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“I couldn’t find your dad,” he continued, completely ignoring my apology. “I think I left my phone back in the stairwell. I don’t know his number by heart but if you do…”
“No,” I insisted. “Please. I don’t want him here.”
“Ava.”
“Please,” I begged. The realization was starting to set in—I was at the fucking hospital. I was eleven weeks pregnant. The truth would come out, sooner than later. And having Adrian here was bad enough, but I needed to keep my father out of this as long as possible.
“We’ve got a space for ‘ya.” A man in all blue sidled up beside my stretcher, a far too wide grin on his face. “We just need to run some checks on you and then we can get this all sorted. You seem to be all right, though. Looks like you just fainted. That normal?”
“No,” Adrian and I said in unison.
“Right.”
He stepped behind my stretcher and slowly lifted the back so I was sitting upright before wheeling me inside.
Harsh, fluorescent lighting bounced off nearly every surface as we moved in silence down the squeaky-clean hallway. I tried to wrack my brain for any other time I’d passed out from a panic attack, but I couldn’t place a single time. There had to be something—something I could tell them and get sent home for without further tests.
As much as I was thankful for Adrian being here, I couldn’t help but wish it was anyone other than him or my father, or even no one.
The man parked me in a small square space separated from other triage banks by hanging blue curtains. He didn’t say a word before he disappeared.
“They should have your dad’s number on your file, right?” Adrian asked as he slowly sank into the chair beside my stretcher. He didn’t dare release my hand, but his leg bounced incessantly, his cold blue eyes fixed on me.
My eyes burned again. “I need you to not call my dad.” I enunciated every word to make myself as clear as I possibly could. “You don’t want him here. I can promise you that.”
“I don’t think he’ll think it’s suspicious that I rode in the fucking ambulance with you, Aves,” he said, his voice a little too loud, a little too aggressive. “I’m sorry. I’m trying to stay calm.”
“It’s not that.” I squeezed his hand half because I needed it and half to try to calm him down.Oh —that was the sharp pain. I’ve got an IV port.“I need to tell you something and I need you to not…”
“Ava Riley?”
A beaming woman with jet-black hair and white scrubs rounded the corner of my little cubicle. Fuck. “Hi,” I said. “Can you give me a minute?”
A single brow rose. “You want me to give you a minute?”
I nodded.
“You realize you just arrived by ambulance and we need to run diagnostics on you as quickly as possible, right?”
I nodded again.
She looked across to Adrian. “Did she hit her head when she passed out, or…?”
Adrian snorted. “No, but she’s certainly acting like it.”
The woman clamped a little clip onto my first finger and a heart rate monitor popped up on the screen behind her. It took a second, but one-hundred-and-seven flashed up and stayed steady. “Hmm,” she said. “That’s a bit high, but you’re stressed out, so we’ll see if it calms down.”
“Can I please just have a minute?” I asked again, and the beeping increased. One-hundred-twenty-five. “Please.”
She completely ignored me as she grabbed a clipboard from the mobile set of drawers beside her. “So you fainted?”
“Yeah, she passed out,” Adrian confirmed.
“Any issues with blood pressure in the past?”
“No,” I sighed.
“Have you eaten and drank enough today?”
