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Ava looked so small strapped there and pinned in place with a brace to keep her still. She was pale and her eyes were beginning to bruise.
I tried not to think about every time we’d received bad news with Duke’s lymphoma, but the memories seemed to swirl through me until I thought I was going to be physically ill.
But not Ava, I wanted to beg. Not little Ava Grace.
At the emergency room, they wheeled her away, and someone showed Lucy and me to a waiting room. When they asked if a doctor could check Lucy’s wounds too, she waved them away, telling them later. All questions directed at us seemed to irritate her, so we were finally given a little peace and quiet. I tried to get Lucy to sit, but she pushed my hands away and paced, rubbing her arms briskly as she glanced toward the door every two seconds, hoping for an update.
Beau and Bentley were the first to find us there.
“How’s she doing?” Bentley demanded, immediately going to Lucy for a hug.
Lucy embraced her back, answering, “She’s getting a CT scan right now. Other than that, I have no idea.”
Her sister-in-law nodded and took Lucy’s hands. “Do you need anything? Can I get you a drink? How about you sit down, honey?”
“I don’t want to sit,” Lucy snapped, shaking herself free of Bentley’s grip. “I don’t need anything. I just…I…I...” Getting too choked up to say any more, she flinched from the pain speaking must’ve caused, and she turned toward me, her eyes pleading. “Vaughn.”
I nodded and opened my arms. When she flew into them and buried her face against my chest, I closed my arms around her and glanced toward Bentley.
“She doesn’t want anything right now,” I translated quietly.
“Mom and Dad have Braiden tonight, but they’ll come if you need them,” Beau spoke up. “Just say the word.”
“No.” Lucy shook her head. “It’s okay. We’re okay. Ava’s going to be fine.”
A few minutes later, more people showed up, Cress with Maverick, and more whose names I couldn’t remember.
At one point, Lucy asked about Chloe. “Where’s Chloe? Do we know anything about Chloe yet?”
“Trick and Luke found her,” the guy who looked like Luke’s brother reported. “At Dax’s place. The police arrested him, and she’s on her way here right now with a couple of superficial wounds that they’re just going to get checked out.”
Lucy swallowed, still looking worried. “But she’s okay?”
He paused, then nodded. “Yeah. She’s going to be just fine.”
“Oh, thank God.” Lucy wrapped her arms around me in relief.
“This says 600,000 children visit the emerge
ncy room each year with blunt trauma to the head, and only 95,000 of them have any kind of intracranial injuries,” Beau announced suddenly, looking up from his phone that he’d been reading. “So we’ve got good chances here. And only fifty-seven hundred of those cases—”
“Beau,” I said, my voice low but full of warning. He stopped reading the statistics and glanced up. I shook my head. “Not right now.”
He cringed and glanced apologetically toward Lucy. As he mouthed the word sorry to me, a tall, lean woman in blue scrubs stepped into our private waiting room. “Gamble-Merrill family?”
Lucy shot forward, lifting her hand. “Here.”
The woman nodded in greeting. “Hello, I’m Dr. Sandaki, the one who’s been caring for your daughter tonight.”
“Is she okay?” Lucy asked, her fingers biting down around mine.
The doctor’s face softened into a smile as she nodded. “She’s conscious and alert, and very crankily demanding to see her parents, I believe.”
“Oh, thank God,” Lucy breathed, looking up at me with relief.
I squeezed her hand as the doctor added, “We just did a CT scan on her, and found no broken bones in her arms, her legs, or spine. But she does have a skull fracture.”
Lucy’s face immediately paled. “What?”
