Page 62 of Home to Me

The PA brightened. “Oh, right, sure. We're not shooting today. We're gonna have to make it up tomorrow.”

Lauren nodded, waiting for the girl to go on. She didn't.

Lauren took a deep breath, reminding herself not to let it out in a rush, lest it sound like a sigh and make the girl more nervous, thereby delaying her eventual retelling of whatever she knew.

“Do you know why?”

The girl nodded as if it were obvious. “Oh yeah,” she said. “Because Ben's at the hospital.”

Lauren felt her knees weaken and feared she might faint. Ben was in the hospital. Her mind raced with horrific possibilities. A heart attack. A car accident. She didn't even want to let it wander further.

“Where?” she asked weakly.

“What?” asked the PA. “I couldn't hear you.”

Lauren stood up straighter and forced strength in her voice. “I asked where. Where is Ben?”

The PA shrugged. “Cedars-Sinai I think.”

Lauren was now past even trying to keep the urgent tension from her voice. “What room?”

The PA set down the garbage bag she was carrying and picked up a clipboard that was lying on the table she’d been collecting debris from. She ran her finger down the paper, consulting a list.

“Looks like room two twenty-one,” she said.

Before the girl had fully raised her head to look up, Lauren had spun on her heel and was running out towards the front of the house, where she expected the town car to be waiting in the driveway. She yelled her thanks over her shoulder but didn't wait to hear the girl's acknowledgement.

To her dismay, when she got out of the driveway, there was no town car.

After a moment's consideration, she realized that, since the shoot was canceled for the day, someone must’ve sent the town car home.

Probably, she thought with a grimace, the same person who was responsible for letting me know that we were done and I was free to go.

Rather than trying to figure out what happened with the town car or if there was any chance of calling it back, Lauren simply pulled her smartphone out of her bag, Googled “cab company Malibu,” and pressed the button to dial the phone number for the first result that came up.

Trying to keep her panic under control and out of her voice so that she wouldn't sound like a crazy person to the dispatcher, she gave her address and asked for a cab to be sent as soon as humanly possible.

Within ten minutes, a yellow cab pulled up in front of the house and Lauren ran to it and dove into the back seat.

“Cedars-Sinai,” she said breathlessly.

“Are you having emergency, ma'am?” asked the driver, looking concerned.

“Um, yes,” Lauren said. A panic attack qualified as an emergency, right?

“You should call an ambulance,” the driver said, looking even more concerned—most likely about possible litigation. “An ambulance is much safer.”

“Just drive,” Lauren said forcefully, and the man—possibly seeing the steely determination in her eyes and deciding that he would rather fight her later in court than now in the car—stepped on the gas.

It took about an hour, all told, to get from the beach mansion in Malibu to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, and Lauren sat in the back of the cab the entire time, oblivious to the dazzling ocean view outside her window. Oblivious to everything, in fact, but her desperate burning hope that Ben was okay.

She took out her phone a couple of times, thinking that it might feel better to call one of the Fabulous Four. Each in turn, she scrolled to them in her list of contacts and almost pressed the button to call them but didn't.

She thought if she heard their beloved, familiar voices—so concerned for her, as they obviously would be—she would absolutely fall apart. She felt like she could stay strong in the face of anything but kindness.

And she had to be strong now. She had to be strong for Ben.

Lauren didn’t fall apart. She didn’t go to pieces. She didn’t have hysterics. That just wasn't who she was.

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