Addy runs a hand over her face. “How much time do you have?”
Kris gets to his feet and gestures to his chair. “Here, have a seat. I need the restroom. Anybody want a drink or anything else while I’m up?”
“I’d kill for a Diet Coke,” Addy says wearily. Kris circles the room taking additional requests as I drop into his chair.
“Is Knox okay?” I ask anxiously. “Why isn’t he here?”
“He’s fine,” Addy says, and I exhale with relief. “The hero of the night, in fact, along with this one.” She reaches over to lightly stroke Maeve’s arm. “He, Ash, and Eli are talking to the police. Maeve was supposed to go too, but she conked out and they said to let her rest. Knox can give them the whole story, I guess. They were together all night.”
I file that away. “Who’s hurt? The nurse said someone was hurt,” I say, glancing around the room and trying to catalog who’s missing. “Is it—”
My eyes catch sight of Bronwyn’s distraught face again right before Addy says, “Nate.” I gasp and she quickly adds, “He’s going to be all right, they say. It’s just—he and Bronwyn were closest to the bomb when it exploded. He was basically a human shield over her, so he took the brunt of it.” She reaches up a hand to twist one of her small gold earrings. “It was…do you remember the Boston Marathon bombing? How it was this pressure cooker thing with nails and stuff inside?” I manage to nod, even though I can’t believe we’re actually having a conversation in the middle of the Bayview Memorial Hospital waiting room about bomb techniques. “Same type of thing. They were pretty far away, thank God, but Nate’s arm is kind of torn up, so they have to remove…”
She hesitates, and my breath catches in my throat. “His arm?”
“No! No, no,” Addy says quickly. She tugs harder at her earring. “God, sorry. I was trying to remember the word for, like…flying bits from a bomb.”
“Shrapnel,” Luis says. I go limp with relief as Addy nods.
“But he’ll be okay?”
“That’s what they say. I don’t know how bad his arm is injured, though.” Addy lowers her voice, flicking her eyes toward the middle-aged woman sitting next to Bronwyn. “It’ll be terrible if he can’t work. Nate needs that money so he can stay in his apartment. His mom’s living with his dad, even though they don’t really have a marriage anymore, because his dad’s still in and out of rehab and somebody has to take care of him. It’s so tense in that house. That can’t be Nate’s life again. It just can’t.”
There’s too much information coming at me all at once, but still so much I don’t understand. “Why would anybody do something like this?” I ask. “You said Knox and Maeve are heroes. What did they do?”
Addy exhales. “It’s still sort of jumbled up. We haven’t had much of a chance to talk to either of them, so we don’t have the full picture, but…there was this guy Jared Jackson, I guess? His brother is one of the police officers in the news for framing people on fake drug charges. He’d been sending threatening letters to Eli, and he decided to follow through on them tonight. Knox and Maeve were tailing him—I’m not clear how they knew to do that, to be honest—and followed him straight to Talia’s.” She shudders and hunches down in her chair again. “We’d probably all be dead if they hadn’t. The bomb was literally right below the deck we were standing on.”
“At least police arrested the guy pretty fast,” Luis says grimly.
“Thanks to Maeve and Knox,” Addy says. “Knox caught the whole thing on video. The worst thing is, police were there, at the restaurant. Eli took precautions because of the threats. But they were inside. Nobody planned for this.” Her lips form a tight line. “Like, is this my sister’s life now? She has to deal with terrorists and death threats? I love Eli with my whole heart, I really do, but this is horrible.”
Maeve stirs but doesn’t wake, and Luis presses a light kiss on the top of her head. “Is the wedding still on for tomorrow?” he asks.
Addy sighs. “I don’t even know.”
My phone starts ringing in my pocket. I pull it out and stifle a groan when I see that it’s Derek, calling me back already. His timing sucks, but I