“We were off duty one of the nights that we were on the island—”
“And?”
“If you’d shut up for a minute, I’d tell you.” I waited. “Anyway, one thing led to another, and we had…sex.”
Crickets.
“Hammer?”
“I’m here.”
“That’s what she remembers.”
When he started to laugh and then kept laughing, I wanted to hurl my phone against the side of a building. “Shut up,” I muttered.
“You’re shittin’ me?”
“Go ahead and laugh. Meanwhile, Siren asked me to crawl onto the hospital bed beside her and ‘hold her.’”
“And she wasn’t playin’ you?”
“First thing I thought, but she was dead serious.”
Hammer laughed again.
“What do I do?”
“What do you mean?”
“Should I tell her?”
“Tell her what? That she hates the ground you walk on?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know, Smoke. What do the doctors say?”
I told him how hard it had been to get any kind of answer out of the surgeon.
“I’d wait. Maybe in a day or two, her memory will return.”
“There’s something else.”
Hammer was laughing so hard he could barely talk. “Wait. Don’t tell me. She’s pregnant?”
“You’re an asshole.”
“Sure am.”
“She’s also having trouble controlling movement on the left side of her body. If IMI gets wind of this…”
Hammer stopped laughing. “It’ll mean the end of her career.”
“Glad you’re finally taking this seriously.”
“Who knows about this?”
“Outside of the hospital staff, me. Now you.”