Layla

Damn it, I couldn’t do it.

Colette took a step closer. “And?”

I choked. “Reid knows the story better than I do.”

My colleague and friend—hopefully—gasped and hissed, “You bastard!”

Not taking my eyes off the pissed mom, I gestured at her with my hand and tried to smile. “Mrs. T—” I stuttered when I saw her glare intensify, “Colette’s waiting.”

Ren coughed into his hand. “Pussy!”

Yes, yes, I was.

Making a frustrated noise, Reid exhaled loudly. “He twerked in the junction while he directed cars in the wrong direction, then he began running again and yelling at us to catch him if we could. Unfortunately, he looked over his shoulder while he was doing it and ran into a stop sign.”

There was no reaction from the family. Not a blink, not a gasp, not one word was uttered. They all just stared at us blankly.

Finally, Jack, Cole’s dad, moved away from them and joined his wife. “He ran into a stop sign?”

The irony wasn’t lost on me either.

“We called an ambulance because he lost consciousness, but then he woke up before they got here and demanded they bandage him up like a mummy.” The tone Reid was using could only be described as so dry, it was like a desert.

Colette pinched the bridge of her nose while Jack dropped his head back on his shoulders and looked at the ceiling.

A welcome voice at any point in my life, but especially now, broke the silence as Layla ran through the entrance to the ER. “Mom? Where’s Cole? What happened?”

Swear to God, I didn’t expect any of them to react like they did then.

“You tell her,” Colette whispered urgently. “It sounds better coming from an official.”

“My wife’s right,” Jack mumbled as he walked over to where I was standing and pushed me forward. “I’ll keep an eye out here, and you go tell Layla.”

Fuck that shit.

Reid and I took enough steps back until we were at the wall, and I—admittedly childishly—nudged Jack out of the way and put him back in the line of fire.

“Asshole,” he hissed, trying to get back into position. “She likes you and won’t lose her mind. I don’t want to do it.”

Turning to glare at him, I said firmly, “Your daughter doesn’t like me, which is why we’re in the predicament we’re in right now. Me telling her will just make that even worse when I’ve done nothing wrong. The only reason you don’t want to tell her is because you know you should have been with Cole when he went to the dentist in case something like this happened.”

He couldn’t call me a liar or say I was being rude when I was telling the truth. It was well known and documented that Cole had ‘sensitivities’ to medications, normally painkillers, which was why he had kids Tylenol and ibuprofen at home—for him.

In the past, he’d yelled he was a unicorn while standing on a hospital bed, done the ‘wee-wee windmill’ which no one wanted to see as it involved him whirling his dick around, and he’d gotten stuck in a tree just last year when he’d adamantly announced he was a squirrel.

I still couldn’t bring myself to admit what I’d seen when it came to him ‘gathering his nuts.’ Those nightmares had taken a while to go away.

And that was the tip of the iceberg of why he’d needed someone with him.

“I thought the dentist knew,” Jack sighed. “It’s on Cole’s file.”

I snorted. “Kingston Heart’s new in town, and you know it. Depending on what the emergency was, it’s unlikely he’d have seen a note dating back to when Cole was a kid on his file warning him. He’s also a great dentist and asks if you have any allergies, so this could have been avoided if someone had gone with Cole.”

“You’d think they’d have told him,” Jack whined. Yes, he literally whined it. “Shit like that’s the first thing I’d have yelled when I’d handed the practice over. Cole’s like a Gremlin, except you don’t give him medications without having a team to hold him down or handcuffs.”

“That’s pitiful, man. You know the old team in that practice retired when the dentist did because they were all well past retirement age anyway. If anything, it’s time for them to get a new system where you can put a red flag if a patient’s got allergies or sensitivities that make them act like an asshole,” Reid growled, leaning around me to glare at Jack.

“Forgive me for speaking so bluntly, but for the love of God, I’m already scarred enough because of the squirrel incident.”