With every step I took, my nerves gripped my stomach tighter, twisting it into knots.
“Visiting hours are over, but since he was just admitted they said they’d make an exception,” Emma said quietly in the eerie silence of the elevator.
“Thank you for calling me.” I wanted to hug her. The thought that Neil could be in here for days without me knowing made me panicky, even though it hadn’t happened. “Do they know what’s wrong with him?”
“Um…” Emma’s gaze darted away, her brow wrinkling in concentration. “They’re running some tests.”
I had the feeling she knew more than she was saying. Then again, I was pretty paranoid at the moment.
We stepped out of the elevator, and I wrinkled my nose at the hospital environment. The quiet, interrupted only by soft, far away beeps. The suspiciously clean smell even though you knew the place was crawling with germs. Someone had made a bag of popcorn in the break room; as we passed by the open door, the scent wafted out to mix with the sharp, unnatural odor of disinfectant, and I gagged.
A nurse was standing outside one of the rooms, writing in a patient chart. She looked up, slightly annoyed, and said, “Visiting hours are—”
“We have permission,” Emma said authoritatively, and she led me past the nurse. I envied people who could do that. Just walk around a hospital like they owned the place. Emma was far more comfortable here than I was.
Neil was in a huge corner room. The lights were low, and the curtain around his bed was pulled when I peeked inside.
“Come on,” Emma said gently. “He was awake and talking to me not long ago.”
I knew I probably wasn’t her favorite person. I couldn’t blame her. But she’d taken the time to call me, and she was being so kind, despite her discomfort around me. At that moment, I had to really fight my urge to hug her.
“Dad?” Emma pushed back the curtain a bit. Neil was lying flat in the big, weird hospital bed. There was a heart monitor on, beeping steadily, and two big bags of clear fluid hanging from an IV pole next to him. He opened his eyes just a little, then a bit more, then squinted at us, and I realized he probably wasn’t wearing his contacts.
“It’s me, baby,” I went to his side and leaned down, brushing my lips across his forehead. “What the hell happened?”
“Oh, Sophie.” He half-laughed, half-wept, his arms coming up to hold me. I stepped quickly back, so he didn’t tangle me in his IV tubing. He dropped his arms and rubbed one hand over his face. “They’ve given me enough sedatives to kill a whole pack of elephants.”
“He’s had a spinal tap,” Emma explained. “And painkillers for the headache.”
“Oh my god, why didn’t you tell me you were so bad? I never would have let you leave by yourself, if I had known.” I sat down in the armchair beside his bed and took his right hand, the one that didn’t have a bunch of tubes in it.
“I didn’t know I was.” He blinked a few times as he remembered. “I didn’t feel all that bad until I woke up in the emergency room. My god, I’m so relieved you’re here.”
“Emma called me.” I looked up at her with a grateful smile.
“You should put her on your emergency contacts,” Emma told him. “If I had been in London—”
“Thank god you were still here.” My relief was so acute, I could cry. Neil was... alive. I had honestly thought, from the way Emma had looked when I arrived, that he might have been dying. “What do they think is wrong with you?”
Neil squeezed my hand. He was coming around a bit, but his speech was halting. “They… don’t know. I am most definitely anemic. The headache had them worried, until they found out I wasn’t having a stroke.”
“Okay. Okay, those all sound fixable. I’m just thankful that you’re all right.” And that I wasn’t carrying a recently deceased billionaire’s heir. But I wasn’t going to tell him that now, or he really would have a stroke.
“I’m going to go get some coffee,” Emma said quietly, excusing herself from the room.
Once she was gone, Neil lifted our entwined hands to his lips and kissed the backs of my fingers. “I’m so glad she called you. I’ve been medicated out of my head since I got here.”
“I just feel bad I didn’t get here until now. You had all these painful things done to you—”
“And you weren’t here to get queasy and throw up while they were happening?” he asked with a wry chuckle. I remembered the morning he’d cut his hand, and now I couldn’t remember if I’d been sick over the blood, or because I was pregnant.
I rubbed my hand up and down his arm. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do to comfort him. “Was it awful?”