Page 113 of Catching My Dreams

“I have good news,” the doctor said, a smile softening his otherwise stern face. “Your granddaughter is going to be just fine.”

And just like that, Noah felt like he could finally breathe again.

“The knife punctured her liver, so we were lucky the paramedics got to her as quickly as they did.”

He explained what they’d done to treat her, but Noah barely understood or took in a word of it. His brain was too busy fixating on the fact that Ella was going to be okay.

“When can we see her?” Ella’s gran asked when the doctor had finished speaking.

“She’s not awake yet, and we can only allow two visitors in at a time,” he warned, “but you can see her now if you’d like to.”

“Yes,” she replied, the word coming out in a rush. “Please.” She turned her head to look up at Noah. “Will you come in with me?”

In a normal situation, it should have been Ella’s parents going in first, but they were probably scrambling to buy plane tickets back to the US. If they even bothered to show up at all.

“Of course,” he replied, and he couldn’t help but feel it was just as it should have been as he walked with Ella’s gran to her room. The two of them were the ones who loved Ella the most. They were the ones who cared the most, and they were the ones who would have been destroyed if she hadn’t survived.

Ella’s gran let out a choked cry when they entered the room.

Ella was on a hospital bed, her dark hair striking against her pale skin and the white sheets. Noah swallowed, his eyes glancing over at the beeping machines she was hooked up to before settling back on Ella.

She looked so fragile and small, no sign of the fiery spirit he knew so well evident in the small frame of her body or her sleeping face. But the steady beep of the heart monitor told Noah that she had survived. That she was still fighting.

He helped Ella’s gran approach the bed, his arm supporting much of her weight, and when she stroked a hand lovingly over Ella’s hair, the tears he’d been holding back started falling.

“She’s okay,” he managed to say through his constricted throat. His hand reached out to take Ella’s hand in his own. “She’s really okay.”

“She is,” Ella’s gran replied with a brittle smile.

“I—” Noah didn’t know what to say, and it was like the dam that had been holding back his fear and his grief broke.

His face crumpled, and when Ella’s grandmother pulled him into a surprisingly firm hug, he sank against her. He should have been the one comforting her, but Noah found himself sobbing into her shoulder.

“It’s alright, honey,” she soothed, her arthritic hand patting his back gently. “Everything is going to be alright.”

Noah nodded, but his sobs didn’t cease. He’d nearly lost her. He’d nearly had to live in a world without her in it. Ella was okay, but she almost hadn’t been, and Noah crumbled under the weight of that knowledge.

33

Ella’s eyes fluttered open, squinting against the brightness of the room.

“Ella?” A face appeared above her. The gray hair and wrinkles were as familiar to Ella as her own reflection. “Can you hear me?”

“Gran?”

Her grandmother smiled. “Hi there, Ella-Bella.”

Ella let out a weak chuckle. “Hi, Gran.”

It wasn’t the first time she’d woken up in the hospital, but it was the first time she felt awake enough to focus on her surroundings. She let her eyes roam over the room. When she turned her head to the side and spotted Noah sleeping in a chair with his head drooped forward, she smiled.

“Definitely a keeper, that one,” her gran whispered. “Hasn’t left the hospital once in the last two days. Even the detective wasn’t stupid enough to insist Noah speak to him at the station.”

Ella swallowed. “He’s pretty great,” she agreed.

Her gran stood up from the chair she’d been sitting in, using her walker to help her. “I’m going to go get a nurse or the doctor.”

Ella nodded, watching her gran slowly leave the room. The woman closed the door behind her more loudly than necessary, and Ella looked over at Noah, not surprised to see the sound had woken him up.

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