The Boss (The Boss 1)

In my room, I opened my recent calls. Ten of them so far. I was looking a little obsessive. But I was pretty sure he would understand, once he knew what they were all about. This would be the last call tonight.

“Neil... I really need you to call me.” I took a breath, and I knew he would hear my teary snuffling. “It’s super important. I... I don’t know what to do. I just really need to hear your voice.”

Okay. So not my best moment.

Hopefully, pathetically, I took the phone with me into the living room. He said he was sick. He’s probably in bed right now. That didn’t make me feel better.

“Are you okay?” Deja asked as I entered the room.

I nodded. “I’m in shock.”

“I understand that, believe me.”

Holli’s head whipped up to look at her with a bad attempt at disguising her curiosity.

Deja sighed. “Yes, I got accidentally pregnant once. It’s not something I put on my résumé.”

“What did you do?” I asked, because I knew Holli wouldn’t, and I really needed to hear someone say they had all the answers.

“I had an abortion.” Deja shrugged, her wide eyes bouncing between me and Holli. “What? It’s no big deal. I was at a party, I’m pretty sure someone put shit in my drink, and then next morning I’d woken up and I’d had sex with this guy.”

“That’s not sex,” Holli said gently. “That sounds more like you got roofied and raped.”

“I know,” she said, looking slightly embarrassed. “And I’ll talk to you about it later. This isn’t the rape conversation, it’s the Sophie is pregnant conversation. I’m trying not to steal her thunder.”

I laughed at that. I don’t know why. “Sorry. It just strikes me as totally insane that we’re having this discussion.”

Deja gave me a closed-lip smile of sympathy. “You’re going to be okay. You have somebody to go through this with you. Mr. Elwood isn’t going to leave you stranded.”

“And while we both think it’s creepy and weird that you have a boyfriend we have to call ‘Mr. Elwood,’ I agree with Deja,” Holli said with a decisive nod. “He’s going to support you with this, no matter what.”

As if on cue, my phone buzzed. “It’s him.” I didn’t leave the room to take the call. I didn’t figure I would be breaking the news to him over the phone. I would wait and do it in person, tonight, if he let me. “Neil?”

“This is Emma.”

I frowned. “Emma... what are you—”

“Dad is in the hospital.” There was a faintly hysterical quality to her voice. “They just gave me his things, and I saw you’d tried to call him.”

“In the...” Wait, this was all wrong. I was the one having a crisis. We could only have one crisis at a time. “What happened?”

She made an impatient noise. “I don’t know. He was unconscious in the back of the car when Tony found him. Look, are you going to come down here? You’ve been calling all night, you must have been worried.”

I had been, but for reasons I didn’t care to discuss with her at the moment. “Which hospital? I’ll be there as fast as I can.”

“Presbyterian, east sixty-eighth.”

“Is he okay?” Of course he was okay. It was impossible for Neil to not be okay. It just couldn’t happen.

“I don’t know, I haven’t seen him. He wasn’t awake when the ambulance arrived. Now I’m waiting for the bloody doctor to come out and bloody talk to me,” she snapped impatiently. “I’ll know more by the time you get here. Come through the emergency entrance, I’ll wait for you there if I can.”

She hung up without saying goodbye, and I numbly hit the disconnect button. I stared back at Holli and Deja, a paralysis of fear and disbelief leeching the blood from my veins. “Neil had some kind of collapse. He’s in the hospital.”

“What?” Holli squeaked. “What the hell is going on, Soph?”

“I don’t know.” I reached for my purse, dropped my phone into it, grabbed my keys and headed for the door. I wanted to say something else, but I just couldn’t. “I don’t know,” I repeated, and then I dashed out the door.

Every step I took down the stairs jarred all the way to my skull. He’s okay, this is nothing, he’s fine, tumbled through my mind. This wasn’t happening. This wasn’t my life. I wasn’t pregnant. My boyfriend wasn’t in the fucking hospital. None of this was real.

But it was. Disturbingly, awfully real.

Chapter Twenty-Three

True to her word, when I got to the hospital Emma was waiting by the emergency room doors, bundled up in her winter coat. Her eyes were red, like she had been crying.

“Is he okay? Is Neil okay?” I asked, as if she wouldn’t know whom I was there to see.

“They’ve moved him to a room, I can take you up.” She gestured to the automatic doors behind her, and we went inside.