Page 87 of First Comes Marriage

He scrubbed his hand over his face and slid his hands into his hair, digging his fingertips into his scalp to ground himself in the moment.

She will not die today. She can’t die when she doesn’t even know I love her.

“She knows,” Gavin said softly. Baz shot him a look, desperate to believe him. “You should tell her anyway. Women like that. And for some reason, this woman loves you too.”

Baz shook his head. “I was an asshole.”

“Yeah, you probably were. I didn’t say you don’t owe her an apology.”

“I don’t know how to do this.”

“You just do it.” Gavin leaned forward, bracing his elbows on his knees and leveling Baz with his most parentalcut-the-shitlook. “You wake up each day and you decide she’s worth it. You decide to stop letting your baggage get in the way of your happiness.” He leaned back, picking upHighlightsagain and flipping through the brightly colored pages. “Let me tell you, when you finally stop pretending she’s not the most important thing in your life—” He whistled. “There’s nothing better.”

Baz pushed to his feet. He couldn’t sit there any longer and wait. Sabrina was back there. Alone. He pressed his palms flat against the cool top of the desk at the edge of the waiting room and made sure to keep his voice quiet, even, to project the appearance that he wasn’t a few seconds away from completely losing his shit.

“Is there any update? Her name is Sabrina Page and—”

“Sir, I don’t have any new information. I promise, as soon as she’s in recovery, someone will come talk to you,” the woman behind the desk repeated.

“Does it usually take this long? It’s been a long time—”

“I promise you she is being well taken care of.” The woman looked at him with an expectant eyebrow raise, waiting for him to accept her meager information and go sit in the waiting room for another indeterminate length of time.

Fuck that.

“You don’t understand. I should be with her,” he said, pressing his palms down harder to keep his hands from shaking. “I should be—”

The double doors to the left of the desk burst open, a trio of harried-looking doctors in green scrubs guiding a gurney through the doorway and down the hall towards another set of double doors, already swinging open. And on that bed, a spray of auburn hair against the white pillow, a too-pale face dotted with freckles. Baz peeled away from the desk, turning to follow after the hospital bed as it rolled away.

“Sabrina!”

“Sir, you need to step back.”

“Sabrina!” he called again, trying to move around the woman from behind the desk who suddenly seemed a whole lot more formidable now that she was standing. He really didn’t want to knock down this poor woman trying to do her job but he needed to get to— “Sabrina!”

“Sir, step back.”

“Sebastian?” Sabrina’s voice was thin, frail, but it was a balm to his frayed nerves.

“We need you to step back.” One of the doctors at Sabrina’s bedside turned to Sebastian, blocking his path.

He called after her, moving faster towards her. “I’m here, wildflower. I’m—”

A hand landed on his shoulder, trying to guide him away from her. “Sir—”

“That’s my wife!” Baz roared.

Suddenly everything was quiet—no more fluorescent light hum, no more squeaky hospital bed wheel—only Baz’s own ragged breathing.

“That’s my wife,” he repeated, quieter, grasping for some semblance of calm.

The doctor in his path glanced back at his colleagues, seeming to come to some sort of silent consensus, then stepped back. Suddenly he was guiding Baz towards Sabrina instead of blocking his path and Baz didn’t think he’d ever wanted to hug a stranger more.

“Your wife has just come from surgery. She’ll be groggy for another hour or so, and she’ll need to stay overnight for observation, but she did very well,” the doctor by Sabrina’s feet said as Baz dropped to his knees at her bedside, pulling her hand into his grasp. He held it with both of his hands, pressing her curled fingers to his lips as the doctor continued. Bits of what the doctor was saying floated through the haze of Baz’s relief at seeing Sabrina, things like, “ruptured cyst” and “ovarian torsion” and “internal bleeding” and—fuck.

“I’m sorry,” he said. She looked so small in the hospital bed, surrounded by this small army of doctors. “For everything. I’m so sorry.”

“Sebastian, you’re here,” she said happily, her speech slurred. She used her free hand to stroke his hair, his cheek. A frown stole over her face, her eyes narrowing in confusion. “Why are you here? You’re mad at me. Or amImad at you? Someone’s mad. Oh! Do you want to know a secret?”

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