He left her at the front entrance, with a soft kiss on the cheek.
“Goodbye.”
* * *
A low light filtered out from Naomi’s room, through a cracked door. The hallway on this floor was silent and empty, except for soft beeps and whirs from the surrounding rooms and a few nurses down at the entry desk. Hara knocked softly.
No one answered. She pushed open the door and poked her head through. The bed was empty, the blankets tossed back. She almost withdrew when a weird, heavy smell hit her in the face. Hara held her breath.
What is that?
The bathroom door was shut. Naomi was either in there or they’d taken her for tests.
To give Naomi privacy, Hara waited in the hall for a few minutes, but no nurses came by. Impatient, she decided it would be okay to knock on the bathroom door. As she walked back into the room and around the bed, though, her foot slipped on something wet.
Looking down, Hara’s vision wavered and the room spun in a lazy circle. “Na—Naomi?” she whisper-screamed.
She’d stepped in a pool of blood seeping out from under the bathroom door.
CHAPTER 18
You may well warn me against such an evil. Human nature is so prone to fall into it!
—Pride and Prejudice
The doctors pumped nearly half a gallon of blood into Naomi before they were sure they had her back.
“This girl wasn’t messing around,” one of the nurses said to Hara, coming out of the room after changing the bandages on Naomi’s wrists. “She lost almost forty percent of her blood. She’d turned off her monitors, so if you hadn’t gone in there when you did, she would only have lasted maybe a minute longer. Maybe.”
Hara hadn’t been allowed back in the room, but they’d let her sit in the hall. She was too freaked out to make it any farther than the narrow, hard bench a few feet from Naomi’s door. Hara couldn’t remember how to use her legs, much less figure out what she should do next.
The sight of Naomi, slight and childlike and curled up in a fetal position on the white tiles, would likely stay with her forever. The copious amounts of dark red blood pooling around her, even in her hair, and the slackness of her petite features …
Hara wanted to dislodge the slideshow of horror via whatever means necessary. Heavy drinking, lobotomy, whatever.
The girl had people in her life who loved her. Why would Naomi try to kill herself? She’d only known for a short time she was pregnant, and she hadn’t even been sure she wanted it. A miscarriage was definitely an occasion to be sad and confused, depressed, but to want to end it all? Naomi was so young and talented and beautiful. She could have more babies, when she was ready. Why throw in the towel for good?
It blew her mind. Naomi had seemed like a girl who walked in and took what she wanted.
Having a relationship with a professional athlete was just too dangerous for normal people.
Hara suddenly, desperately, wanted to talk to her father. He was her touchstone, the man who listened to her, encouraged her, consoled her. He was also out of reach, as usual. When it came to emergencies, he wasn’t there, hadn’t been since she was a child. And Hara had never learned to rely on her mother, not unless she wanted to be treated like an incapable imbecile who needed her decisions made for her.
She yearned to have a partner to lean on in times like these. Hara almost broke down and called Derek, but restrained herself. She could not push a relationship into existence after a one-night stand.
So, do what you always do, Hara Isari. Fight your way through this. Buck up. It’s Naomi who is suffering, not you. What needs to happen next? Let’s get going!
Naomi’s dad was on his way, so Naomi wouldn’t be alone. But how about Charles? Should he be there? Or not?
She’d go back to her hotel, Hara decided. Focus on her job. She needed to work on the story about the arena’s power outage and the flood, write it up as a feature this time, since a simple recap wouldn’t do a day after the game. Then she could try to find contacts from Charles’s past. Tomorrow, there was an early game, the last before the team went on the road. She’d go, sit in the press row with Eddie, and see if he knew anything about Butler’s time in