“Hart. Benjamin Hart.” My fingers tighten around my purse handles. I hadn’t even noticed I’d brought it with me. Pressing a finger to my eyes, I urge myself to get it together. Ben needs me to be calm, cool, and collected. Not a frazzled mess.
“Right, room 12E,” the female says, without turning from the computer screen.
“Follow me,” says the male nurse.
Relieved, I squeeze between two police officers and follow the nurse down a hallway with even more people. My heart beats double-time, then nearly stops when screams reach my ears. No one else seems to notice or care, and we pass the room with the muffled screaming without consequence. An old woman clutches her belly and mewls on a gurney in the middle of the hallway.
By the time we reach room 12E, I’m fearing the worst. What if Ben is in terrible pain? Oh, God, I can’t lose him.
The nurse points to the room. “There you go.”
I swallow once, hard, and tell myself to buck up. Peering around the corner, I nearly forget to breathe because I’m afraid of what I’ll find.
Instead of Ben in the hospital bed, I find an older woman. “Err, sorry,” I say to her and her husband, who is sitting next to her, holding her hand.
I turn back to the nurse and catch him before he can disappear into the winding bowels of the ER. “I’m sorry, that’s the wrong patient. I’m looking for my husband, Ben. That was a woman.”
“I apologize. We’ll get this straightened out,” he says and goes to a nurses’ station to confer with the others there.
I shoot out a quick text, unsure whether it will be answered or not.
Me: Which room are you in?
While I wait for a response, I shift my purse on my shoulder and wish for an ice-cold Coke. I feel like I haven’t slept in days.
The response is more immediate than I expect. I suppose that’s a good sign if he can text. Right?
Ben: 2E
Well, that makes sense.
“Excuse me,” I say to the nurse. “I just texted him and he says he’s in 2E.”
“Sorry about that. It’s just over here,” the nurse says and leads me to another room. This time he waits for me to look around the corner. I have a passing thought that maybe they should triple-check before I go into another wrong room, but the words don’t come.
My heart is in my throat, my tongue dry and sticking to the roof of my mouth. The door to the room is open, but the curtain wrapping around the bed is closed. The hand I reach out to move it aside is trembling.
I push the curtain aside, and there he is.
A sound that’s a cross between a sob and a sigh erupts from my chest, startling him from a half sleep. He shifts in the bed, sitting up and yawning big. He must have been half asleep when I texted. I try not to think about whether or not he should be resting. What if the car accident aggravated his brain injury?
“Thanks,” I say to the nurse.
I can’t make myself step any closer, afraid if I move I might break.
“Livvie?” Ben asks, his voice a croak from the too-dry air in the room.
“It’s me,” I answer.
“C’mere.”
One word, not particularly an order, but it isn’t not an order either. I move closer and the door closes behind me. The nurse must have closed it to give us our privacy.
“Closer.”
There’s still a few feet between me and the bed, but I don’t like looking at him hooked up to monitors and pale from drugs, dark smudges underneath his eyes from a restless sleep. He has a hep-lock on his wrist and an IV on his opposite forearm. They’re both disconnected, but still.
Cole, I’m used to seeing him hooked up to things. After his heart surgery, he was in the hospital for months. But Ben is indestructible to me, untouchable. Invulnerable.
