Page 91 of Light in the Dark
"More wait and see, then," I say with a sigh.
He gives me a sympathetic look. "Unfortunately, yes. I know you've been here for a while, and I know those chairs suck. We are going to admit her to keep her under observation for a few days at very least, so we'll get you sent up to a room, at which point you can bring your visitors in."
"Visitors?"
He blinks at me. "Uh, yeah. There's a good half-dozen people out there asking for updates."
"Fuck, I—I forgot. I've been focused on her and then I fell asleep."
He smiles. "A nurse informed them about—" he checks a wristwatch worn against the underside of his wrist, "thirty minutes or so ago that there should be news soon. We'll get her admitted and moved in the next few minutes and you can go talk to your people."
My people.
"Thank you, Doc."
He nods, whacks my knee gently with the iPad. "There are better options for sleeping up there, so hang in there, alright, bud? Your girl will be okay. I mean, she's got a pretty long recovery ahead of her, but with the right support, she'll come through it just fine." He stands up. "Alright. Well, on that note, I’m out of here. I'll be back on in a couple days. I'll try to come check on her. Take care."
"You too."
“The next few minutes” turns out to be forty-five minutes. I make sure to memorize the route from the ER to her room, and once she's settled, I head back down to the ER waiting room.
I find Riley, Nyx, Cole, Bear, Noelle, Amy, and, oddly enough, Layla and Lainey Cartwright—owners of The Alt Cafe—all clustered in chairs together. Cole and Nyx are huddled together watching something on Nyx's phone, Riley is asleep with his head on Bear's mammoth shoulder—Noelle is asleep on his other shoulder, and Bear is reading a dog-eared paperback.
Amy is the first to spot me coming. "Felix!"
She shoots to her feet and scurries over to me, reaching for me—she stops herself at the last second. "Is—is she okay? They wouldn't tell us anything."
I don't know how to handle Amy. For a minute, I just stare at her, trying to form words, or even coherent thoughts. Behind her, I see Riley jerk awake and sit up, wipe at his mouth with his sleeve, and stare at Bear's shoulder as if it offended him somehow. Bear's lips twitch in a smirk, but he doesn’t otherwise react—saving Riley's dignity. In moments, I'm surrounded and being peppered with questions.
Bear's voice pierces the barrage with a low but powerful snap. "Yo! Let the man speak."
"Um. Sorry I didn't come out earlier, I—" I sigh, shake my head. "She's okay. I mean, relatively speaking. She has a moderate TBI and she's still unconscious. They don't think there will be any lasting brain issues, though. She also had a collapsed lung and a broken leg."
Amy turns away, shuddering as she tries to contain some powerful emotion.
I have no space in my brain to deal with her right now.
Riley moves beside me and wraps an arm around my shoulders. "What can we do?"
I swallow, shake my head, shrug. "Dunno. She's still unconscious and she's been admitted upstairs. If you wanna visit her, you can, but we've got no way of knowing when she'll wake up." I look at the Cartwright sisters. "I didn't know you two knew Ember."
Layla, the older sister with shoulder-length black hair, smiles sweetly. "She's been coming into The Alt to study for months. She's a darling and we just adore her."
I blink. "Studying? For what? She hasn't mentioned that to me."
The other sister, Lainey—the younger one, her hair cut razor-straight at her chin—smirks at me. "She's taking online courses to become a vet."
I scrub my face, wondering how I possibly could have missed this about her. "Oh."
"Yeah, she took her final not long before she went to LA," Layla adds.
"Haven't spent a lot of time talking, huh?" Lainey says, grinning and wiggling her eyebrows suggestively.
I roll my eyes at her—the Cartwright sisters are sandwiched around me in age—Layla is older by a year and graduated before me, and Lainey is a year younger and graduated a year after me; I know them, but not well enough that I'd expect this kind of teasing, especially in this situation. "We’ve talked plenty, Lainey. She just…never mentioned it."
She claps a hand over her chest, feigning shock. "Felix Crowe knows my name? Holy shit."
Layla elbows her. "Lane. Not the time, not the place."
