Wake Up, Lila

Chapter 06 - Lila Wakes Up

Lila opened her eyes on the second day, slowly, the specific, disoriented surfacing of someone emerging from a darkness that had been considerably deeper than ordinary sleep.

Adrian was there. He'd been there for thirty-seven hours straight, sleeping in the hospital chair, eating whatever Margaret brought from the house, refusing to leave for longer than it took to use the bathroom down the hall.

"Hey," he said, voice cracking with relief. "You're awake."

Lila's eyes found his face, and something in them, some fragment of understanding about where she was and why, produced a specific, visible wave of fear that made Adrian's chest tighten unbearably.

"The baby," she whispered, her first words.

"The baby's okay," Adrian said immediately, taking her hand. "You're both okay. The doctors stabilized everything. You're going to be fine."

Lila's eyes closed again, not unconsciousness this time but relief, the specific, physical release of a fear she'd apparently been carrying even through the medicated blur of the past two days.

"I didn't know how to tell you," she said, tears sliding from beneath her closed lids. "About the pregnancy. I found out three days before the wedding. I was going to tell you after, once everything calmed down. I was so scared your mother would find out first."

Adrian felt a complicated wave of emotion move through him, joy about the pregnancy tangled with fury about whatever had put his wife in this hospital bed, and underneath both, a specific, painful understanding of exactly why Lila had been afraid to share the news in a house where Eleanor's approval was the currency everything else was measured against.

"My mother found the test," Adrian said gently. "This morning. When she found you."

Lila's eyes opened. "She knows."

"She's been here since yesterday," Adrian said. "She hasn't left. She's in the waiting room right now, actually. She's been asking about you every hour."

Something complicated crossed Lila's face, the specific, uncertain expression of a woman trying to reconcile the Eleanor who had spent six months making her feel unwelcome with the Eleanor who had apparently spent two days sitting in a hospital waiting room, terrified, asking about her hourly.

"I don't want to see her yet," Lila said. "I'm not ready."

"That's completely your choice," Adrian said. "Nobody's going to pressure you about anything right now."

Rachel, Lila's closest friend and maid of honor, arrived that same afternoon, having driven three hours the moment Adrian called her with the news.

She found Lila considerably more alert than she'd feared, sitting partially upright in the hospital bed, color slowly returning to her face, one hand resting protectively across her still-flat abdomen.

"I'm going to kill whoever did this," Rachel said, which was not, strictly speaking, a helpful thing to say in a hospital room, but which communicated the specific, fierce loyalty Lila needed to hear from someone who wasn't a Whitcomb.

"The detective thinks it was deliberate," Lila said. "Something in my water glass. I don't know who."

"Do you have any idea," Rachel asked.

Lila was quiet for a moment, something working behind her eyes.

"Eleanor hated me," she said slowly. "But I don't think she'd actually hurt me. Not like this. She's cruel, sometimes, but it's the kind of cruelty that needs an audience. Poisoning someone in their sleep isn't her style."