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“Hey, of course not! They just wanted you to keep her belongings safe. That’s all. Sit down.” He picks a better couch this time. “Coffee?”
“Ah… yeah, thanks, Rob!” I take the cup.
“Alaskan espresso. Sorry I couldn’t bring Mama’s coffee.”
I curve a reminiscing smile. Amber’s mother’s coffee is the best. I have even forgotten that I’m more than three thousand miles from home. I guess the coffee wouldn’t survive the journey here.
“The nurse just now told me Isabelle is having delayed shock symptoms. Was it her fall? Did I pull her too hard? Why didn’t they treat her for shock right from the start? Why does it have to bedelayed?”
Rob takes the cup away from my hand. A good thing, because I’m about to drop it and spill it all over the floor.
“She hung on for a long time, Clay. Her body just needs time to recover. She’ll do it again. She has you, and she has Raffi and the baby. She won’t quit.”
“You know, Rob. That day when everything happened,” I say. “When Mia was born, when Isabelle ran away, it did cross my mind that I was going to propose to her. I mean, I wasn’t going to do it that day, but just a thought—how beautiful would it be to hear her say yes? I didn’t know how I’d do it. I still don’t. But I knew it’d be beautiful.”
He keeps quiet as if giving me more time to imagine it. Then he looks at me playfully. “You’re not going to upstage me, though.”
I chuckle. Rob’s proposal to Amber was spectacular—I’ve got to hand it to him for his ingenuity. Just like the love story between him and her, there’s no way I will ever upstage it.
Rob pats my shoulder. “Keep it simple, brother. There are more important things you two need to think of other than a few seconds of you on your bended knee.”
I nod at his wisdom as I reach for my coffee cup, taking a couple more sips. “I’ve said a lot of despicable things to her. I just hope she can forgive me. I mean, I don’t think she’ll leave me, but—I don’t want our fallout to resurface in the future. You know, when things aren’t going so well, and we look to the past for some kind of justification.”
“Come on. She doesn’t seem to be the type who holds grudges.”
It never crosses my mind that she is. Rather, it’s me who needs to hear from her that I’ve been forgiven.
It has to wait. In the meantime, I ask Rob about her best friend. “By the way, what happened to Thomas?”
“That kid was tortured by Fletcher’s man back in L.A. They believed he knew something about Raffi’s whereabouts. Apparently he had a new passport with him, ready to leave, but he stayed on for Isabelle.”
“That kid!
“And he can prove Fletcher’s tampering of her health and criminal records.”
“Thank God for Thomas!”
“Indeed. And he’s a wiz!” Rob admits. “I mean, he transformed your old HartTracker software in less than an hour. Did you see the terrain overlay that he did?”
“It was him?”
“Yeah.”
“Poach him.”
“Already have!” Rob gushes. “Fletcher Tech will be no more anyway.”
A man who looks like Stanley Tucci makes a beeline toward us. He introduces himself as the hospital’s head of trauma. A doctor at last!
“How is she?” I ask him.
The doctor grants me a reassuring smile. “The worst has passed, so she’s on the mend.”
I release a long breath. Rob stands closer to me.
The doctor explains, “Her blood pressure and heart rate are still low, normal symptoms for delayed shock. What she went through was traumatic. Her body had sustained an extended period of ‘survival mode,’ so to speak. And once she left that mode, her body reacted—hence the delayed symptoms.”
Why was it so hard for anyone to explain it to me before? Perhaps she did go into a rough patch.
