Page 85 of Bad & Bossy

Her mother.

Bile crept up my throat and entered my mouth.

“That has nothing to do with this!” Vee shot back, the open bottle of Coke in her hand spilling onto the floor. “He’s been sick for weeks, Dana. You know that. Mom is not why he’s here.”

Dana took in a shuddering breath, her chest shaking. I couldn’t see her face, couldn’t see the tears that were falling, but I knew they were there. “I told you I wanted nothing to do with them. I told you I wanted them nowhere near him. You couldn’t respect my fucking boundaries and now my son, my child, is paying the price.”

“Girls, please, don’t fight over this,” the man said, taking a step toward the center of them.

Dana kicked out, nearly knocking me over with the shift in weight. “Dana, breathe,” I said, lowering my lips to her ear. “Breathe, baby. Breathe.”

Slowly, agonizingly, she listened. She breathed. She started to calm down.

But her words hung in the air, wrapped around my mind, and squeezed. She’s a fucking alcoholic. Maybe I shouldn’t be here. Maybe I was only making things worse.

But without me to stop her, who knows what she would have done to her sister. She could have ended up leaving the hospital in a fucking cop car, landing herself in a jail cell for the night.

I knew the moment she found out about my relapse, the moment I had to tell her would haunt me. It was already.

Chapter 30

Dana

Respiratory Syncytial Virus or RSV, leading to a severe case of pneumonia.

Finally, I had answers.

On the top floor of the infant ward in Denver’s Children’s Hospital, I stood over my son as tubes and wires kept him alive and breathing. He would get through this. But recovery would be long, and Drew would need to stay in the hospital until he was given a full bill of health.

I still wanted to punch a hole through my sister’s face.

“You’ll keep him past the point when he’s first recovered,” Cole said, his voice low on the other side of the room as he spoke to the doctor. “Long enough to ensure there’s no complications. Do you understand?”

“Stop,” I sighed. “I don’t even know if you guys take my insurance yet. He’ll stay just as long as he needs to in order to get better and then we’ll go.”

“Oh, that’s taken care of already, Ms. Beechings,” Dr. Stanley said, her clipboard tucked in tight to her chest.

“You take my insurance then?”

“Well, of that I’m not entirely sure, but it’s all been covered by Mr. Pearson.” She glanced at Cole before taking a step back. “I’ll be back with some paperwork for you to sign.”

She left, closing the door quietly behind her.

I didn’t have the energy to fight him on that, at least not now. But fuck, it weighed heavily on me as I sat down in the plush chair beside my son’s bed. He didn’t even know he was the father, yet here he was offering to be financially responsible for potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars on a kid that, as far as he knew, wasn’t even his.

But I was still angry with him.

He’d disappeared. He hadn’t called nor had he answered any of my calls. He turned up when things got bad only because Gray had told him what happened. I knew there was a high probability he had relapsed.

Despite his generosity, every part of me screamed to tell him to leave.

“Dana,” Cole began, but the little wheeze and cry from Drew was enough for me to leave whatever he wanted to say behind.

————

The silence that hung between me and Cole felt heavier by the second. The sun rose, and he stayed. It set, and he stayed. It rose again, and there he was, looking ten times worse than he did when he’d first arrived, his eyes focused intently on Drew as he tried to stick his giraffe through the oxygen mask.

A female figure at the door, sans scrubs, made my heart rate spike before it opened. There stood Lottie in all her glory, a coffee cup in hand and a smile plastered to her face.

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