Chapter 37 #2
While Bridget is talking to the police, waving her hands and using a lot of curse words, a surgeon appears with a set of notes in his hand and calls out, “Sadie Turner!” Bridget and I shoot toward him, and she gets there first, coming to a halt in front of him with her palms pressed to her face.
“Sadie’s lung has collapsed, and we need to remove the air from her pleural cavity.” Sadie’s mom’s hand shoots out and grips my arm in a deathlike grip.
“We’ve placed a chest tube to address that,” the doctor continues. “She’ll have to be in the hospital until we’re confident it’s resolved, likely one to three days. She’s being monitored in recovery right now, and then she’ll be transferred to a regular room.”
“She’s okay?” Bridget says, pressing her hands back to her cheeks.
“She’s come through the operation successfully,” the doctor says, looking at her over his glasses.
“And we can see her?” she says.
He nods. “Yes, of course.”
“She’s not in any danger?” Bridget adds, wringing her hands. “She’s my only daughter.”
“We’re very confident that how we’re treating Sadie will be effective, and we don’t often see any adverse health effects from a procedure like this.
There can be complications, but I have no reason to suspect we’ll see them in her case.
She’ll be monitored closely over the next few days. Would you like to see her now?”
Bridget’s hand curls through mine as she nods, and the surgeon gestures us forward. We follow him down a brightly lit corridor.
When I see Sadie in her hospital bed, her eyes are closed and my whole heart tries to thump right out of my chest. It’s like nothing I’ve ever felt. Like all the muscle tissue and blood vessels are being crushed under a steam roller. I want to swoop her up, take her home, and keep her safe forever.
God, I love her.
Shit.
I love her.
I love her strange jokes and soft understanding.
How she sits so quietly, not meeting your eyes, but you know she’s listening.
I love how she doesn’t hear me when she’s engrossed in a good book.
I love the way she eyes me sideways when she’s going to give me shit and calls me an asshole when she disagrees with me.
How can I tell her all this after everything that’s happened with Jane?
She wouldn’t trust it, wouldn’t trust me.
It’s almost darkly funny how right Jane was about our relationship, and I was so wrong.
I just never really thought much about how suited we were to each other.
It wasn’t a bad relationship, and it was often good.
But it was nothing like this. This agony and ecstasy.
This vibrating need and heart-crushing terror.
Well, maybe I’ve just got to keep proving it to Sadie day in, day out, and then tell her when she’s ready to hear the words, when I think she’ll believe me. Slow and steady, the James Royce superpower. I can do that.
I take her hand. It’s so small in my palm, fragile looking, though I know better. Her eyes flicker open and lock on mine, and for a beat it’s like we’re the only two people in the world.
“Hello, sweetheart. They’ve just told me you’re going to be in here for a couple of days, so I thought we should start making a list of things you’d like to read.”
And her eyes flick back and forth across my face as her lips curl up.
I camp out at Sadie’s bedside, working on my laptop while she sleeps and wakes up every few hours to complain that she could be doing something useful.
The hospital is bizarrely quiet, and I’m incredibly productive in here, so I keep joking to Sadie that she needs to stay in here as long as possible so I can get more work done.
But two days into this routine, Sadie no longer seems weak and wobbly, and her breathing has improved dramatically.
Not surprisingly, she’s raging about Jake, and the police have been in several times, first to take her statement and then to clarify things.
Her mom’s face was a picture when she heard Sadie recount everything Jake said and did.
On Saturday, we get Sadie home and settle her back into the apartment.
On the first day back, she complains so much about having to rest and not doing any work that I have to set her up with a table that moves over her lap and a screen and computer so she can “contribute.” She’s a surprisingly grumpy patient.
But she does get tired, so I cook for her each night and encourage her to read more and work less.
Mr. Karen likes to get his paws on her warm keyboard, and she spends a lot of her time pushing him off it.
Her mom watches us with big eyes and berates Sadie on and off for not being grateful for how much care I’m taking of her.
But I don’t want her gratitude; I just want her to know, through every small action, how deeply she matters and how much she’s loved.
Everything I feel about Sadie, everything we’ve done, coalesced when I pulled her cardigan open and saw the blood on her top.
It was like someone set my body on fire.
Like there was nothing more important I’d ever do in my life than stopping that bleeding.
All my aversion to looking at and dealing with medical issues flew right out of the window.
This was my person, and I had to save her life.
It made the things I did with Jane seem trivial, like we’d been playing at house, acting out the roles of boyfriend and girlfriend.
And anger is still bubbling in my gut about Jane.
I blame her for this whole thing. Not the Jake part, obviously, but the Sadie running away and me getting robbed bit.
I don’t know what she thought she was doing, turning up at the office and confronting Sadie like that.
She’s messaged me a few times, but I haven’t responded.
If we’re actually going to stay in touch—though I have my doubts—she needs to understand who Sadie is to me now and how damaging what she did was.
It’s more than boundaries; it’s about respect and reasonable behavior.
So, with that in mind, I agree to see her two days later.