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Tristan looked over his shoulder as if I were talking to someone behind him. When he was satisfied no one was there, he looked at me. “What?”
“What? What do you mean what? Just look at what you’ve done!” I cried.
“What I’ve done? Oh no, I haven’t done anything. You are the one who tripped!”
I shook my head, not believing what I was hearing. I glared at him. “I see you haven’t changed much at all! You trip me, and now it’s me who has done this! Like I wanted to trip. Makes me remember back to the days in school when you were always messing up but never taking the blame.”
“You guys. Please…there is no need to fight,” Melinda cried.
“Oh no, you’re wrong, there is a need to fight. With him, there is always a need,” I bit out.
A shrill ring rang through the room, and Tristan pulled his phone from his pocket and looked down to the screen. “I’ve got to take this,” he mumbled.
“So take it,” I barked.
The tension within me finally lowered as he left the room. I leaned back against the pillow behind me and looked to Melinda, not knowing what to do. There was no way I could put all of this on her. “Don’t worry, I’ll figure something out,” I whispered.
* * *
I sat on the edge of the hospital bed going over my order schedule. While I’d been waiting for discharge, I decided that I would try to figure out how I was going to get everything completed. I’d had twenty orders come in on Baking Crate today alone, and I’d just gotten off the phone with Cici, who’d told me that there had been five orders placed for holiday parties.
“Well? Come up with anything?” Melinda asked, coming back into the room with two bottles of orange juice.
“It’s impossible. There is no way you can handle all this on your own,” I cried, looking down at the piece of paper I’d been using to try and make sense of everything. “No matter how many times I try to cut it, orders will have to be canceled.”
“What about your mom? Maybe she can come and help me?”
“No, her and Dad have gone off to Paris. They left two days ago, and they won’t be back until well into January. Which, by then, I’ll have messed up enough to lose my Baking Crate account.”
Melinda looked at me with sympathy. “I can try, Brooke.”
“This is just a disaster,” I said, throwing the pencil down on the bed.
Melinda grabbed the paper and pencil and looked at it. “Let me see if I can’t figure something out,” she said, putting the end of the pencil in her mouth.
“Well, are you ready to head out?” the doctor asked, stepping back into the room.
I nodded, swallowing hard at the thought of what I was about to lose.
“I’m just going to go down and pull the car around,” Melinda said, nodding to the doctor.
“I’ll get a wheelchair. You can just come take her once you’re back. Here is a prescription for pain, and your crutches are on the way up.” He smiled. “And a mild prescription to help with the anxiety you are feeling.”
I tore the prescriptions from his hand and shoved them into my purse, mumbling under my breath. It wasn’t long before I sat in a wheelchair as Melinda pushed me through the halls of the hospital. My head ached, and I hoped it would pass once I’d gotten home and could think through things a little more logically. We were just about to the front doors of the hospital when Tristan appeared.
“Going home?” he asked.
“Oh, not you again,” I gritted. “Could you please just go away.”
“He can’t. I told him we would give him a ride back into town,” Melinda said from behind me.
“What? Why?”
“Well he was nice enough to come out here to check up on you. It was the least I could do.” Melinda stopped to help me get into my winter coat.
“Melinda, knowing Tristan, he probably came out here because he is in trouble and was told to smooth things over,” I gritted.
“Brooke, be nice. He was trying to be nice,” Melinda whispered to me as she began pushing me to the car.
