Chapter 20
Michael
M y phone rang just as I drove out of the pub’s lot. I glanced at the display on the dashboard and shrugged it off. It wasn’t a familiar number, and I wasn’t in the mood to deal with a sales call or a scammer.
After a few more rings, it stopped, then started right back up again, same number. Impatient, tired from another long shift, I hit the button to connect the call.
“This is Michael.” I didn’t sound friendly, but there was the outside chance it might be business-related, so I tried to keep my tone at least civil.
The person on the other end hesitated, telling me my tone may not have been as civil as I’d hoped.
“Is this Michael Baron?”
“Yes, it is. Who is this?”
“Mr. Baron, this is Dr. Randolph. I’m an emergency medicine physician at University Hospital. Do you know Grace Mathews?”
I jerked the SUV out of the flow of traffic and shoved it into park. “I know Grace. What’s going on?”
“What’s your relationship to Miss Mathews?”
“I’m her fiancé.”
The lie slipped out easily. Hospitals sometimes had restrictions on who could see or have information on patients, and often it was only family. Fiancé had to be close enough. Claiming that might come back to bite me later, but there was no way they were stopping me from seeing or knowing what was going on with Grace. If that required me to lie, I had no problem with it.
“She was brought in a little while ago by the squad. She’s stable and she’s in no immediate danger, but she was unconscious when the squad arrived and hasn’t regained consciousness since being brought in. Your phone number is one of only a few contacts in her phone, so we were hoping you were family or a close friend.”
The doctor sounded relieved to have found someone close to Grace, reinforcing that I’d done the right thing by lying. It wasn’t like Grace had family who would legitimately show up at the hospital and help her. Whatever you called me – friend, friend hoping for much more, pathetic lovesick idiot – semantics aside, I was the closest thing to family that she had.
The doctor gave me the rest of the details, including the fact that Grace would be admitted and in a regular room by the time I got to the hospital. She had a head injury, an injury to her left shoulder, and various abrasions and bruising. They strongly suspected she had a concussion and the doctor had ordered testing to confirm it.
Before we disconnected, I asked the doctor the one thing he hadn’t told me. “Do you know what happened?”
“I only know that she was in an altercation of some kind. Several passers-by came to her aid and called 911. The police will need to speak to Miss Mathews when she regains consciousness, but if she has a concussion as we suspect, it may take her a few days to be ready for that.”
An altercation? Like a fight? It was beyond the realm of possibility that Grace had gotten in a street brawl with someone.
Anger and fear swamped me as I realized the implications of what the doctor had said. Had her brother found her? Had someone attacked her?
I slammed the brakes on my runaway thoughts. Freaking out over unknowns and possibilities wouldn’t help anyone, much less Grace. The important thing right now was that she was safe and being taken care of. Everything else could wait until she woke up.
Wanting to be sure I was there by her side when that happened, I clamped down on my emotions and gripped the steering wheel tight as I sped back out into traffic.
Whatever had happened, I’d obviously messed up by not keeping a closer eye on her. That was a mistake I wasn’t going to make twice.
––––––––
W ALKING INTO GRACE’S hospital room and seeing her lying in the bed, machines attached to her seemingly everywhere and an IV in her arm, was one of the toughest moments of my life.
The doctor had told me she was stable, in no immediate danger. I repeated those words back to myself as I stood just inside the door and took a shaky breath.
Grace was quiet, her eyes closed, either sleeping or still unconscious, I didn’t know which. The left side of her face was swollen and starting to bruise, and angry red abrasions marred the smooth skin of her right cheek. More bruising and scrapes covered her arms and hands where they lay motionless on top of the covers. A machine whirred softly, doing I didn’t know what, and a clear liquid dripped steadily and silently from the IV bag into the tubing attached to Grace’s arm, but neither seemed to disturb her.
I crossed the room and lifted a chair into place closer to Grace’s bed, then just sat and watched her, letting her quiet, even breaths steady me.
As messed up as it sounded, it was probably a good thing she was out, because I needed time to pull myself together. My hands still shook from the adrenaline that had shot through me after the doctor’s phone call. I had only a vague memory of the drive to the hospital. The whole situation had my protective instincts amped up to the maximum, with lights flashing and alarms blaring in my head. My emotions were all over the map – fear and worry for Grace, anger at myself for not protecting her better, and fury at whoever had dared to touch her.
In that moment, I would have given every last thing I had on earth if it would make Grace open those beautiful eyes of hers and look at me. But before she did, I needed to lock my shit down. The last thing she needed was me acting like a raging neanderthal. Even if every instinct I had was telling me to scoop her up, take her to my place, and lock her away from the world, that wasn’t happening. She was already running from two men trying to control her life – the very last thing she needed, hurt or not, was a third.
I lost track of time as I sat there, eyes pinned to Grace, cataloging every slight movement of her eyelids or twitch of her fingers. After a few minutes or a few hours, a woman dressed in red and black scrubs with her dark hair smoothed up into a ponytail walked through the door and gave me a smile as she crossed to the small sink to wash her hands.
“I’m Della, Grace’s nurse. And you’re her fiancé, right? Michael?”
I confirmed what she’d said as she dried her hands and watched her as she checked the machines and IV connected to Grace. Apparently satisfied, she turned to face me, her hands resting lightly on the rail of Grace’s bed.
“I don’t know how much Dr. Randolph told you when you talked, but our main concern is the injury to her head. We suspect that she has a concussion, though we won’t be able to really assess her until she’s awake. The scans ruled out any serious brain injury, though, so that’s a bit of good news. As far as her other injuries”...Della looked at Grace for a moment, then back at me... “she’s pretty banged up, but nothing appears to be serious.”
“Good.” I let out a breath slowly, not letting myself think about how much worse the news could have been. “That’s good.”
“Yes, it is,” Della agreed. “Now we just wait for her body to be ready to interact with the world again, and then we’ll see.”
“Is it bad that she’s still out?”
“Not necessarily.” Della paused as if weighing her words before continuing. “It’s hard to tell with head injuries. They can be tricky. The sooner she wakes up, the better, but until then we just make sure she has everything she needs to be comfortable.”
I rubbed my hand across my face. I’d do anything for Grace, but I knew my inability to fix this for her would eat at me.
“I’m not the best at sitting back and waiting for things to happen.”
Della laughed softly. “You and me both. Believe me, I understand. If there’s anything that working in the medical field teaches you it’s that our bodies, and especially our brains, do things on their own timeline and in their own way. We can try to influence things one way or another – and we do – but at the end of the day, our bodies do what they’re going to do in the way they’re going to do it.”
With a last look at Grace, Della stepped back from her bed.
“In the meantime, until Grace rejoins us, it helps if you talk to her, even read to her if you want. We don’t know exactly how much people hear or understand, but patients say they remember people talking to them, so something does seem to get through. And you can touch her or hold her hand if you want to, just be careful of the monitors and IV.”
She pointed to a plastic bag sitting in a cubby across from Grace’s bed. “Grace’s personal belongings are in the bag there. Her clothes, her bag, everything she had on or with her when she was brought in.”
She looked at me, her eyes tinged with faint regret that I didn’t understand until she spoke. “I’m sorry to say she wasn’t wearing a ring when she was found.”
It took me a second to process what Della was saying.
I’d said I was Grace’s fiancé. We were supposed to be engaged. Della was wondering about Grace’s engagement ring.
I swallowed hard as an image of Grace wearing my ring flashed through my head.
“Yeah...she, uh...” I rubbed the back of my neck, thinking... “She hasn’t decided on one yet,” I finally finished, hoping that whatever Grace might hear and remember from all this, that wasn’t it.
“Oh, that’s fine, then. I just hoped it hadn’t been lost or stolen.” Della headed for the door. “I’ll be back in a little while, but if you need anything, just push the call button or pop your head out and let me know.”
With Della gone, I lowered the rail on the side of Grace’s bed and moved my chair closer, close enough to carefully hold her right hand in mine. I looked down at her hand, so small and fragile as it lay in mine, my eyes tracing over the scrapes and bruises, evidence that, whatever had happened, she’d put up a fight. I blinked my eyes against the sudden moisture gathered there and swallowed hard against the lump that rose in my throat.
I stared at Grace, wondering exactly how and when she had become the center of my world. Because after this, there was no denying, even to myself, that she was. If, for some reason, Grace never opened her eyes again, never came back to me...
It had been one thing when she’d left, when she’d been out there in the world somewhere and I just hadn’t known where. That had been hard enough. But if she was gone? Truly gone? That would be close to unsurvivable.
I tipped my head back, willing the tears away as I held Grace’s hand a little tighter. I took a deep breath, and another, and another, then lowered my head again to look at her face.
What ifs would do Grace no good and would only drive me crazy. She was here, just asleep for right now, and she was going to be fine. Sometime soon, she’d open her eyes and then, as Della had said, we’d do what came next. Whatever it was, whatever Grace needed, I’d be right by her side to make sure she had it.
Della had told me the one thing I could do to help until all that happened was to talk to Grace. To let her know I was here and, hopefully, give her something to wake up for.
Focusing on that, I got comfortable and started talking.
“Gracie, sweetheart, it’s Michael.” The endearment slipped out, but I kept going. “You might know this already, but in case you don’t, I wanted you to know that you’re in the hospital. Don’t be scared, though, okay? You’re going to be just fine. They’re taking great care of you and I’m going to be right here, right by your side the whole time. You’re safe and there’s nothing to worry about. You just rest and get better.”
I talked on and on, repeating myself, telling Grace she was safe and she was going to be fine, then telling her all about the room she was in, the machines she was hooked up to, and everything I could remember about her nurse. I told her I’d get somebody to bring us some books I could read to her or music to listen to, and every other thing that entered my head, wondering as I talked if most of it even made sense.
Eventually, I wound down, certain that if Grace could hear me, she was wondering if I’d ever shut up. I ran my thumb across her knuckles and ran my eyes over her beautiful, battered face. I listened to the faint sounds of a hospital at night filtering in through Grace’s mostly closed door and wondered what my life would be if Grace had never walked into it.
Finally, I leaned in closer to her and said the words I couldn’t hold back anymore.
“I love you, Grace. Someday, I’ll have the courage to tell you that when you’re awake. But you have to come back to me, sweetheart. Please, Grace. Please, baby, just come back to me and I promise no one will ever hurt you again.”
Grace slept on, serene and peaceful for now. Wishing I could crawl in next to her in bed and hold her, I leaned in and carefully, softly brushed a kiss across her cheek. With one last look at her sweet face, I laid my head on the bed next to our joined hands and gave in to the tiredness sweeping through me.