She nodded again. “Good. Thanks.” It was all she could do not to leap off the table and demand to be taken to the operating room, so she could stand at his head while the doctors dug through his big body with all their wicked tools, slicing him in order to heal him. “Please keep me updated,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am.”
She felt an insane laugh pressing at her throat.You sound just like Littlejohn, she wanted to tell him. But that would be stupid, because he had no idea who Littlejohn was.
Dr. Roth’s brows notched with concern, but he began to step back.
“Hey,” Aidan called to him. “When’s somebody gonna pop her shoulder back into place? Do I need to do it myself?” The glare he leveled on the intern was pure Ghost, down to the muscle twitch in his cheek.
“Um…” Dr. Roth stuttered. “I’ll get someone. Hold on.”
“She needs some goddamn pain meds too.”
“Yes. Right away. I’ll put someone on it.” Dr. Roth whipped around the corner like a scolded puppy.
When Aidan turned back to her, still scowling, she felt the stirrings of a smile at her mouth. She didn’t want to – it felt like a betrayal to Mercy’s prone form on the operating table – but she couldn’t help it.
“What?” he asked. “Is the concussion kicking in? Early onset dementia?”
“You just looked a lot like Dad,” she explained. “You’ve got early onset Dadding.”
One brow lifted and he almost smiled. “Okay, you for sure hit your head if you’re making jokes that bad.”
“I’m just not funny,” she said, a heaviness stealing across her face, pulling it slack again. Quietly: “Mercy’s the funny one.”
“Yeah, and he can have a good laugh about all this when he wakes his big ass up.”
When Aidan reached to finger a stray piece of hair that had fallen across her forehead, she said, “You’re being really sweet to me.” His hand stilled, like he’d been caught. “It’s because you think Mercy’s going to die, isn’t it?”
It was eerie, seeing her like this. For all that she was like Maggie, Ava had enough Ghost in her to rock along fairly smoothly most of the time. More even-tempered than both her parents. But this? This was spooky how detached and indifferent she was. She made a tiny whimpering sound when the doctors aligned her shoulder and put it back in its socket, pliant and blank-faced as a nurse fitted her with a sling and offered her some Tylenol in a paper cup. “Not while my husband’s on the table,” she protested matter-of-factly when another nurse came to wheel her up for her head CT.
“Hon, he’ll be on the table a while. Let’s get your head checked, okay?” The nurse was a sweet, motherly type who didn’t bat an eye at Ava’s single-minded obsession. She shot Aidan an understanding smile and said, “We’ll be right back.”
Ava twisted in the wheelchair as it was pushed from the room, looking small and pale in her white hospital gown. “Come get me if you hear anything,” she instructed him.
Aidan sighed and nodded, glad when she was finally out of sight.
He sank down into the visitor chair by the bed – they’d admitted her at this point – and dug his phone out of his cut pocket.
Husband. Every time Ava or one of the staff said it, he felt a little jolt. He’d wondered, at first, when she’d said it in the ambulance, if that was just her way of ensuring that she’d be allowed to see him later. But he’d spotted the gold ring on her left hand. “Before we left home,” she’d explained, without him asking. Aidan didn’t guess he could feel like too much of a righteous brother if the man had married her. He respected that.
It would make things so much harder for Ava, though, if for some reason Merc didn’t pull through. If they lost him – ifshelost him…he wasn’t sure she’d recover this time.
Aidan hit two on his autodial and Maggie picked up at the end of the first ring. Her voice was a stronger version of Ava’s detached, calm tone.
“How’s it going?”
“They just took her up to CT to get her head checked out, but the doc’s not too worried about it. They’ll keep her in a room overnight, I’m guessing. The shoulder’s back in place; no breaks.”
“Good. How’s he?”
“Still in surgery.”
She let out a breath that rustled across her end of the line. “Okay.”
“Where are you guys?”
“Going across the state line into Georgia. Your dad’s going eighty-five.”
