Page 2 of Wishing for Love

All his work stress had just vanished into thin air. Nothing was as important as this. He grabbed his keys and ran to his car, then tried to call Maryn, but it went to voicemail. That was odd if she was just talking to her coworker.

He got to the hospital twenty minutes later after calling his best friend numerous times with it all going to voicemail.

He parked quickly and ran in. “Maryn Stevens was just brought in. I need to know what is going on.”

“Are you family?” the woman at the desk said.

“To her I am,” he said. “She has no family. I’m her emergency contact. The guardian of her daughter.”

He was throwing out everything he could to get this woman to give him some kind of information.

“Let me see what I can find out if you can take a seat.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Sure.” No reason to get in the woman’s face when she was just doing her job.

Thirty minutes later he was still sitting there waiting. He’d texted his mother what was going on because he needed to talk to someone. Mom always seemed to be his go-to though he had plenty of siblings he could lean on.

They all had lives though.

Another thirty minutes went by and he got up to see if there was anything else to report. He’d seen the woman was swamped and had to wait in line behind a few people.

When he got to her desk, she said, “I’m sorry. I haven’t had a break to get to you, but she’s in surgery right now. Someone said they’d come out and get you when she’s in recovery. You can go back through those doors and the nurses will show you another area where you can wait.”

Phoenix moved through the doors and went to the nurse’s station on autopilot and stood there another twenty minutes before someone was available to talk to him. None of this was making sense to him.

“Hi, I’m looking for information on Maryn Stevens?”

The nurse started to type into her computer and then looked up at him. “I’m sorry, she’s in surgery right now. If you want to take a seat over there, someone will come out when they can with an update.”

“Surgery for what?” he asked impatiently. “Can you at least tell me that?” He looked at his watch. “I’m going to have to pickup Maryn’s daughter in a few hours from school, but I’d like to know what is going on.”

There was some more typing. “She sustained a head wound. It looks as if she lost consciousness in the ambulance. I don’t have any other details.”

“So she’s having surgery on her head?” Brain surgery? Was that what he was being told?

“I believe they are trying to relieve the pressure,” the nurse said. “It’s common.”

Didn’t sound it to him. “So she’s going to be fine?” he asked, holding his breath.

“I don’t have any other information right now,” the nurse said. “I’m sorry.”

This day was going to hell fast.

When he got a text from Scott forty minutes later saying the product would be done on time, he couldn’t even think about work. It was meaningless and he just replied okay.

His mother was texting him, even his father. Some of his siblings too, as they’d heard about the accident.

What he hated the most in this world was not having answers.

As a scientist, he’d dealt with data and facts and right now he didn’t have them, raising his anxiety levels.

Finally, after almost two hours of waiting in this small room, someone came out to talk to him. “I’m Dr. Charleston. Maryn sustained a head injury in the accident. We relieved the pressure building on her brain and have put her in a medically induced coma while she heals.”

Phoenix shut his eyes to take a deep breath. “But she’s going to be fine?”

“We don’t know just yet,” Dr. Charleston said. “Not until the swelling is down and we try to wake her.”

“How long could that be?” he asked. This had to be a horrible dream he was desperately trying to wake up from.

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