“No,” she admitted. “I only felt safe when Liam was near.”
Funny, considering he thinks the closer we all are to each other, the worse things will be.
“I did too,” I said. “I know he thinks we should be here, but I’m not sure. It’s too public. Too accessible.”
“Too obvious.”
We grimaced. Liam had never had to worry about a stalker in his life. It wasn’t something I held against him, but there was a big difference between giving what you thought was the best advice and what you just knew, in your core, to be the best advice. Being in the hospital was not that. Especially because…
“And Charlotte’s away from me.”
That was something that had to change.
“I can’t let that remain the case.”
I would let the entire hospital sue me or try to stop me if they wanted. Nearly losing Bucky would be bad enough; the thought of losing Charlotte, after everything I’d gone through to have a child, would be literally unbearable. The thought only ended in one way—with the end of my life, feeling I had nothing left to live for.
Dramatic? Not when she was my everything, the person that I kept fighting and pushing for.
“Unfortunately, Sean probably knows about Charlotte.”
What a fucking terrifying thought. But one that, also, needed to be said out loud. We needed to know what was going on.
“Yeah, I need her by my side,” I said. “Should we leave now? Should we go—”
“Not now,” Emily said, “because look outside.”
I did. It was dark. A guy like Sean would thrive in the darkness.
“And because we’ve hammered them so hard about protecting us, they’ll be vigilant tonight and start to lax up when nothing happens,” she said, although I wasn’t entirely convinced that she believed her own words. “Let’s sleep here. We can go get Charlotte tomorrow and…I don’t know.”
“Somewhere not here.”
We both nodded. I didn’t want to wait until tomorrow morning. But I definitely didn’t want to give Sean any advantages. He was such an asshole that if my doctor had been named Sean, I probably would have felt shaken to the core in some fashion.
Somehow, Emily managed to fall asleep in her chair. I didn’t know how, given how uncomfortable it looked, but perhaps she just had that much stress built up that she would collapse at some point.
I, however, never fell asleep. And if I did, it was so short and filled with such little respite that it might have been better for me to stay awake entirely.
More than once, through the night, I thought I saw Sean passing by the doorway. “He,” if it was him, never stopped at the door, and he passed by casually, like he was a janitor going to another room. But I swore up and down that he knew we were in this room and was making a point.
Maybe I was just going fucking crazy. Maybe being separated from Charlotte was making me put Sean’s face on every man that wasn’t Liam. Maybe if I got a good night’s sleep, I’d know this was crazy.
But maternal instincts had not steered me wrong so far.
“You understand—”
“Yes, I do, I’m fine,” I said, trying to hurry the doctor through his questions. “If I need to sign anything to say I’m fine, I will. And release my daughter, Charlotte. She’s fine, right?”
The doctor scrambled, as if he’d never expected me to come back with such force.
“Well, I mean, yes, she will recover, but we still want to hold her for observation, and there’s sometimes the risk—”
“I’ll gladly take that risk compared to the alternative.”
The lack of sleep, the anger I felt toward this being a bigger issue than it needed to be, and the fear that Sean was just a step away all made me the snappiest, angriest I’d been in a long time. And while this doctor had surely dealt with his fair share of angry patients, I couldn’t imagine he’d ever dealt with a mother having this much anger and forcefulness.
“I…well, OK,” he said. “It’s against our wishes, and—”
“Hurry up and do it.”
Minutes later, Emily and I, staying close to each other, had Charlotte handed to us. Her eyes went wide with delight when she saw me, and for at least the briefest of moments, all felt right with the world. It was literally a fleeting feeling, one I couldn’t grab back onto, but so long as I had my little girl in my arms, I could have the strength to do whatever I needed to do.
“Come on,” I said.
“Where are we going to go?” Emily said. “Your car isn’t here. You rode in ambulances.”
Shit. She’s got a point.
“We’re not going to drive anywhere,” I said, “because the more remote a location we go, the easier it’ll be for Sean to do something to us without anyone else knowing.”
The thought had come to mind as a way to sound like I had things under control when I didn’t. But actually, I felt it made a lot of sense. Why go deep into the woods so Sean could kill us and have no one find out for days, maybe even weeks on end?
“So where the hell are we going to go?”
Emily was starting to crack. It was the little things, like the way her eyes fluttered or the way she said “go” that made me realize Liam had better damn well finish his hunt in the next day or two.
“Why don’t we just ask?” I said.
“Not here,” Emily said, “not in a public place like a hospital.”
I agreed. I held Charlotte tight against my body and walked out with her of the hospital. It was a chilly day, although not so cold as to wish I could
