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Meredith wished she could help him. She put a hand on his leg, but that was all she could do.
“Hold on,” Evelyn said from the front seat, and Meredith started to cry again. She loved her mother so much.
The car stopped and Meredith could hardly breathe. She wasn’t sure she was going to make it. Wondered what would happen if she died right then in the back seat of her own car with her mother at the wheel.
“They’re at the second house,” Evelyn said quietly.
“They’re running to the third,” Mark added, his voice urgent. “Do you think they found something out?”
Meredith’s heart started to beat faster, pumping blood and air through her body.
“Most likely.”
She had to hold on.
“They’re going in.”
Please, God, Meredith begged, find me fast. And then she passed out.
SUSAN MET THEM at the hospital and stood by while the team of emergency doctors worked on Kelsey. Mark, pacing with Evelyn and Meredith, kept an eye on the hallway where they’d disappeared with his daughter and waited for Susan to come out and report to them.
“How you doing?” he heard Evelyn ask Meredith and he turned to take inventory of her color. Her cheeks were rosy again—instead of the alarming white they’d been when he’d helped her in, conscious but sick to her stomach and lethargic.
“Good,” she said, and Mark’s heart jumped when she smiled. “Feeling more and more like myself.”
He squeezed her hand. “You scared the hell out of me.”
“Me, too.”
“Has that ever happened before?”
“Never.”
Even now that she was more herself, she held his hand.
“She’s been sick before, needed to lie down to calm herself, but it’s never taken control that strongly.” Evelyn, as Mark had just discovered, was a scientist. She’d held an impressive position with the oil company that was Bartlesville’s claim to fame.
Pulling the knot in his tie down to midchest, he looked from one to the other of the strongest women he’d ever known, and knew the past two hours, past two months, had changed him. Irrevocably.
“Is she going to be all right?” he asked Meredith.
She peered up at him, her eyes widening. “You want to know what I feel or what I think?”
“I want to know what you know.”
“She’s going to be fine. Physically, at least. We have some work ahead of us in the emotional department.”
“How sure are you on that?” Evelyn asked.
“Ninety.”
Mark frowned, feeling like a novice. “What does that mean?”
“Anything over sixty on Meredith’s confidence scale has at least some truth to it,” Evelyn said. “Fifty or less, she thinks it, but she doesn’t feel anything at all one way or the other.”
“So ninety’s good.”
Meredith was staring at him, tears brimming in her eyes. “Yes, very good,” she said. Mark knew that she wasn’t just speaking about his daughter, but any other conversation would have to wait for another time.
