Chapter Fifteen #2
Shit. Aurora wanted to sag against Jiro, to have him hold her like he had just been doing.
But she managed to keep herself steady. As if reading her mind, Jiro’s hand stole into hers, and he squeezed her fingers, offering her support.
It was enough to get her tongue moving again.
“My father is tough, Dr. Hessel; he will pull through,” she replied stoically, meaning every word.
He was a tough old bugger, hard to kill, and she had every faith that he’d recover, even if it was just to be the bane of her life again.
“Good,” the doctor said. “You can follow me. But he has to stay here.” She pointed at Jiro. “Immediate family only.”
Aurora shot him an apologetic look, but he waved her out of the room.
“I’ll wait. You take as long as you need.
” Her heart melted at those words; he was going to wait for her, and that might be the only thing that kept her going.
She would’ve preferred to have him by her side as her rock, but she straightened her spine and followed the doctor down the long corridor. She could do this.
Hessel led her into a room, and she saw her father for the first time.
Karl was lying in a hospital bed, surrounded by beeping machines and tubing.
He was completely still, his face pale, but strangely peaceful, as if he were just sleeping.
What should she do? A good daughter would go up and take his hand.
But she seemed to be frozen to the spot.
This man was just so… incompatible with the Karl she knew.
“Once he regains consciousness, we will be able to assess him better.” The doctor broke the awkward silence, going up and taking the patient chart from the end of the bed.
“There was no bleeding on the brain that we could see, just a slight contusion, which bodes well for his recovery. When he does wake up, it will be his broken hip that will become the big problem, however. Recuperation and rehabilitation from a broken hip can take many months, and he will probably have to stay in hospital for a long time. In a man of his age, this might not be such a problem, but I understand that your father suffers from Parkinson’s disease. ”
Aurora nodded in reply, unable to tear her gaze away from her father in the hospital bed.
“This will add many complications to his recovery. He may never actually fully recover, and may even be completely wheelchair-bound. He will need lots of care.” The doctor left her last words hanging in the air, as if she wanted to say more, and Aurora wondered what exactly she meant by that.
Was she saying that Aurora wasn’t capable of that kind of full-on care?
She glanced over at Hessel, but found no discernible emotion on her face.
It almost felt like this doctor was blaming her for her father’s fall.
Part of her wanted to protest that this was all her father’s doing—he was attempting to do something he clearly wasn’t capable of, and he wasn’t supposed to be up in her room anyway.
But the larger part accepted the guilt, because if she had been home on time, this wouldn’t have happened.
“Okay,” Aurora replied, knowing her voice had lost that convincing air of authority. She wasn’t going to get into it with the doctor tonight. So she forced herself to walk over to the bed and lay her hand on her father’s arm. It was warm.
“I’ll leave you with him for a while then,” Hessel said after a few moments of silence. “A nurse will be in soon to check on him.” This doctor’s bedside manner left a lot to be desired, Aurora decided. But then she put that thought out of her head; she had much bigger things to think about now.
Karl was going to need a lot of care. Was she going to have to quit her job?
It didn’t seem fair, but how was she supposed to look after him as well as he needed and continue her demanding work?
The job required her to be out at all different times of the day and night, and also some overtime.
Would she have to get a normal nine-to-five job so that she could be there for him?
She stared down at her father, a jumble of mixed emotions rumbling around in her head.
Regret, resentment, pity, worry, devotion, and finally acceptance.
Acceptance of the fact that there was nothing she could do to change what’d happened.
She would just have to accept whatever came next and deal with it day by day.
She was usually Mrs. Fix-it. She liked being a problem solver.
She’d also been called a bit of a perfectionist by more than one of her colleagues recently.
She didn’t like that term, but admitted that she liked things done a certain way, and they had to be done properly.
Deep down, she knew the one aspect of her life that she was failing at was her father, because he wouldn’t be corralled into a model parent.
She now realized she would never be able to fix her father; he would never be the man she wanted him to be, and he would never fit into one of her perfect little boxes.
Certainly not now. So if he wasn’t going to change, then perhaps she would need to.
Was it time to let go of her pedantic tendencies, and learn how to just let things be?
The door opened, and a rosy-cheeked nurse walked in carrying a tray of medicines.
“Oh, hello,” she said brightly. “I’m Nurse Rossi.
You must be Mr. Karlsson’s daughter.” The woman spoke good Swedish but with a thick Italian accent.
“You can stay if you like, I’m just going to check his vitals and top up his pain medication. ”
“Thank you.” Aurora took the seat in the corner so she would stay out of the nurse’s way, then watched without really focusing as the nurse flittered around her father’s bed.
The act of sitting down finally made her realize how totally fatigued she was.
Tiredness crashed over her like a wave, and she had to rub her hand across her eyes just to keep them open.
It’d been a big day. A huge day. And her father ending up in the hospital was the icing on the cake.
She rested her head in her hands, giving in to the lethargy for just a moment.
It was after two a.m., and she desperately needed sleep.
“There’s nothing else you can do tonight, Constable Karlsson,” the nurse said, surprising Aurora—how did she know she was a cop?
The nurse gave her a sympathetic look as she returned her father’s patient chart to its spot at the end of the bed.
“He will be under sedation for the rest of the night. You should go home and get some rest. We’ll call you when he wakes up.
” She said it in such a friendly way that Aurora couldn’t take offense at being told to go away.
“Yes, I guess you’re right,” Aurora conceded.
She would go and find a Jiro, and offer him the spare bedroom for what was left of the night.
It was the least she could do. She was so tired she almost stumbled down the hallway, and it took her a while to find the waiting room again.
But Jiro was still there, curled up and using his jacket as a pillow, trying to sleep in one of the uncomfortable chairs.
She went and laid a hand on his shoulder.
“Come on, let’s go to bed.” Then she smiled to herself. That’d come out as more of an invitation than she’d meant, but he was still groggy and so hopefully hadn’t heard.
“How’s your dad?” he asked, unfolding his legs and rubbing bleary eyes.
“Sedated and as comfortable as they can make him. Pretty much the same as your papa,” she added with a wry grin. Both of them walked like zombies to where her car was parked and almost fell into it.
She drove back to her house in grim silence, letting the car heater warm them up, making her even more drowsy.
And so when they finally stumbled in the front door, all she could think about was climbing into her soft, welcoming bed.
They stripped off jackets and boots without speaking, almost on autopilot.
There’d been no word from any of her police colleagues, so she assumed there was no new information to pass on about Taro’s whereabouts, and she let the subject lie for now. She really hoped he was still alive, for Jiro’s sake, but the longer he was missing, the less likely he would be found alive.
But as she went to lead Jiro down the hallway past her father’s bedroom to the spare bedroom, she suddenly had an epiphany.
The next best thing to climbing into bed alone would be to climb in and snuggle with another warm body.
A hot, sexy, muscular body, to be exact.
Not that she wanted sex right now, just the feeling of another human’s arms around her.
“Would you…” She halted, unsure how to phrase it now. It’d sounded good in her head. “I mean, would you like to come up and…” Damn, why couldn’t she communicate what she wanted?
“I’d love to,” he said with a grin that told her he understood exactly what she meant.
“I don’t expect anything to happen,” she mumbled. “It would just be nice to have someone to hold, that’s all.”
“I’m willing and able to be of service,” he replied, giving her a mock bow.
“I will be as chaste and platonic as a best friend could be,” he added.
She glanced at him out of the corner of her eye, but was too tired to decide if he was pulling her leg or not.
If he were willing just to hold her all night, then that would be enough for now.
They turned as one, and she led him up the stairs, pausing only to flick on the bedside lamp before starting to undress.
She stripped down her underwear and climbed under the covers with a heartfelt sigh.
He’d already seen her in her lingerie—which she had put on this morning instead of her normal cotton underwear with him in mind, not that she would ever admit.