Mike winced. “Yikes,” he said.
That was as close as Mike Bailey ever got to swearing.
“Is Mom here, too?” Brynne asked, reaching the steps.
Her dad stepped aside, holding the back door open for her. “Of course she is,” he replied. “We’ve been calling and texting all night, and getting no response whatsoever. We were really worried, Brynne.”
“I’m sorry,” Brynne replied, going inside and starting up the back stairway. Light spilled from the landing above, which meant the apartment door was standing open, probably with Alice Bailey framed within it. “I was pretty distracted.”
She could have said the Wi-Fi connection wasn’t very good at the hospital, since that was so often true in other places, but the Creek’s medical facility was relatively new, and most electronic messages came and went with little or no problem.
Alice was indeed waiting in the apartment doorway, holding a clearly cranky Waldo in her arms. He was squirming to be put down, but Brynne knew her mom thought she was comforting the poor creature, and she didn’t have the heart to correct her.
She smiled at her mother—and by extension her cat—and stepped into the apartment.
Every light was on.
There was freshly brewed coffee.
The minor irritation Brynne had felt from the time she’d spotted her parents’ car subsided, replaced by a quiet sense of gratitude.
It was nice not to be alone, especially tonight.
Or this morning.
Whichever.
Brynne kissed her mother’s cheek, then slipped off her coat and hung it in the tiny closet beside the door.
Waldo wriggled free of Alice’s embrace and leaped to the floor, still complaining. He did not countenance being manhandled, even by a woman.
Brynne had fed the contentious little animal earlier, but now she bribed him into silence with a few flakes of tuna from the container in the fridge.
“That cat is spoiled,” Alice said fondly.
“So true,” Brynne replied, with a tired smile.
“Darling, you look utterly exhausted,” her mother observed. “Why don’t you shower and put on some snuggly pajamas? While you’re doing those things, your dad and I will fix you an early breakfast.”
“I’m not hungry,” Brynne said, grateful for the thought. “And I’m not sure I have the stamina for a shower. I was planning on giving Waldo the required ration of canned fish and flopping facedown on my bed.”
“You may think you’re not hungry,” Alice pointed out reasonably, “but that doesn’t mean your body isn’t in need of sustenance. You’ve been through something traumatic.”
There had been times in Brynne’s life when her mother’s persistence, however well-intentioned, would have gotten on her last nerve, but tonight was different. She wanted to be taken care of, told what to do, if only until she’d regained her composure.
Eli would recover, but none of them had known that until he’d been out of surgery for hours, and moved from the ICU recovery room to the bed he was, hopefully, resting in now. Before Marisol’s first update, delivered at 10:42 p.m., his condition had been classified as critical; Eli had, in truth, come very close to dying.
So Brynne replied with a meek “Okay,” and went off to take a quick shower. She emerged from her room nearly half an hour later, clad in her warmest—and silliest—pair of pajamas, bright yellow, fluffy ones that made her look—and feel—like Big Bird.
Miranda had given them to her at Christmas, as a joke.
They were warm, though, and they were soft, and because they reminded her of Miranda, a dear friend, they felt like a hug.
That night, Brynne needed all the hugs she could get.
She broke down and cried when her dad pulled back a chair for her and her mom set a plate of steaming waffles, swimming in butter and syrup, at her place. There were eggs, too, and four crisp slices of bacon.
Everything exactly the way Brynne liked it.
“I feel like such a baby,” she wept.
Her dad handed her a clean, folded handkerchief, plucked from his shirt pocket. Who but Mike Bailey still carried a handkerchief, and who but Alice Bailey still pressed them after every washing.
“Eat,” Alice said, helping herself to coffee and sitting down at the table.
Mike sat down, too. “We had to dig around downstairs for the waffle iron,” he said, probably trying to distract Brynne from her teary mood. “You ought to get one for the apartment.”
“I’ll put that on my to-do list, Dad,” Brynne said, after drying her eyes and dabbing at her nose. “number seventy-two, right after nominating myself for an alien abduction.”
Mike laughed. “That’s my girl,” he said.
Alice, who was sipping coffee, looked very serious all of a sudden. “Why didn’t you tell us you were dating Eli Garrett?” she asked.
Brynne noticed, for the first time, that neither of her parents had plates in front of them. “Aren’t you two eating?”
“We ate earlier while we were waiting to hear back from you,” Alice said.
“Right,” Brynne replied, resigned.
The waffles were heavenly.
“Weren’t you going to tell us about Eli?” Alice persisted. She was an old pro; it took more than deflection to throw her off the trail.
“Of course I was going to tell you,” Brynne answered, between bites. “When I was sure there was something to tell.”
“Isn’t there?” Alice asked.
“I’m in love with him,” Brynne admitted, albeit cautiously.
“But?” Mike put in.
Brynne laid down her knife and fork. “But he’s a cop.”
“And that means he’s like Clay Nicholls? It means he’ll cheat?” Alice wanted to know.
“It means that he could be killed in the course of an ordinary day,” Brynne replied. “It means that some madwoman might be lying in wait to bash his head in with a snow shovel!”
“Sweetheart,” Mike said, gruff in his gentleness. “Anyone can be ‘killed in the course of an ordinary day.’ Or at any other time.”
“Yes,” Brynne agreed tersely, “but let’s face it, cops are in a lot more danger than the rest of us, 24/7, 365 days a year!”
Alice blew out a breath, and it struck Brynne that her mother was still ravishingly beautiful, despite her advancing age.
Which was beside the point.