A Heart Healed

Chapter 3

Naomi

“He’s here again.”

Naomi looked up from the file in her hands. She had been doing her regular rounds earlier for a change so that she could go and see her newest responsibility. They had been waiting to see how he was faring after surgery as well as for him to wake him. The young man, Ezra, was definitely tougher than she and the staff had given credit for.

When they had wheeled him in, he looked so small and frail after all the blood loss, but he seemed to be doing all right. After several rounds of stitches and a pint of blood that had to be transfused in, he was stable and sleeping his way through recovery. His body didn’t seem to require the ventilation shaft they’d placed in his mouth, but Dr. Adamson had ordered it. So as soon as his oxygen levels were in the clear, he would probably just need the nasal piece for a little while.

The commotion that had gone on in the waiting room over him a few days ago was now a memory that most of the staff was still amused by, not so much because of the way she had handled it, but because the man who had started it was currently seated in one of their chairs next to the young man in question’s bed. It had taken a few of the nurses and a couple security guards to contain him afterwards, but it was probably Naomi herself that had made the story itself amusing to the rest of the hospital.

Her face burned at the memory, and she couldn’t help but feel a little self-conscious that she had spoken to such a high-profile personality like that. It wasn’t enough that she had seen him in the news a few days ago trying to fix someone else’s problem, but now the two of them may have caused another one.

“Dr. Bennett, you don’t have to go in there if you don’t want to.” That same male nurse who had asked her out a few days ago, who she eventually learned was named Darnell, seemed to be trailing her a lot more recently. She thought he had caught the hint that she wasn’t interested in her, but whenever she came out to this ward, there he was.

“Darnell, I can do this,” Naomi said, not entirely sure if she was trying to convince him or herself, but she had to do it anyway. Plus, it was only for a few minutes that she had to be in the man’s presence, right? There were worse people out in the world so who cared what he had to say about her?

“Good luck then,” the nurse said before gracefully bowing out of the scene, leaving her to do what she needed to do. She stepped forward to her patient’s private room, noticing that the door was slightly ajar. As she was about to push it open, she heard the insufferable man’s voice from inside the room.

“I know what you said, but did you ever stop to think that this was nobody’s fault? The driver himself had said that the car had come out of nowhere and there was no way to swerve that wasn’t going to get both Ezra and him killed.” There was about a moment of silence before the man let out a sigh. “Look, I’ll be here for another ten minutes then I’ll head over to pick up some more of his things, okay? I know how much you don’t like his facial hair.” Another few moments of silence. “All right, bye.”

Naomi figured this was as good a cue as any to knock on the door, letting it swing open with a light squeak, revealing her presence to the man on the other side who just glanced at her before giving her a slight nudge of his head to signal for her to come in.

Marc Hewitt. What an annoying man.

She stepped inside, heading straight for Ezra’s bed and grabbing his file from the end of his bed, opening it to the nurse’s notes for the day. His heart rate seemed to be stable. Responding well to the medication. Nutrition still had to be administered via IV until he woke up.

“How long will he be like this?”

Naomi looked at the man in the visitor’s chair who was staring at her with expectant eyes. He asked her this question every evening when she came in to check on him, since Dr. Adamson also insisted on constant updates, and every time she had the same answer for him.

“When he’s ready to wake up, he will.”

Today, unlike the previous couple of days, he seemed to just accept it with a newfound source of resignation. It seemed that over the past few days, he seemed to slip away from the face he seemed to put on for the press conference she had seen him on. The usually neatly styled blonde waves on his head seemed to have been ignored for a long while, along with the suits she had seen him in for the first couple of days.

Marc had seemed to ditch them for an unusually casual outfit that you’d never imagine from a CFO of a billion-dollar business. Naomi was a little ashamed to admit that she did do an internet search of him as soon as she got home that first night, mostly to see what kind of man she had argued with, and the man’s net worth had almost given her a heart attack. Not only because of his standing within Octave Media, a company he apparently ran with his brother-in-law and best friend, but because of the mention of his name all over the news for having wealth in many other companies that also were known for their own respective fortune.

If he was really angry at her for what had gone down in their first encounter, she’d have probably lost any chance at working in this city again. A man with that kind of wealth also had friends in very high places as well, and she couldn’t compete with that.

However, he didn’t look like a man who would do anything like that now. As she observed him out of the corner of her eye, she saw the exhausted sadness that existed around him like a dark cloud. He was genuinely worried for his brother lying here in this bed, and when she had gone over the boy’s medical history, it was understandable why that was.

He was in and out of the hospital a lot, it seemed, sometimes for patching up after injuries and a few times for alcohol poisoning. He clearly loved the fast life and his brother was probably losing his mind making sure that Ezra here was staying alive.