Page 11 of Miles
“I’m sure I didn’t make it any easier for you.”
“She didn’t make it easy,” he replied with a shrug. “And nothing worthwhile ever is.”
“There you are!”
Speak of the devil, and she shall appear, I thought to myself as Martina, and her mother approached from Mary’s office.
She slid her arms around Gate’s waist and flashed me a smile. “I heard our patient is awake.”
“News travels fast around here, doesn’t it?”
Mary rolled her eyes. “You have no idea. It amazes me that we manage to keep anything confidential. How did she look to you?”
Beautiful. Intoxicating. Mysterious.Could give voice to those thoughts. “Alert. Pained, but alert.”
“We can bump up the pain meds a bit more, now that she’s awake,” she suggested. “It was necessary to dial them back in order to allow her to clear up a bit.”
“She won’t need them for long though, will she?” Martina asked, directing the question to Gate and me.
I recalled what Phillip told me after he’d set her breaks. “This is a bit more complex than the wound you received. There was damage to the muscle and ligaments when the bones broke through the surface. Even so, it shouldn’t take more than a week for her to mend completely.”
“What do you think she’s going to make of that?” Mary asked, raising an eyebrow.
She was merely voicing a question I’d asked myself dozens of times during my long, silent vigils over the sleeping girl. What would she think? How would she react?
“I think we’re going to have a lot of explaining to do,” I decided.
“We?” Gate snorted. “I think you mean you will. You’re the one who saved her.”
“Phillip saved her,” I reminded him.
“Which he never would’ve been able to do had you not kept her from crashing into the rocks. Don’t you think she’s going to want to know how she didn’t die on impact? I think that’s the first explanation she’s owed. Which should come from you. It’s only fair.”
“Fair,” I groaned.
Since when was any of this fair?
