I wake up with my cheek pressed against the tile floor, and Micah standing over me. “Don’t look at me like that,” I say. “All smug because you’ve already been through this.”
“It gets better,” Micah promises.
I moan. “Wonderful.”
“I was going to make you breakfast in bed, but instead I opted for ginger ale.”
“You’re a prince.” I push myself upright. The room spins.
“Whoa. Steady, girl.” Micah crouches beside me, helping me to my feet. Then he sweeps me into his arms and carries me into the bedroom.
“In any other circumstance,” I say, “this would be very romantic.”
Micah laughs. “Rain check.”
“I’m trying really hard not to vomit on you.”
“I can’t tell you how much I appreciate that,” he says gravely, and he crosses his arms. “Would you like to have a fight now about how you’re not going into the office? Or do you want to finish your ginger ale first?”
“You’re using my tactics against me. That’s the kind of either-or I offer Violet—”
“See, andyouthink I never listen.”
“I’m going to work,” I say, and I try to get on my feet, but I black out. When I blink a moment later, Micah’s face is inches from mine. “I’m not going to work,” I whisper.
“Good answer. I already called Ava. She’s going to come over and play nurse.”
I groan. “Can’t you just kill me instead? I don’t think I can handle my mother. She thinks a shot of bourbon cures everything.”
“I’ll lock the liquor cabinet. You need anything else?”
“My briefcase?” I beg.
Micah knows better than to say no to that. As he goes downstairs to retrieve it, I prop myself up on pillows. I have too much to do tonotbe working, but my body doesn’t seem to be cooperating.
I drift off in the few minutes it takes Micah to come back into the bedroom. He’s trying to gently put the briefcase on the floor so he doesn’t disturb me, but I reach for it, overestimating my strength. The contents of the leather folio spill all over the bed and onto the floor, and Micah crouches to pick them up. “Huh,” he says, holding up a piece of paper. “What are you doing with a lab report?”
It’s wrinkled, having slipped between files to get wedged at the bottom of my bag. I have to squint, and then a run of graphs comes into focus. It’s the newborn screening results that I subpoenaed from the Mercy–West Haven Hospital, the ones that had been missing from Davis Bauer’s file. They came in this week, and given my lack of understanding of chemistry, I barely glanced at the charts, figuring I’d show them to Ruth sometime after her mother’s funeral. “It’s just some routine test,” I say.
“Apparently not,” Micah replies. “There’s abnormality in the blood work.”
I grab it out of his hand. “How do you know that?”
“Because,” Micah says, pointing to the cover letter I didn’t bother to read, “it says here there’sabnormality in the blood work.”
I scour the letter, addressed to Dr. Marlise Atkins. “Could it be fatal?”
“I have no idea.”
“You’re a doctor.”
“I study eyes, not enzymes.”
I look up at him. “What did you get me for our anniversary?”
“I was going to take you out to dinner,” Micah admits.
“Well,” I suggest, “take me to see a neonatologist instead.”
