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“I couldn’t,” he said. “It’s your dinner. I couldn’t take it from you.”
“You wouldn’t be,” I told him, smiling. “We’d be sharing it.”
He smiled back at me. And I swear I saw a tear in his eye as he came and sat next to me to join me.
CHAPTER26
***WESLEY***
Life ebbs and flows and, with a little bit of distance behind it, I viewed Sloane’s brief disappearance as just a small bump in the road. Before too long, things were more or less back to normal. I told Sloane to take some time off, so she gave herself an extended weekend and returned to the office the next week. She invited me to take the time off with her, but I declined. The agency could go without one of its agents for a few days, but the supervisor couldn’t abandon his post without some notice. When she did return, the brightness returned to the office, and it felt like it was clear sailing off into the indefinite future.
But things can only stay so perfect before life throws another challenge your way. Often, it's a person who’s hellbent on making your life difficult, or so it seems. That was the case with Marty and Rebecca and, to a certain extent, with the office climate team. These are usually very solvable problems — the kind of thing I’m particularly good at dealing with. A salesman with good presentation skills can negotiate with people and while I might not walk away with everything I wanted; things will ultimately work out in the end.
When you’re battling against non-human forces, however, it’s a very different story.
Such was the case when Sloane came into my office and had a look of despair and utter fear in her eyes. Instantly, I knew only one thing could have triggered such a reaction. It had to have something to do with Grace.
“What is it?” I asked, hoping and praying that it was virtually anything else.
"I'm bleeding," she said. "A lot."
This was completely out of my realm of expertise. Normally, I could tell her that everything was going to be all right and lean into the comfort of my confidence. Now was not one of those times. For perhaps the first time in our relationship, I was scared and didn't know what to do.
I could deal with my own misfortune or tragedy, but I couldn't deal with such things happening to someone else, especially the person I cared more about than anyone else in the world. And, with the way we'd been talking about Grace, she'd quickly elevated herself to tie Sloane for the most important person in my life despite not even being born.
At that moment, all I could do was latch on to whatever hope I could find in myself, then do everything in my power to prevent the unthinkable from happening.
“Then we need to get you to a doctor,” I told her. It wasn’t a question or a request, it was me telling her exactly what we needed to do at that moment. And Sloane didn’t fight me on it.
There wasn't time for me to feign an excuse for the rest of the office — by this point, I think everybody knew the open secret about me and Sloane — but I took her out of my office and ran her to my car, where I sped as quickly as I could not to the doctor's office or urgent care, but straight to the hospital. I wasn't going to waste my time with this — Dynasty paid for our insurance, we might as well take advantage of it and get the best tools and resources available to save the baby.
Along the way, I held Sloane's hand, and she squeezed me tight, breathing deeply.
"How are you feeling?" I asked.
"What are you talking about?" she said. "I'm scared. I'm devastated. I’m falling apart. I don't even know what to do if this is—”
"No," I said, trying to remain calm as a means to lower her stress levels as much as possible, considering the circumstances, "I mean are you in physical pain."
What I was thinking but didn't dare say was that her life might be in danger, too. I could possibly deal with the tragedy of losing Grace. I couldn't live with myself anymore if I lost Sloane, too. That was too much for any man to handle.
"No pain," she said. “I don’t want to talk about it right now. Just drive."
She didn't want to talk. I understood, so I followed her instruction and offered my support with physical proximity instead of words. Meanwhile, fears raced around inside my head, flying around like bats and I did my best to calm them with the only tool I had available at the time: hope.
I pulled into the emergency entrance of Cedar Sinai, where Sloane left and checked in on her own while I dealt with parking. As I walked (really, it was closer to a sprint) back to the entrance, I hoped that I wouldn’t see her in the waiting room. In a perfect world, she would have been triaged to the top of the list and already admitted, talking to a doctor.
Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case. She was right there in the waiting room, curled up on a chair, shaking. I sat down beside her and gave her a hug, then whispered in her ear.
“It’s okay,” I said. “Everything will be okay. I won’t let anything bad happen to you or Grace.”
She looked at me, her eyes red and exhausted, then shook her head. “You can’t promise that,” she said. “you don’t have control.”
“I know,” I said, “but for now, just pretend that I can.”
Sloane nodded and leaned into me, letting me wrap my arm around her like a blanket. Her breathing steadied and the imaginary protection offered her an unearned sense of relief, which she absolutely needed at that point.
I looked around at the other people in the waiting room. None of them seemed to be in a particular hurry. Whatever they were dealing with couldn’t have been as important as the situation we were in the middle of. That meant someone would be coming out shortly to call us into the back room.
