Page 56 of Holding Grace

Chapter 20

Michael

My phone rang just as I drove out of the pub’s lot. I glanced at the display on the dashboard and shrugged it off. It wasn’t a familiar number, and I wasn’t in the mood to deal with a sales call or a scammer.

After a few more rings, it stopped, then started right back up again, same number. Impatient, tired from another long shift, I hit the button to connect the call.

“This is Michael.” I didn’t sound friendly, but there was the outside chance it might be business-related, so I tried to keep my tone at least civil.

The person on the other end hesitated, telling me my tone may not have been as civil as I’d hoped.

“Is this Michael Baron?”

“Yes, it is. Who is this?”

“Mr. Baron, this is Dr. Randolph. I’m an emergency medicine physician at University Hospital. Do you know Grace Mathews?”

I jerked the SUV out of the flow of traffic and shoved it into park. “I know Grace. What’s going on?”

“What’s your relationship to Miss Mathews?”

“I’m her fiancé.”

The lie slipped out easily. Hospitals sometimes had restrictions on who could see or have information on patients, and often it was only family. Fiancé had to be close enough. Claiming that might come back to bite me later, but there was no way they were stopping me from seeing or knowing what was going on with Grace. If that required me to lie, I had no problem with it.

“She was brought in a little while ago by the squad. She’s stable and she’s in no immediate danger, but she was unconscious when the squad arrived and hasn’t regained consciousness since being brought in. Your phone number is one of only a few contacts in her phone, so we were hoping you were family or a close friend.”

The doctor sounded relieved to have found someone close to Grace, reinforcing that I’d done the right thing by lying. It wasn’t like Grace had family who would legitimately show up at the hospital and help her. Whatever you called me – friend, friend hoping for much more, pathetic lovesick idiot – semantics aside, I was the closest thing to family that she had.

The doctor gave me the rest of the details, including the fact that Grace would be admitted and in a regular room by the time I got to the hospital. She had a head injury, an injury to her left shoulder, and various abrasions and bruising. They strongly suspected she had a concussion and the doctor had ordered testing to confirm it.

Before we disconnected, I asked the doctor the one thing he hadn’t told me. “Do you know what happened?”

“I only know that she was in an altercation of some kind. Several passers-by came to her aid and called 911. The police will need to speak to Miss Mathews when she regains consciousness, but if she has a concussion as we suspect, it may take her a few days to be ready for that.”

An altercation? Like a fight? It was beyond the realm of possibility that Grace had gotten in a street brawl with someone.

Anger and fear swamped me as I realized the implications of what the doctor had said. Had her brother found her? Had someone attacked her?

I slammed the brakes on my runaway thoughts. Freaking out over unknowns and possibilities wouldn’t help anyone, much less Grace. The important thing right now was that she was safe and being taken care of. Everything else could wait until she woke up.

Wanting to be sure I was there by her side when that happened, I clamped down on my emotions and gripped the steering wheel tight as I sped back out into traffic.