“Vince? Vince, can you hear me?”
She held her breath, watching his face for a reaction and bit back a moan when not so much as an eyelash fluttered. “Vince, please,” she begged. “Hold on. An ambulance is on the way.”
There was a rap on the door.
“Houston Fire Department! Is there an emergency?”
Sally jumped to her feet. “In here!”
A man appeared, followed on his heels by a second man carrying a bag.
The first to arrive moved to stand with Sally, while the other dropped down beside Vince and began pulling equipment from his bag.
“What happened?” the man beside Sally asked.
She wrung her hands. “I don’t know. He just returned from a trip. Said he wasn’t feeling well. I went to get him a glass of water. He must have fainted, because I heard this loud crash. I ran back and found him lying on the floor.”
“He’s breathing,” the second fireman reported.
A third man appeared and dropped down at Vince’s head to support his neck while the second fireman fastened what looked like a thick, padded belt around it.
“What’s he doing?” Sally asked in concern.
“Applying a C-collar,” the man at her side explained. “In the event he injured his neck when he fell, the collar will prevent further damage.”
Gulping, Sally watched as the men continued to work, one attaching a heart monitor to Vince’s chest, the other wrapping a blood pressure cuff around his arm.
“EMS!”
Sally snapped up her head to see two more uniformed men rushing into the house, carrying a stretcher.
The man beside her quickly shifted his attention to the EMS team and reported, “Male, midthirties, possible cardiac arrest. Witness reports he passed out and hit his head on the table. We’re holding C-spine, have applied oxygen via nonrebreather at fifteen liters per minute. Blood pressure 178/96, pulse is 102 respirations at 24 rapid.”
Wide-eyed, Sally scooted out of the way and watched while the EMS team positioned a backboard beside Vince. On the count of three, the fireman rolled Vince to his side, and the EMS team slid the backboard into position. After lowering Vince to the backboard, they cinched straps around him to secure him. On the count of three again, the men lifted him onto the stretcher.
“You’ll need to meet the ambulance at the hospital,” the fireman told Sally, as the other men gathered their equipment, preparing to leave.
Sally took a step back. “Oh, I’m not family,” she said. “I’m just his secretary.”
The fireman gave her a slow look up and down and Sally cringed, knowing what he must think. A woman at her boss’ house on the weekend wearing a towel wrapped around her? No, this didn’t look good, at all.
The EMS team started toward the front door with Vince. The fireman placed a hand in the middle of Sally’s back, urging her to follow.
He stopped on the porch. “Can you notify his family?”
“The only relative I know of is his mother, and she’s confined to a nursing home.”
“Then you’ll need to go to the hospital.”
“But I’m not family,” she said again.
“Admittance is going to need whatever information you have to offer.”
Leaving Sally on the porch, the fireman went to help the others load Vince into the back of the ambulance. One of the EMS team hopped into the back with Vince, while the other ran to climb behind the wheel of the vehicle. With lights flashing and siren screaming, the ambulance took off down the circle drive and bounced onto the street.
As Sally watched the vehicle disappear from sight, she sent up a silent prayer for Vince, then whispered another for her own forgiveness.
She might’ve prayed for Vince, but it was really her own welfare she was worried about.
If anything happened to her boss, she knew she’d be out of a job.
Sally spent the next eight hours in the hospital’s emergency room. Upon her arrival, she’d provided the desk clerk with what information she could about Vince, which proved enough to allow them to locate his records, as well as his doctor. Technically, she could have left then, and with a clear conscious. But some weird sense of duty made her stay. Since she knew of no family or friends of Vince’s to call to sit in her stead, she felt obligated to remain and await news of his condition.
During her long vigil, she read every magazine in the waiting room, drank four cups of coffee, made numerous trips to the restroom, one to the snack machine, and all without receiving any word on Vince’s condition. Fearing the worst, she gathered her courage and approached the reception desk. The staff had changed at three o’clock, and a different woman now sat behind the desk, having replaced the clerk Sally had spoken to previously.
“Excuse me,” she said, in order to get the clerk’s attention. “Is there any word on Vince Donnelly?”
“Are you family?”
She shook her head. “His secretary.”
“The doctor’s still with Mr. Donnelly. I’ll let him know you’re here.”
Sally murmured her thanks and returned to her seat. Desperate for something to help pass the time, she picked up a tattered paperback novel someone had left behind and began to read. As luck would have it, it was a mystery, her favorite genre, and two pages into the book, she was totally engrossed by the story.
“Are you Sally?”
She snapped up her head to find a doctor standing in front of her. Gulping, she set the book aside and slowly rose. “Y-yes. I’m Sally.”
“I’m Dr. O’Connor, Vince’s physician.” He gestured toward a door. “If you’ll come with me.”
Sally followed him through the door and down a short hall.
Unsure what to expect, she asked uneasily, “He’s going to be all right, isn’t he?”
“That depends on Vince.”
Considering that a nonanswer, she followed the doctor into one of the curtained-off examining rooms, where Vince lay, his eyes closed, his hands folded over the hospital gown that covered his chest. An IV tube ran from the back of one hand to a bottle hanging from a hook at the head of the bed. A white plastic bracelet circled his left wrist. She stared hard at his hands and breathed a sigh of relief when she saw the rhythmic rise and fall of his chest beneath them.
She sent up a silent prayer of thanks that he was still alive and her job hopefully secure, then whispered to the doctor, “Why hasn’t he regained consciousness?”
“He did. His current state is drug induced.”
At her questioning look, he went on to explain, “Vince doesn’t make a very good patient. He regained consciousness shortly after arriving and pitched a fit when he realized where he was. I sedated him to calm him down.”
Sally nodded, easily able to imagine the kind of ruckus her boss had kicked up. “Do you know what happened to him?”
“Before, during or after his fall?”
She shrugged. “All of it, I guess.”
“He suffered a mild heart attack. The dizziness he experienced during the attack probably caused the fall. Unfortunately, on the way down he cracked his head on something and—”
“The end table,” Sally interjected. “When I found him,