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“Why? Is she hurt?” Ziggy asked, some concern in her voice.
“She was hit, hard, by a player in the Berlin Thunder. It felt like he targeted her.”
“Is she okay?”
“I don’t know. I’m headed to Martin Luther Krankenhaus right now.” His voice shook a little, and he closed his eyes, ran his thumb and finger against his eyes. “I don’t know, okay? She went down really hard. Hit her head. And she was unconscious when she left the field, so—”
“Okay, breathe, Hudson. What was this guy’s name?”
“Werner Vogel. Number sixty-three, Berlin Thunder.”
“I’ll track him down, see what I can find out, but I’m not in country at the moment, and I’m sort of in the middle of something, so you might need to do the legwork on this.”
“Anything you need.” He hung up and it occurred to him that was the very sentence that’d gotten her—them—into this. Shoot, why had he been so terribly gung-ho to be something bigger than he was?
“You a player with the Thunder?” the Uber driver asked.
“Vikings.” Although if coach reviewed the fourth-quarter tapes, maybe not for much longer. “Can you go faster?”
The man met his eyes in the rear view. Nodded.
Hud opened the app and tipped him forty percent as they pulled up to a sprawling white complex on the south side of the city. “Thanks.”
He got out and headed to the reception desk. And then he played the same game that Iris had played when she’d tried to see him in Athens, right after he’d had a seizure not far from the hotel breakfast bar. “My name is Hudson Bly, and my fiancée, Iris Marshall, was brought in from the Thunder football game.”
He even reached into his pocket and pulled out his ID.
The lobby was sparse and sleek, a leather sofa built into the wall, a few red recliners. The woman wore a green uniform, her blonde hair cut short, in her early fifties, maybe. She eyed Hudson. Finally, “Okay. She’s in X-ray, but you can wait with her family in the ER lobby.”
Her family?
She took his picture, then produced a badge with his name and picture and clipped it into a lanyard which he put over his head. She pointed down the hall to a door. “Scan the code. The waiting room is inside.”
He strode down the hall, scanned the code, and the door released.
Family. So, her father, her brother?
It didn’t matter. He wasn’t leaving.
The doors opened into the lobby. Massive windows overlooked a tree-lined avenue, gold and red leaves still clinging to some of the trees. The wind took them, and they scattered into the encroaching twilight.
Standing at the window, his back to him, stood one of Iris’s brothers. Broad shoulders, a little shorter than Hudson, but built like all of the Marshall men. He couldn’t remember all their names.
On the sofa sat a woman nursing a cup of coffee, her legs folded.
“Shae?”
She looked up. “Hudson? What are you doing here?”
“How’s Iris?”
“We don’t know. We just got here.” She wore the same lanyard around her neck.
The man at the window had turned. Ned. Right.
“Ned.” They’d met, twice in fact, but the first time had been so brief, and all he’d been thinking about was disentangling himself from Iris.
The second time he’d, well, he’d been thinking about the same thing. This time with regret.
