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Matt pulled up a chair and sat beside her, leaning over the bed to take Olivia’s hand. Seeing the two of them side by side made her wonder how it was possible no one knew Olivia was his. The girl was practically his clone.
He was just as handsome now as the day she’d met him ten years earlier. His jaw was angular and his nose perfectly aquiline. He looked like the kind of man ancient Greek sculptors would want to base their masterpieces on.
“What happened?”
Alice relayed—in brief, and excluding Kevin’s addled state—the details of the accident. Matt had no real place in her family affairs, and it didn’t make sense to give him any ammunition to use against her. He might not want Olivia now, but if a time came he did, there was no way she’d personally load the gun he would use to shoot her in the foot.
“But the doctors think she’ll be okay?”
“Yeah, it’s all superficial stuff. They say we only have to worry if she doesn’t…if she doesn’t wake…” Alice’s voice faltered, and a renewed spring of tears surged forth. Stupid tears. Was there no end to them?
Again, Matt pulled her close, hugging her awkwardly from the chair. This man, the one in the room with her, was the closest she’d had to the old Matt Hernandez in a very long time, and having him there was like rediscovering an old friend.
It wouldn’t last. These flashes of kindness from him were always short-lived, but for the time being it was exactly what she needed.
“It’s going to be okay,” he assured her, giving her the comfort she hadn’t known she needed so badly. “She’s a tough girl. She’ll be fine.”
But what did he know about Liv’s toughness? What did he know about her at all? Alice’s frustration over Matt’s absentee parenting melded together with her exhaustion over the whole present situation. She couldn’t yell at any of the people she wanted to—not Kevin, not Matt—and since she couldn’t yell, she kept crying.
When was this promised okay going to come through? How long did she have to wait before everything was, in fact, okay? Because it felt like she’d been holding her breath her entire adult life, waiting for that time to arrive, and there was still no sign of it.
Right now she’d settle for not falling apart.
Since she couldn’t tell him how much he was screwing up her life, she simply said, “I’m glad you came.” She didn’t ask how long he planned to stay because she knew the answer would only set her off again.
For bereavement, players got a scant few days off. Olivia wasn’t dead, she was just in the hospital. For a key player like Matt, it didn’t matter if it was his kid. Unless Liv was in seriously bad shape, they’d expect him back by the weekend.
Not to mention no one but his lawyers knew he had a kid.
“I’m an asshole,” he said quietly. “But I’m not a fucking asshole.”
When he smiled, Alice laughed for the first time in what felt like centuries. The lightness of the moment was completely incongruous to the situation they were in, but it didn’t matter. So what if people weren’t supposed to laugh in hospitals. Who made that rule? If there was anywhere in the world that needed laughter the most, it had to be hospitals.
His hand looked huge with Liv’s small one in it. Matt rubbed Alice’s back with his free hand. “Try to get some sleep. I’ll stay up with her a bit. If anything changes, I’ll wake you.”
He wrapped his arm around her and pulled her chair flush against his, holding her close to his side so her head rested on his shoulder. He must have been slumped low in the chair for that to work, because Matt was pushing six five.
Alice didn’t fight him. There was nothing romantic about the gesture, and nothing sexual she wanted from him. It had been a long time since she’d been able to visualize Matt as the object of her desire. Right now he was just an anchor keeping her from drifting away entirely.
With her forehead against his chin, within minutes she had drifted off to sleep.
A handful of restless hours later, Alice woke to the filtered light of sunrise coming through the cracked blinds. The room looked especially cold in the purple-gray glow. She rubbed her eyes and rolled her stiff neck on her shoulders, glancing over to Matt’s seat.
His empty chair greeted her.
Had his arrival been nothing more than a dream? Did she want so badly for him to be there she’d imagined him?
Then she spotted the leather weekend bag sitting on the floor at the end of the bed and relaxed. In the cot, Olivia was still sleeping, her heart rate monitor beeping in a quiet, steady rhythm that seemed to suggest a normal pulse.
Alice sat next to her daughter, brushing the girl’s curly hair with her fingers, trying to smooth it into some semblance of order. The darkness of the ringlets made her sallow skin look sickly. The bruises on Liv’s face had gotten darker overnight, and each one broke Alice’s heart a little more.
It wasn’t like it was the first time Liv had gotten hurt. She was a kid, after all. But a broken wrist from falling off her bike didn’t hold a candle to this. Children didn’t die from broken wrists, but she’d almost lost her daughter yesterday.
A sob caught in her throat like a hiccup. She had to get her shit together and stop crying. The sooner she calmed down, the better she’d be able to figure the situation out.
“She up?” Matt’s voice made her jump.
“No, not yet.”
