Page 150 of Harrison's Wedding

I groan again as things start to make more sense. I’m lying in a bed, but it’s not familiar. The sheets are stiff and scratchy. Warm air is blowing across me. Finally, I’m able to open my eyes, and the first thing I see is Heather.

She’s standing over me, her face painted with worry, and there are streaks on her cheeks, as though she’s been crying. I look around, and I’m in a strange room.

“Heather? Where am I?”

“Oh my god, honey. You’re in the hospital. You were in an accident, don’t you remember?”

I shake my head, and Heather presses the button to call a nurse. I was in an accident? I remember heading to the airport in the SUV, but nothing after that.

“Is Michael okay?” I ask her.

If I was in an accident, then he must have been, as well.

“I’m sorry, I don’t know. They haven’t said anything,” she cringes.

We fall silent, and I try to process what she told me. I play it back in my head.

“Oh my god, honey. You’re in the hospital. You were in an accident, don’t you remember?”

Surprise and pleasure at her words flood my mind, and I ask her, “Angel? Did you just call me ‘honey’?”

She smiles down at me and says, “Yes, honey, I did. You didn’t have to go and get yourself almost killed to convince me to do it, either. We have a lot to talk about.”

She stops talking as the nurse she called comes into the room. The nurse checks me over before getting the doctor to come and talk to me.

He’s tall and distinguished, with graying hair, and he smiles at me as he walks into the room. “Mr. Fletcher, it’s good to see you’ve woken up.”

“Heather said I was in an accident. Do you know if my bodyguard, Michael Pearce, is okay?”

“I’m sorry, I can’t tell you about other patients, but to my knowledge, there were no fatalities in your crash.”

A wave of relief washes over me. No fatalities means Michael isn’t dead, at least.

The doctor continues on, “When you arrived, you were unconscious, with tension pneumothorax, a badly collapsed lung. We took you into surgery at once to relieve the pressure but discovered internal bleeding once we were in there. We were, however, able to stop the bleed.

“You will need to stay here in the hospital for roughly a week, but we expect you to make a full recovery. Your ribs are broken, so you’ll need to take care while they’re healing.”

He talks to me about treatment, and the nurse gives me some heavy painkillers. A wave of drowsiness hits me as Heather calls Ariana and Mom. I listen to bits of her calls and ascertain that the guys have flown back to Chicago after doing some interviews they couldn’t get out of.

I doze for a little while, and when I wake, Heather is still sitting by my bedside. She’s holding my hand, and I squeeze it as I look over at her.

“So, all I needed to do was get myself crashed into and end up in surgery to get you to forgive me?” I give her a wry smile. “If I’d known that, I’d have done it months ago!”

“No. You promised me that you wouldn’t put your health in danger, so that definitely wouldn’t have worked,” she laughs, “actually, it wasn’t your accident that did the trick.”

“Really? What happened, then, angel?”

She removes her hand from mine and begins to rub the bare skin on her engagement ring finger.

“I saw Maddy last night,” she tells me.

I blink at her, trying to understand what she means. She saw Maddy? Last night? That’s what she was doing?

“I’m sorry, you what?” I manage to ask.

I remember her guarded tone at the beginning of our call, and her unwillingness to speak about how she was feeling.

She links her hand with mine and squeezes it tightly as she continues, “I asked Cooper to get her to call me. Zoe gave me the idea. She said that it might help me to get past it if I had the truth about that night, so my brain didn’t keep filling in the blanks. She agreed to meet me; that was why I wasn’t free for you to come over. I made her tell me everything,”—

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