Chapter 12 - Emily Opens Her Eyes
I wasn't in the ICU room when Emily's eyes finally opened. I was in a conference room three floors down, watching Ibarra and two federal agents — because wire fraud and attempted murder tied to a hostile takeover attracted federal attention fast — build a case against Thomas Halloway strong enough to have him arrested by nine that morning.
A nurse found me and said four words that made everything else in the world disappear: "She's awake. She's asking."
I don't remember the elevator ride, or which stairwell I might have taken instead, only the moment I pushed through the ICU doors and saw Emily — pale, exhausted, an oxygen line still under her nose, but awake, looking at me with the same steady eyes that had looked at me outside a library seventeen years ago.
"Adam." Her voice was rough, barely above a whisper. "The babies—"
"They're fine. They're perfect. They're two floors up, sleeping, completely safe." I took her hand, careful of the IV line, and pressed my forehead against her knuckles because I couldn't trust my own face not to fall apart completely. "You scared me. You scared me so badly, Em."
"What happened to me?" Her brow furrowed, fighting through whatever fog the last several hours had left behind. "I remember holding Caleb. I remember laughing about something with your mother. Then everything just — stopped."
I told her, as gently as I could manage, leaving out details a person recovering from a poisoning didn't need in the first ten minutes of consciousness. She listened, her hand tightening around mine when I mentioned Vivian, tightening further when I mentioned Derek's twenty unexplained minutes near the nursery, and going rigid entirely when I said the name Thomas Halloway.
"Someone tried to kill me," she said slowly, "to help a takeover go through faster."
"Yes."
"And used a resident who felt guilty enough to only give me half the dose meant to finish the job."
"Yes."
She was quiet for a long moment, staring at the ceiling, processing something I couldn't fully see behind her eyes. Then, unexpectedly, she laughed — a small, exhausted, slightly unhinged laugh that startled me until I understood it wasn't really about anything funny.
"Seventeen years ago," she said, "you were a broke kid with a business plan blowing across a sidewalk. I picked up one piece of paper because the wind was going to lose it in traffic, and now I'm lying in a hospital bed because a private equity firm apparently thought poisoning me was a reasonable business strategy. Do you understand how insane that is?"
"I understand it's my fault," I said. "If I hadn't let that deal consume every part of my life, if I'd noticed Vivian's feelings sooner and shut them down properly, if I'd trusted Derek enough to tell him what I was worried about instead of half-suspecting him all night—"
"Adam." Emily's voice, weak as it was, still carried the particular firmness I'd fallen in love with outside that library. "This is not your fault. A man decided murdering me was worth it to close a deal faster. That's on him, and on whoever helped him, and on absolutely no one else in this room. Do you hear me?"
I nodded, even though it would take much longer than that hospital room conversation to actually believe it.
May you like
"Where's Vivian now?" Emily asked. "Did they find her?"
I hadn't checked in the last hour, consumed as I'd been with Emily waking up. I pulled out my phone and saw three missed calls from Ibarra and a text that read simply: She turned herself in twenty minutes ago. Come to the station when you can. There's more you need to hear, and it changes things.
