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CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Sunshine radiated through the blinds into the sterile hospital room. Lucy blinked her eyes open and squinted against the light. She checked the clock on the wall at the foot of her bed. Nearly noon.
She was leaving Confluence. She rubbed her palms over her cheeks and blew out a breath.
She’d tell Will. Her path was somewhere else. The road she paved went a different direction.
When she sank back into her pillows, the one propped against the bandage on her arm shifted. She mashed her lips together at the tugging pressure. To her surprise, the emergency room doctors hadn’t treated her immediately. They waited for the plastic surgeon to arrive. Everyone seemed put out about the delay, so she was fairly certain it wasn’t protocol.
She had a suspicion it was Will’s credit card that pulled Confluence’s one and only plastic surgeon from his bed at midnight to fix her up.
A light tap at the door, and her nurse popped her head in. “Oh good, you’re awake. You have a visitor. Feel up to it?”
“Who—”
“She’s awake? Then of course she’s up to it.” Katie’s voice came from the hallway.
“Katie?” Lucy raised herself up, grimaced, and lay back on the bed.
Katie slipped past the nurse into the room.
“Hey,” Lucy called before the nurse could leave. “Is there any news? About Neilson?”
“I checked an hour ago, and he was still critical, can’t say anything else without a release.”
“Keep me posted if”—Lucy swallowed the lump in her throat and glanced down at the partially exposed bandage across her arm—“it changes?”
If he dies…
“I can do that,” the nurse said softly before she left.
He had to make it. She couldn’t process the alternative.
“How’d you get here?” Lucy tapped a button to raise the head of the bed a little.
“It’s called a car. Nifty things. You get in them, turn the key, and they take you where you want to go.” Katie leaned to give her a hug. The scent of gumdrops and cinnamon perfumed the air around her.
She took a long look at Lucy, pausing at the large swath of gauze and tape. “Jeff called me in the middle of the night to tell me what happened.”
Jeff. After things calmed down at Camelot, he had visited with Lucy at the hospital to take her statement.
“Is he all right?” Lucy asked.
“He’s beating himself up for not catching Robbie.” Katie bit at her lower lip. “Listen. Between that whole alligator thing and your house burning down, I figured your family would be worried, so I called your parents last night when I heard.”
Lucy sucked in a breath. “They aren’t coming, are they?”
Katie scooted one of the metal guest chairs closer to the bed. “I told them not to, that you’d call later.”
“My cell phone is presently a molten mess of plastic and metal somewhere in Camelot.”
Katie flopped to the chair. “You can use mine when you’re ready. Where’s William?”
“Down the hall. Smoke inhalation. They’re keeping him for observation.”
Will did not appreciate being confined to a bed. The nurse informed her of this fact because, apparently, he was not being a model patient. As soon as they were separated in the emergency room, he insisted he needed to keep checking on Lucy. He finally agreed on a note passing system through the nurses—a flashback to the era before cell phones. The messages had stopped a few hours ago when the nurse told her they had taken him for a chest x-ray.
“Did you guys figure out your caterpillar problem?” Katie asked, a bit too casually.
