk.
“Come on, I’ll take you to lunch,” I tell Ally. “There’s a place around the corner with amazing fried chicken.”
“Sounds good.”
We get there just as the restaurant’s opening, and they give us a table immediately. After the waitress takes our order, I think back to Nilesh’s suggestion that I take Ally away for a week on the beach. I can’t manage a week off, but we have the rest of the weekend.
“Let’s get a hotel room tonight,” I say, pulling out my phone. I’ll book a room in the nicest place I can find, somewhere that’ll arrange for roses and champagne in the room. We’ll spend the afternoon wandering the city, then I’ll take Ally back to the hotel and tell her how I see our relationship.
But Ally hesitates, and I can tell she’s searching for a graceful way to say no.
“We don’t have to, obviously,” I say, trying to hide my disappointment.
“No, I’d really like to, Drew,” she says quickly. “It’s just . . . my family’s going out for dinner tonight to celebrate my sister’s graduation. I told them I couldn’t make it, but since we’re done early, I should probably go back for it. It’s not until seven, so I could take the train?—”
“No, I’ll drive you back,” I interrupt.
“Thanks, Drew.”
“So . . . you wouldn’t have told me about this dinner if I got bad news this morning.” It’s more of a statement than a question, because the truth is obvious. She wanted to be around to scrape me off the floor if the news was bad, and she didn’t tell me about the dinner so I wouldn’t feel guilty.
“It’s not that big a deal, Drew,” she says quickly. “And I’m not really looking forward to it, but I should probably go if I can.” She pulls out her phone. “I’ll just text my mom to ask if I can still come. They’re going to Nico’s, and they may have already changed the number of people on the reservation. If they can’t change it back, we may as well stay in Toronto.”
Nico’s is one of the fanciest restaurants in Somerset, so it seems like this dinner is a pretty big deal to her family.
“What did you tell your family? About why you couldn’t go?”
“I said I was sick,” Ally admits. “It was the best excuse I could come up with.”
“So now you’ll say you’ve had a miraculous recovery?” I ask. “Will they believe it?”
