I knew I loved Stella—it was hard not to, but this all-encompassing feeling of helplessness only cements it for me. The little girl has wormed her way so deep inside of my heart that I’m one hundred percent sure it beats for her now instead of me. Mo chuisle mo chori, I think with a wry grin. My pulse of my heart. How incredibly fucking lucky am I that, for me, my pulse is not just Tristan, but Stella, as well.
I watch the world outside speed by as Monroe heads toward the emergency room. I move as close to the booster seat as I can while reaching for my cell phone. This isn’t a phone call I’m looking forward to making.
Tristan beats us to the hospital. After the longest thirty minutes of my life, we pull up in front of the hospital. Tristan is standing right outside the emergency-room doors, her hands twisted together, as she paces back and forth in front of the sliding door. Every pass across the door sends it swooshing open, her hurried steps just barely giving it time to close entirely before she triggers it to open once again. Mom is leaned up against the side of the building, talking into her phone. Her eyes track every move Tristan makes, but she does nothing to interrupt the pacing.
Monroe slams on the breaks in front of the emergency room, and before she even has the car in park, Tristan has rounded the car and is opening Stella’s door.
Tristan starts toward the emergency room doors when Stella lets out another wail and then cries, “No! I want My Owen Daddy!”
My eyes fly to Tristan, wide as saucers. Stella has called my parents Gram and Gramps on multiple occasions, at their urging, I’m sure, but she has never even once called me Daddy.
I want her to, more than anything, but that isn’t a conversation I’ve broached with Tristan yet.
“Mo chuisle¸ I swear—”
She shakes her head. “I know you didn’t.” A tight smile teases the edges of her mouth. “Come on, you heard the girl.” She pauses. “Owen Daddy.”
“Go.” Mom comes up behind me. “Here are my keys. Tristan knows where I’m parked. Monroe and I are going to take Huck home with us. Keep us in the loop, handsome.”
The words barely register as I hurry to follow my family into the hospital.
Chapter Twenty
Tristan
Five hours after the most terrifying phone call of my life, I’m tucking Stella into her bed. The cast that stretches from her hand up past her elbow is what the orthopedist called Princess Pink, and is currently elevated on a small stack of pillows to help with swelling. The pink of the fiberglass isn’t nearly as glaring as the white bandage that stretches just above her right eye that covers six neat black stitches.
She finally fell asleep on the way home, and didn’t wake up when Owen carried her up the stairs or when I carefully changed her into her pajamas. Owen has slipped back down the stairs. I figure he needs a few minutes alone to regroup.
I remember I had downed nearly an entire bottle of wine after getting home from my first trip to hospital with Stella, and I have extensive medical training. She was nine months old and running a fever that capped at just over one hundred and five degrees. It doesn’t matter how much training you have when it is someone you love that’s sick. I was so overwhelmed with worry, that the nurses, whom I worked with on a regular basis, threatened to sedate me while she received her first dose of antibiotics intravenously.
Reaching up, I brush my hand along her hair, smoothing it away from the bandage. She clung to Owen when they cleaned and stitched up her forehead, and again when they set and casted her arm.
He sat next to her through the entire time in the hospital. A calming presence for her, even though I could practically see the storm swirling in his eyes. The only thing that surprised me about Stella calling him Daddy is that it had taken her this long.
I wish I could tell what Owen’s thinking. Did she scare him? Is this going to be the thing that causes him to walk away from us?
With a sigh, I lean over, brushing my lips just above the bandage on her forehead before heading out of the room. I nearly trip over Huck who has stretched out on the floor right next to Stella’s bed. Monroe met us on the front porch with Huck at her side when we got home. She said it had been all she and Mama G could do to console the dog when they’d had to leave the hospital without Stella. I reach down to run my hand over his soft fur, smiling softly at him when he lifts his head to look at me briefly before lying back down again with a little huff.
I take a few minutes to swing into my bedroom and change my clothes, then change my mind and decide to run through the shower real quick. Even though I’ve worked in a hospital for years and should be immune to the smells, tonight I feel like they have seeped into my very pores. It will also give Owen a little more time to smooth himself out.
Twenty-five minutes later, dressed in a pair of loose sweatpants and a cotton T-shirt, I may or may not have liberated from Owen’s drawer the night of the break-in, I find Owen stretched out on the couch with a glass of dark amber liquid in his hand.
His long legs are stretched out in front of him, his head tipped back on the couch, eyes closed. There’s a football game on the TV, but the volume is turned down so low I imagine he just turned it on out of habit.
His mouth is still tight with worry, his eyes pinched even as they’re closed. He has the look of an exhausted parent, one who has just recently come down from an extreme level of complete and utter terror to being just mildly scared and mostly just worried now. Every few seconds the hand wrapped around the glass of alcohol flexes, the knuckles turning white and then evening back out again.
He loves her.
I hadn’t really doubted that, but seeing the parent-weary look on his face resonates within me. He loves her, and he loves me. He may not have said the words yet, but I know he does.
The chances that Owen Gallahanger are going to leave us are so miniscule that it is practically nonexistent. If he was going to leave, he would have done it by now. Instead, when I pushed him away, he lingered along the edges, giving me the space I thought I needed.
He’d come when we needed him, retreated when I pushed him away, and taken care of us the whole time. Whether it was through having someone else check on us or leaving Huck to act as our guardian when he couldn’t, Owen never once left us.
Why had it taken me this long to see that he wasn’t going anywhere? Of the two of us, I had been the only one leaving.
Well, that’s about to change.
Crossing the room, I reach over and grab the glass out of his hand, setting it on the coffee table and out of the way. His eyes blink open, meeting mine. It’s hard to read the emotion swirling inside of them.
“Hey,” I whisper, licking my dry lips. “You okay?”
“Oh, sure.” He laughs drily. “I’m fucking great.”
His eyes widen comically when I swing my leg over his, settling in his lap. His hands fall to my hips, loosely holding me in place. “I think you’re lying.” My hands rest on his shoulders.
“She broke her arm. Needed fucking stitches. I was supposed to be watching her.”
I arch a brow. “It was an accident, Owen.”
“Has she ever broken her arm when she’s with you? Or needed stitches? I fucking broke her.”
“Okay, A, she isn’t a toy that you can simply break. And B, it was an accident,” I reiterate. “Accidents happen. Unless you actually let her play in traffic, or juggle lit candles, or any of that other shit you always text me about. Then we’ll have issues.”