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“Thanks, Ry. Tell them I’ll see them soon.”

After they hung up, Mick forced himself to get up and go back into the house. He was hungry and now his curiosity was piqued about these videos.

First, he ordered some Thai food to be delivered, and then sat down on the sofa with his phone and pulled up the links Riley had sent. He was about to click on the first one when a text from Sienna popped up.

Sienna: Hey, are you free to talk?

As if he’d let anything keep him from doing that.

Rather than texting a reply, he simply called.

“Hey, beautiful,” he said as soon as she answered. “I figured you’d be in bed by now.”

And that’s when he heard it; the sniffle.

“Sienna? What’s going on?”

She sniffed again before responding. “It was just a bad day. Eleanor’s taken a turn for the worse and...and...I’m not handling it well.”

Dammit! He knew he should have chartered the plane so she wouldn’t have to be by herself.

“I can be there by lunch tomorrow,” he said fiercely. “Tell me what you need and I’ll take care of it.”

“I need a miracle,” she said quietly. “I need a cure for my friend. You’re incredibly talented, Michael, but...I don’t think you can do that.”

“Sienna...”

He knew she was crying; he could hear it and picture her so clearly in his mind that it broke his heart.

“I’ll be there as fast as I can. I’ll...”

“No.”

“What?”

“I don’t want you to come. It’s unnecessary,” she told him, softly but firmly.

Was she for real?

“You’re upset and you shouldn’t be alone right now. Let me be there for you.”

“You’re here for me right now. This is what I need,” she reasoned. “I appreciate that you want to come here, but...this isn’t something that you need to be involved in. It’s private, Michael. Can you understand that?”

Actually, he couldn’t.

“Eleanor doesn’t need more people coming in and gawking at her.” She let out a small huff. “I was shocked by how many people just kept coming and going from her room. There’s zero privacy and it was just...it was awful. And if you were here, it would just be another person in the room. It wouldn’t be right for me to do that to her.”

That took some of the fight out of him.

Some.

“Then I won’t go to the hospital. I’ll stay at your place and just be there for you when you get home. I’m not asking you to entertain me or to cut your time with your friend short. I can work from your place and whenever you get home, I’ll be there.”

Silence.

He didn’t take it as a bad sign; if anything, it meant she was thinking about it.

“We said we weren’t going to do this. We said we could get through the two weeks without finding excuses to see each other.”