CHAPTER SEVEN

Aria’s POV

I was halfway through reconciling a column of receipts when my phone buzzed against the desk. I almost let it go to voicemail. Mr. Murphy had already mentioned twice this month, that personal calls during work hours weren’t part of the job description he hired me for and I needed this job too much to test his patience over what could wait.

But the screen showed Bellmont Elementary in plain block letters, my heart skipped a bit before I even picked it up.

Schools don’t call during work hours unless something was wrong.

“Hello?”

“Ms. Ashford?” A woman’s voice sounded from the other end of the phone, brisk but gentle, the tone people used when they were about to deliver news they had rehearsed well. “This is Mrs. Doyle from the front office. I’m calling about Bryan.”

My hand tightened around the phone. “What’s wrong?”

“He took a fall during the football tournament this morning and he sprained his ankle, the school nurse looked at it and recommended he be seen properly. We’ve called for an ambulance as a precaution, and they’re taking him to Westbrook General.”

The room tilted around its edges, the way it always did when fear arrived faster than information.

“Is he conscious? Is he in pain?” I scrambled the words out.

“He’s conscious, Ms. Ashford. He’s in pain, understandably, but he’s talking and alert. I really do think it’s precautionary, but I wanted you to know immediately.”

“I’m coming,” I said, already pushing back from my desk. “I’m coming right now.”

I hung up and stood there for half a second too long, the way you do when your body hasn’t caught up with the information your mind has already processed. Then I grabbed my bag, shut down my computer with a clumsy, too-fast motion, and walked straight toward Mr. Murphy’s office without bothering to knock first.

“My son’s been hurt at school,” I said before he could ask. “I have to go.”

He looked up from his monitor, surprise flickering across his face at the interruption, then softened slightly at whatever he saw in mine. “Go,” he said. “We’ll sort the hours later.”

I was already moving before he finished the sentence.

***************************************************

The drive to Westbrook General took eleven minutes that felt like eternity.

I kept the radio off, I needed the silence to keep my thoughts in order. I needed to not let my mind wander toward the worst version of events before I had any actual information to justify it.

Bryan was alert and talking. Mrs. Doyle had said precautionary, and I held onto that word the entire drive like it was some solid piece I could grip unto.

I left my car in the first available spot in the hospital lot, not caring whether it was technically a space or not, and half-ran through the sliding doors into the harsh fluorescent light of the emergency reception.

“Bryan Ashford,” I said to the woman at the front desk, breathless. “He was brought in from Bellmont Elementary, a football injury.”

She typed for a moment, then nodded toward a hallway to the right. “Pediatric urgent care, third door. They’re finishing up an X-ray now.”

I ran toward the direction she pointed to, and I found my boy in a small curtained bay, sitting upright on the exam table with his ankle elevated and wrapped, his face streaked with the exact evidence of a child who had cried hard and has ran out of tears before anyone could arrive to comfort him properly.

The moment he saw me, his face crumpled all over again.

“Mommy”

“I’m here, baby, I’m here.” I entered the room, and in two steps, I’m already beside him. I pulled him carefully against my chest, mindful of the ankle, pressing my lips to the top of his head. He smelled like grass and the antiseptic wipes that was used to clean a scrape on his elbow. “What happened?”

“I went for the ball and Tyler fell on my leg and it hurt so bad,” he said into my shoulder, voice wobbling. “I didn’t even score.”

Despite everything, my chest tightness loosened a bit at that. Despite being injured, my little boy was still him. Still worried about the goal he didn’t get to make.

“It’s okay,” I said, pulling back just enough to look at his face. “You don’t need a goal today. You just need to get better.”

A nurse stepped through the curtain a few minutes later with a tablet in hand and the calm, efficient warmth of someone who handled frightened children and frightened parents in equal measure every single day. “Mrs. Ashford?”

“Ms.,” I corrected automatically. “Is he okay?”

“He’s going to be fine,” she said, and the relief that moved through me was so immediate I nearly lost my footing.

“It’s a moderate ankle sprain,” she continued. “Not a fracture, the X-ray came back clean. He’ll need to stay off football for a couple of weeks, ice and elevation, maybe a short course of anti-inflammatories. Kids heal fast at this age.”

“Thank you,” I said, and I meant it more than the two words could carry.

“The doctor will be in shortly to go over the discharge instructions,” she continued, already tapping something into her tablet. “And someone from billing will need to see you before you leave, just to process everything.”

The word billing landed somewhere behind my ribs with a weight that had nothing to do with relief.

************************************************

The billing office was three doors down, tucked behind a frosted glass partition that did very little to mute the printer humming on the other side of it. I sat in the chair across from a clerk whose name tag read DENISE, and watched her scroll through a screen full of line items with the brisk detachment of someone who processed devastating numbers all day and had long since stopped absorbing their weight.

“Emergency room admission f*e, ankle X-ray, consultation, splint and wrap supplies, nursing care.” She read through it efficiently, then turned the monitor slightly so I could see the total at the bottom.

I looked at the number twice to make sure I was reading it correctly.

Oh yes, I was. It’s twenty-two hundred dollar.

“Is there a payment plan option?” I asked, keeping my voice level through sheer force of will.

“We do offer installment plans,” Denise said, not unkindly. “I can pull up the terms for you. Typically a deposit is required upfront, and then the balance is spread over a few months depending on the total.”

“What’s the deposit?”

“Twelve hundred.” She said without looking up from the monitor.

I did the math in my head immediately, and instinctively, the way I had trained myself to do with every expense for the past five years. Rent is due in nine days, the daycare invoice I already pushed back once this month, the accounting firm’s pay cycle that wasn’t lining up with any of it. I had exactly enough in my account to cover one of those obligations. Maybe two if I stretched groceries down to almost nothing.

But definitely not all three, not with this number sitting on top of everything else.

“Ms. Ashford?” Denise was watching me with the patient, slightly weary expression of someone who had delivered this particular silence to dozens of parents before me. “Would you like to start the payment plan today, or do you need some time to think it over?”

I looked back through the frosted glass toward the bay where Bryan sat, swinging his good leg off the edge of the exam table, already chattering at the nurse about whatever I know is unrelated to his injury, completely unaware that the ground beneath his mother had just quietly given way.

“I need a moment,” I said.

I didn’t know, sitting there with the number still glowing on the screen in front of me, that the answer to the problem I couldn’t solve alone was about to walk through the doors of this very hospital.