I had not expected it to follow her into the city. Into her real life.
“What happened?” I asked. My voice came out a bit shaky, which I didn’t expect or appreciate.
“She took a fall and briefly lost consciousness,” the nurse said. “She’s awake and stable, but we’re admitting her overnight for observation and imaging.”
My grip tightened on the phone.
“I’m on my way,” I said.
It was a forty-minute drive.I made it in thirty-two.
I parked crookedly, tried to correct it, and failed. So I left my car like that.
The lobby lights inside the emergency department were too bright. The chairs were out of alignment. I noticed all of it, but none of it mattered.
Security checked me in and gave me a wristband, then led me down a hallway that smelled like antiseptic and stale coffee.
And there she was. The blue hair made it impossible to miss her.
The call had been too much information and not enough detail. Hospital. Loss of consciousness. Head injury. My mind had filled in the blanks efficiently and without mercy. I had prepared myself for blood. For fear. For the look people get when they’re hurt badly enough that they stop arguing.
Instead, she was awake.
Pale, yes. Annoyed. She was propped up on pillows and clearly displeased with the situation. Functional irritation. That mattered more than anything else. It meant she wasn’t grievously injured.
The relief hit me so hard, I had to lock my knees to keep from sagging.
I let it settle all the way through me. The tension I’d been carrying since the phone rang loosened in layers. Not gone. Never gone. But quieter. Quiet enough that I could stand there without bracing for the next worst thing.
Seeing her again did something else I hadn’t prepared for. It revealed that the space she’d left in my chest when she walked out of Pine Hollow had not been filled in. It had just been waiting.
She stared at me for a second too long.
“Liam?” she said.
“Yeah.”
Her brow creased in confusion. “Why are you here?”
“I’m your emergency contact.”
Her expression shifted again. Slower this time. “I thought that was just for the B&B.”
“So did I.”
She looked down at the blanket, then back up at me. “I didn’t mean for that to… carry over to the real world.”
“It’s okay.”
The truth of that surprised me.
The idea that she’d needed someone and the system had landed on me tightened something low in my chest.
I realized then that part of me had been carrying the disappointment of not asking for her number, of letting that night stay contained and unfinished. I had accepted it because acceptance was almost always easier than wanting.
Standing here now, watching her process the fact that I existed in this space, I knew I wouldn’t have turned this down even if I’d been given the choice.
Whatever this was, I was in it. I wanted to see it through as far as she would let me, to see what this turned into.
