But Henry was fidgeting, clearly agitated about something. “Can I speak to you outside, Mr. Aspin?”
Miles frowned. This didn’t give the best impression. A part of him wanted to scold Henry, but he had pledged to himself that he would always prioritize making Gold Standard a comfortable work environment for his employees. The kid was obviously upset about something. “This will only be a moment,” he said to Bastion. “Do you mind?”
“Not at all,” Bastion assured him.
Miles stepped out into the hall, pulling the door closed behind him. “What’s this about, Henry?”
“I just got a phone call from St. Francis Hospital,” Henry said, and for the first time, Miles noticed how pale he was. “They say your father was just brought in.”
“My father?” Miles’s heart skipped a beat. “What’s going on?”
“They wouldn’t tell me,” Henry said. “They said he’s stable for now, but that it’s serious. I think you should get down there.”
Miles was already moving toward his briefcase. “Can you deal with Bastion for me? All the papers are signed. Everything is taken care of.” Focusing on business was keeping his panic at bay. “Get him some champagne if he’d like it. Tell him I’m sorry to leave like this, but that I had a family emergency and it was unavoidable. Let him know that he can call me anytime if there are any follow-up questions in the next few days.”
Henry nodded. “Of course,” he said.
“I’ll have my cell,” Miles said, already thinking of the instructions he would need to text to various people in the organization. Someone was going to have to step up and takeover tomorrow’s meetings. Someone was going to have to manage the financials. Everything Miles struggled to take his hands off of and allow others to do, would now be left to other people to manage, and it was a terrible thought. But he clung to that thought. Because that was easier to cope with than letting his mind wander to what might have happened to his father.
St.Francis Hospital was a busy place, but Silas Aspin had a VIP suite on the top floor. Miles knew that this part of the hospital had been reserved by his father years ago for the family’s private use, although when they didn’t need it, they asked the hospital to give it at no charge to families who did.
Today, they needed it.
Miles didn’t have to ask anyone for directions as to where to find his father. He knew exactly where to go, and he ran the whole way, dodging nurses and orderlies who called to him to slow down. Fear had caught up with him on the drive over. Henry had told him his father was stable, but what if something had changed in the last twenty minutes?
What if he was running to his father’s deathbed?
He burst into the room. A single nurse stood by the bed, checking something on a machine. Miles’s heart stopped. There were so many machines. It hurt to see his father hooked up to all those machines.
The nurse looked up at him. “Are you Miles Aspin?”
Miles nodded wordlessly, unable to speak.
“You got here quickly,” she said, giving him a gentle smile.
“My assistant couldn’t tell me what had happened…”
“Why don’t you sit down?” She pointed to a comfortable sofa by the window.
Miles didn’t want to sit down. He didn’t want this to be a sitting-down kind of conversation. He wanted the nurse to tell him that his father had passed out, but that he hadn’t been hurt, and that Miles could take him home. Something simple like that.
“We think it was a stroke,” the nurse said.
Miles’s breath caught.
No.
“He’s stable, and we think it was caught quickly,” she said. “But we’re not sure how his recovery is going to look. Right now, he’s lost a lot of function, and he’s going to need care. Some people recover from these things. Others don’t.”
She was giving him everything she knew at once, Miles understood. She wasn’t going to let him get his hopes up for this being less awful than it was. She was ripping the bandage off. But God, it hurt.
“How’s his cognitive functioning?” he asked, his voice a croak.
“We’re not sure about that either, we still have tests to run. But we’ll learn a lot when he sees you,” the nurse told him. “If he recognizes you, that’s a great sign to us that his cognition is still pretty intact.”
She didn’t present the other side of that hypothetical — what it might mean if Miles’s father didn’t recognize him. It didn’t really need to be said.
Miles rose to his feet and approached the bed. His father’s eyelids were half closed. He looked a decade older than he had the other day on the golf course. It was hard to believe this was the same man. Miles’s stomach swooped. For a moment he felt like a child again, and all he wanted was to turn and run away, but he knew he couldn’t do that.
