Baby Lessons

fine right now. If she hears you like this, it could just make things worse.”
Why couldn’t he talk? It couldn’t be a side effect of his pain medication, because they refused to give him any. He’d already asked for some...a couple of times. Apparently, it could mask the symptoms of a more serious problem, so his aching head wasn’t going away anytime soon.
“Home?” he asked, because the effort required to string together an entire sentence was more than he could manage.
“The doctor has ordered another CT scan tomorrow morning. So long as there’s no progression of the bleed, you’ll be discharged. Until then, you need to rest, Lieutenant. Got it?” She pressed the call button into his right hand.
He cracked an eye open and smiled, but suspected it looked more like a grimace than any approximation of a pleasant expression. “Got it.”
She jammed her hands on her hips. “I’m serious. Don’t try and stand up on your own. If you need anything, just press this button and someone will come help you.”
He nodded and his headache, which had begun to ease into a dull pain, throbbed to life again.
The nurse’s expression turned sympathetic. “I’m sorry you’re stuck here, Lieutenant. That’s what you get for being a hero. What are your twins’ names?”
“Ella and Ella,” he mumbled. “I mean Emma and Emma.”
Why couldn’t he get it right? Was he really groggy enough that he couldn’t get his infant daughters’ names straight?
“Yep, you’re woozy, all right.” The nurse laughed. “All right, hero. It’s time for lights out. Don’t forget—press the call button if you need anything.”
He held up the button as a gesture of compliance and then let his arm flop back down on the bed. God, he was tired. He wasn’t sure he’d ever been so exhausted in his life. Not even when the twins first came home from the hospital.
The door closed with a soft click as the nurse left the room, and Jack wondered how long he would have to wait for a different, more lenient caretaker to take over her shift. He needed a telephone, damn it.
His cell was probably still on the rig or back in his locker at the station if Wade had remembered to grab it for him. He moved his head gently back and forth, searching the room for a landline, but it was situated on the nightstand, which the nurse had wheeled out of reach.
He closed his eyes and sighed. He trusted his captain to keep his mom and dad calm. Cap was great at that sort of thing, which was one of myriad reasons why he was an exceptional senior officer. Also, the nurse had been right—hearing Jack slur his words would only upset his mom. Sarah Cole was as strong as they came, and she’d had years of being a firefighter’s mother under her belt, but she would probably have strapped the twins into the back of his dad van and headed straight to Burlington if she’d heard him confuse Ella and Emma’s names like he did just a few minutes ago.
His family was safe and sound. The best thing he could do for them was get himself rested up and patched back together so he could go home in one piece. They weren’t the ones he was so anxious to call.
When Wade had stared down at Jack as he was being strapped to a gurney and hauled into the back of an ambulance, he’d asked if there was anyone else they should contact about his accident. Madison’s name had almost tripped right off Jack’s tongue. He’d had to grind his teeth together to keep from saying it.
Getting injured on the job had a way of knocking a firefighter’s priorities immediately into proper alignment. Jack had seen it happen time and time again. He’d witnessed fires put an end to divorce proceedings, family estrangements and long-held grudges of all kinds. That was the unexpected, beautiful truth about fire—at first glance, it was licks of red heat and burning destruction. But deep in its molten yellow center, fire carried the promise of rebirth. Great swaths of forests that burned always grew back stronger and healthier than they’d been before. Jack liked to think it worked that way with other types of fire, too. He knew it did. He’d seen it.
And even thought it hadn’t been an actual fire that had knocked him flat on his back on the sidewalk outside Ethel Monroe’s Lovestruck cottage, he’d felt his own priorities shifting before he’d even opened his eyes. And somewhere beyond the fog of pain, he’d seen Madison’s face, like a dream or a mirage or some kind of angelic vision.
Wade knew. That was why he’d asked Jack if there was anyone else he should call. He’d either seen it written all over Jack’s face, or he still firmly believed fate had brought Madison into Jack’s life for a reason. He probably thought fate had thrown Jack out of the old maple tree and given him his current concussion, but Jack was fairly certain it had been Ethel’s cantankerous Persian. It was a classic Fancy move.
Either way, he didn’t want Wade to call Madison. Jack wanted to do it himself. He had things to say to her—important things...
If only he could get to the blasted phone.
Maybe if he just closed his eyes for a little bit, he’d wake up feeling better. Then he could make his way to the nightstand and dial Madison’s number, except he didn’t know her contact information. Her number was programmed into his cell, which was missing at the moment—at least he thought it was. Everything had gone so blurry around the edges after the fall.
“Madison,” he slurred as sleep began to drag him under.
And then the bleeding in his brain must have caused an auditory hallucination, because he could have sworn he heard her voice, as soothing and lovely as the sweetest lullaby. “Yes?”
He dragged his eyelids open, and there she was, standing at the foot of the bed.