Page 220 of Wrong Number Right Doctor

The sirens get louder. And all I can think, stupidly, wildly, is that if Dalton hadn’t been waiting in that parking lot, if he had finally gone home, if I hadn’t seen him standing there⁠—

I don’t finish the thought. I can’t.

The paramedics arrive in a rush of movement and clipped questions, and then the whole thing becomes a blur again—stretcher, oxygen, monitors, someone cutting away more of Alester’s shirt, someone else asking what happened, when he lost consciousness, whether he had complained of chest pain before he slumped over.

Dalton answers before I can. “He was driving. Sudden collapse at the wheel. Brief loss of responsiveness. He resumed spontaneous breathing after airway repositioning.”

They start moving Alester toward the ambulance entrance and then back through the emergency bay doors, and Dalton goes with them without looking at me first.

That should hurt.

It doesn’t. Not the way it would have before. Because this is his work. Because a man nearly died in front of us. Because if I were the one on the floor, I would want exactly this version of him—focused, terrifyingly competent, incapable of letting go of the next necessary thing.

At the doors, one of the ER doctors asks, “You know his history?”

And Dalton, already walking beside the stretcher, says, “I know the full family history. Something similar happened to his father.”

The doctor nods.

A nurse tells me to sit because I’m pale. Another asks if I’m still cramping. Someone wraps a blanket around my shoulders that I don’t remember accepting. Time goes strange after that. The ER keeps moving around me while I stay still in the middle of it, the hospital bright and cold and busy in the way it always is when your own life has stopped making sense.

At some point Acharya appears, already informed, already speaking to someone in a low voice near the desk. He glances at me once, takes in the blanket, my face, the fact that I’m still here, and says only, “Stay put.”

As if I were going anywhere.

Eventually they move me back into a quieter room to keep observing me. The cramping has mostly settled, but nobody seems willing to trust my body for the rest of the night, including me. I lie there staring at the ceiling, listening to the muffled sounds outside the door, and all the things I’ve been pushing away start crowding in at once.

Alester collapsing at the wheel. Dalton in the parking lot, waiting. The way he got him breathing again. The way everything could have gone differently in less than a minute.

And under all of that, the older wound still open: Dalton saying he was leaving, me not stopping him in time, and then this awful impossible night dragging us back together anyway.

By the time the door opens again, I’ve already started crying.

Dalton steps in and closes the door behind him. He looks exhausted. More than exhausted. Shirt wrinkled, sleeves pushed up, hair a mess, face drawn tight with the kind of strain he would usually hide better than this. For a second he just stands there looking at me, and whatever is left of my control gives out immediately.

“How is he?” I ask.

“Stable,” he says. His voice is rough. “They’ve got him upstairs. It wasn’t a full infarction. Collapse from arrhythmia, likely stress-induced on top of a bad cardiac pattern. They’re watching him closely.”

I nod like I understand every word.

Maybe I do.

Maybe I only understand that he’s alive.

Dalton comes closer. “How are you feeling?” The question is so gentle it makes my throat close.

“I don’t know,” I say.

That’s the truth. I don’t know if I’m relieved or horrified or guilty or just emptied out. I don’t know if the tears on my face are for Alester, for the child, for the car, for Dalton, for myself, or for the fact that all of it happened in the same hour and my body had no choice but to carry it.

Dalton reaches where I’m sitting and stops there, like he’s giving me time to decide whether I want him near me.

I do. The answer is immediate enough to make me angrier than it should.

He must see it, because his face softens in the smallest possible way. Then he sits on the edge of the chair beside the bed and says, “You did everything right.”

I laugh once through the tears. “That feels made up.”