“Are you sure?”
Eleanor swallowed, mustering a slight smile. “Actually, I’m not feeling well. Perhaps I should go lie down.”
“That might be a good idea.”
She had to tell Nate about these episodes before she left. He needed to know Eleanor was acting unwell. She should have told him earlier.
“Why don’t you rest in the guest room next door so that I don’t disturb you while I’m working in here?”
“That might be...good.”
Jess rose from the floor. “Let me help you.”
Eleanor waved a hand. “You’re in the middle of things. Don’t stop on my account. I’m fine.”
Before Jess could reach her, she stood. She took two or three steps toward the door then suddenly collapsed as if someone had kicked her legs out from under her, falling forward and narrowly escaping hitting her head on the doorjamb.
Jess gasped and rushed to her. “Eleanor! Are you all right?”
She didn’t answer. Had she hit her head? Jess hadn’t heard a crack.
Her eyes were closed, Jess saw when she rolled her to her back, and her face was deathly pale.
What was happening?
Fear scorched through her, hot and urgent. She tried to shake Eleanor but the older woman didn’t stir.
She was still breathing. Jess could see a faint pulse in her throat and her chest was rising and falling, but she wasn’t responding.
“Eleanor!” she called again, even as she reached for the cordless phone next to Eleanor’s bed so she could call 911.
As soon as she started to dial, she spotted Nate’s number. Still trying to rouse Eleanor, she hit the programmed key first, thinking he could rush over while the ambulance was on the way.
She was immediately sent to voice mail after the second ring.
“I think something is wrong with your mother,” she said quickly on the message. “She suddenly went pale, said she wasn’t feeling well and then passed out. I don’t know what’s going on. She’s unconscious but breathing. I’m calling an ambulance. I’ll try to keep you posted where they’re taking her.”
As she ended the call, she saw Eleanor’s eyes begin to flutter. “I don’t...need an ambulance,” she said, voice breathy.
“I’m afraid you do, honey. You passed out and fell down. You’ve been out of it for at least three minutes now. You need to be checked out.”
“I’m just tired.” Eleanor tried to get up, but Jess rested a hand on her shoulder.
“That’s what you’ve been telling me for days now. But it’s more than that, isn’t it?”
Eleanor was quiet, breathing deeply, then she met Jess’s gaze, raw fear in her eyes. “I think I might be dying.”
Damn it. She should have called 911 first. She quickly dialed the number and spoke quickly into the phone. “Yes. Hello. I’m with a seventy-year-old woman, Eleanor Whitaker, who just passed out. She’s awake and conscious now but still pale. She’s having chest pain. You are having chest pain, right?” she asked Eleanor, who nodded. “Yes on the chest pain. Please hurry. We’re at Whitaker House, just above Sunshine Cove. Twenty-one thirty-five Seaview Road.”
“Confirmed. We have identified your location. Please stay on the line while we dispatch emergency crews to your area. I’ll be back with you momentarily.”
“Please hurry,” Jess said.
Sophie and Nate couldn’t lose Eleanor, too. Not when they were still grieving for Jack Whitaker.
Jess vowed to do everything within her power to make sure that didn’t happen.
34
Nate
An ambulance. His mother passed out. Sick.
Nate listened to the message from Jess that he had missed after turning off his ringer during a meeting. When had she sent it? Only ten minutes earlier, he saw quickly.
Still, that was ten minutes when he had been unavailable. Anything could have happened in that time. He rose quickly.
“I have to go,” he told his team of project leaders in the room. “Apparently my mother is on her way to the hospital.”
“What can we do?” his second-in-command, Kevin Hall, asked instantly.
Just pray, he wanted to say. “I don’t know what’s going on yet. I’ll keep you posted.”
He hurried out of the room, trying to call Jess’s cell phone. Each time it went to voice mail. He tried a third time as he was sliding behind the wheel of his truck and she finally picked up.
“Hi. Sorry. The ambulance just arrived.” She sounded breathless and afraid, which ratcheted up his own anxiety. Jess always seemed so contained, so in control. If she was this upset, he knew the situation had to feel serious to her.
“What’s happened?”
“I don’t know, to be honest. She passed out and she’s got chest pain. They are treating it as a possible cardiac arrest and are taking her directly to the emergency room of the Cape Sanctuary hospital.”
Cardiac arrest. Good Lord.
“I’m at a meeting in the next town. It will take me about twenty minutes, but I’ll meet you there.”
He peeled out, heart racing. This couldn’t be happening! He couldn’t lose his mother, not just months after his father. He still hadn’t figured out how to deal with the huge void in his life left by Jack Whitaker’s death.
Sophie.
If something happened to his mother, Sophie would be devastated. She still mourned her grandfather, but he feared that losing Eleanor, who had been more of a mother than a grandmother to her, would crush her.
Nate wasn’t sure how he made it safely on the coastal road to the regional medical center on the other side of Cape Sanctuary, especially as he likely broke just about every traffic law in the county. When he rushed into the waiting room, he immediately spotted Jess talking at the nurses’ station.
“Nate!” she exclaimed. “I just arrived. They didn’t have room for me on the ambulance, so I followed them. They’ve taken your mother back to a treatment room. I was just explaining to the nurse that you would be here shortly to answer questions about advance directives and the like.”
Advance directives. He couldn’t think about that now. All he could do for those first frenzied seconds was grab hold of Jess and pull her into his arms. She was his rock, the one secure thing to grab onto amid the seething tumult.
She wrapped her arms around him and held on before stepping away. “You should go back and see what’s going on. They wouldn’t let me because I’m not family.”