Page 68 of Accidental Vegas Vows

“Room 208!” She called after us.

We rushed down the hallway, checking room numbers, sidestepping IV carts and abandoned beds. I gripped Liv’s hand, my heart pounding in my chest, all cylinders firing on anxiety. She’d thrown up back at the reserve, and I’d felt like I was going to every second since.

The sign for Room 208 shone like a fucking beacon at the other end of the hall, and I sprinted toward it the second I clocked it.

I pushed the door open.

“Daddy!”

“Damien, thank fuck.”

Noah sat on the bed bolt upright in a tiny hospital gown, his toy car in front of his crisscrossed legs, my sister by his side. Despite the IV port in his arm and the cannula hanging half out of his nose, he looked okay, he looked alive, and oh my God, I could breathe. I could breathe.

I pushed across the room, minding the wiring and the tubes, and pulled Noah into my chest. I could breathe, but my throat was closing, a lump forming. A sob wracked my chest and I bit it back, far too worried about concealing that from him to deal with the implications of stuffing it down.

Across the room, a nurse spoke to Liv in hushed tones, and she eyed me warily. He must have assumed she was Noah’s mother.

“Where were you?” Noah asked, and I pressed a wet kiss against the top of his head.

“Don’t worry about that. I’m here now. Just give me one moment.” Slipping out of Noah’s arms, I sidestepped my way to the doorway, pushing myself into the conversation with the nurse.

“You must be Dad,” he said. “I was just explaining to Mom here that we’ve run some tests and nothing to suggest a reason for the seizure has come back.”

“That can’t be right,” Liv said, her brows furrowing. “There must be a reason. Fever, epilepsy, something?”

Thank God she was composed. All I wanted to do was wring the man’s neck and let his guts spill out onto his scrubs.

He shook his head. “No fever. Epilepsy is only diagnosed when two or more unexplained seizures happen, so I would suggest keeping an eye out. He was a little dehydrated but not enough that it would cause something like this, so we’ve got him back up to normal levels.”

“I don’t understand,” I interjected, the words too biting, too angry. “There’s not a cause? How do we know it won’t happen again?”

“Dame,” Liv breathed, her hand slipping back into mine and squeezing.

The nurse didn’t even seem phased. “You don’t,” he said. “It could just be a one-off. That happens sometimes. The MRI showed nothing of significance so it doesn’t look like there’s any damage.”

“A one-off? People don’t just have one-off seizures,” I snapped.

Liv squeezed my hand again and pulled my attention to her. “It happens, Damien.”

Her softness, her ease, put that tiny bit of calm back into me. “What do we do, then?”

The nurse sighed. “You can take him home in a few hours once we get his discharge sorted. I’d recommend keeping a close eye on him and telling him what happened. Make him feel okay about it so that if it happens when neither of you is around, he feels comfortable telling you that it happened. And if it does happen again, we can look at diagnosing him with epilepsy and getting him on the right medication for handling it.”

“Sorry,” Liv said, cutting in. “Is there a reason why we can’t get him on medication now in case it happens again?”

“I wouldn’t recommend it,” he said. “Taking it when it could be unnecessary is likely to just give him the side effects of it without him needing them.”

Liv nodded and slipped past me, leaving me to speak to the nurse alone as she gave the biggest, fakest smile to Noah and sat down at the end of his bed. Through the anxiety and the words the man was saying to me, I could hear her introduce herself to Caroline.

“The woman who brought him in, she timed his seizure,” he said. “It was only about a minute and a half. That’s within the normal range, so you don’t need to worry about long-term effects. If it happens again, you or Mom or whoever he’s with should time it. Thirty seconds to two minutes is normal, but anything over five minutes is an emergency.”

“Any seizure is an emergency,” I countered.

“For you, yes. When we don’t know the cause then yes, of course. What I mean is — anything over five minutes means there could be serious damage,” he explained.

“Okay,” I sighed. “Have you checked his file? This definitely hasn’t happened before, correct?”

The man rose a brow at me. “I’d assume you would know if it had happened before.”

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