A Reasonable Doubt by Susan Sloan (free novels .txt) 📕

convinced Dancer to go get some sleep, he had refused to budge from the dayroom until he had seen his daughter up close, until he knew for himself that she was going to be okay.

He had tried to send Diana home, too, but she was having none of it.

“If you’re staying, I’m staying,” she said firmly.  “Besides, who else is going to get you to the bathroom when you need to go, and make sure you get something proper to eat?”

Maynard Purcell had pretty much told him what to expect, and Jeff Nordlund had filled him in on more of the specifics, but he still couldn’t believe his eyes.  She looked so small and so pale lying there, the skin that wasn’t bruised was almost as white as the bandages that covered the rest of her, and there were more tubes and needles attached to her than he could count.  He had to lean close to see for sure that she was actually breathing.

She had had her share of accidents growing up, of course, a couple that were even serious enough to have landed her in the hospital -- like the time she had broken her left leg in three places, falling from the jungle gym when she was five, and the time she had dislocated her right shoulder falling off her bike when she was eight.  And she had had a tonsillectomy when she was ten, and then she had had her appendix removed when she was sixteen.  But none of that had resulted in her looking the way she looked now.

“So what did you go and do to yourself this time?” he asked, mustering up a humor he certainly didn’t feel.

Lily’s eyes fluttered open, her glance roaming around the fuzzy white space before landing on the man in the wheelchair beside her bed, and then she stared at him for a full minute before she spoke.

“Dad?” she breathed finally.

“Who else would it be,” he said gruffly, blinking away the tears that had welled up in his eyes.

Traumatic brain injury, oxygen deprivation and blood loss, Purcell and Nordlund had said, all leading to blurry vision, dizziness, difficulty speaking, headaches, and memory failure.  Whether all her memory would return, or only parts of it, was currently unknown.  The blunt force trauma alone, they said, could result in permanent memory loss.  She had also sustained a hemo-pneumothorax when the fractured ribs had damaged her liver and punctured her lung.  But at least he now knew it wasn’t going to be total memory loss, and she was going to survive, and he felt an almost overwhelming sense of relief.

“Why is she still in the ICU?” he had asked.

“We want to monitor the TBI,” he was told, “and then there’s the air and the blood in the chest that has to be expelled.  We’ll keep her under constant observation for at least forty-eight hours, to make sure there are no complications -- no infection, no bleeding, no embolism, no stroke.  We’re lucky there was no skull fracture.”

“Why-you-here?” Lily asked, through her still stiff and swollen lip.

“You were in an accident, and you got hurt,” Carson replied.  “So where else would I be?”

“Don’t-mem-ber,” she said.  “Why-don’t-mem-ber?”

“Don’t worry about that now,” he told her.  “Just worry about feeling better.  The rest, well, it’ll take care of itself.”

. . .

On Thursday afternoon, Lily was moved out of the ICU and into a private room.  Although she was still heavily bandaged, and had the arm cast, the chest tubes, and the excruciating pain from the fractured ribs, she was no longer restrained.  She had discovered that, in addition to the injuries she thought she knew about, there were others she apparently didn’t.

“Tell me,” she said.  Her voice was a little stronger now, her throat a little less sore, and she had figured out how to form fairly comprehensible words around the stiff, swollen lip.

Maynard Purcell filled her in on the details, after her father had called him in, and after she thought that just maybe she recognized him.

“It’s a miracle you survived,” the family physician said, after he had accounted for every stitch, every bandage, every needle, and every tube.

“What happened?” she asked.

He shook his head.  “We don’t know.  All Amanda could tell us was that it was some kind of explosion.”

Carson wheeled his chair a little closer to her bed.  “Lily?” he said tentatively.

“Yes, Dad?”

“What do you remember?”

“Nothing,” she said, after a moment.  “Everything’s kind of fuzzy.”

“Well, let me ask you a different question,” Purcell interjected.  “Where do you live?”

Lily blinked.  “With Dad  don’t I?” she replied hesitantly, and then something in her mind suddenly clicked into place.  “Right next door to you.”

“That’s good, that’s very good,” Purcell said with a chuckle.  “And what do you do for a living?”

This time, Lily did not hesitate.  “I followed my father into the law,” she said.  “I work for him.”

Both Carson and Purcell frowned at that.  “Lily, do you know what year this is?” the doctor asked gently.

She started to respond, and then stopped.  “Wait a minute,” she said.  “I forgot.  I don’t work for Dad anymore.  He retired.  I jumped ship.  I opened my own law practice.”

Purcell nodded.  Carson sighed with relief.

“Good for you,” the doctor said.

“What does it mean?” Carson asked.

“It means the TBI didn’t cause total memory loss, and she could make a full recovery,” Purcell told him.  “One more question, Lily, and then I’ll leave you alone -- what case are you working on now?”

“I think  I think I just won the Wicker case, didn’t I?”

“Yes, you did, Sweetheart,” her father said gently.  “And now tell us, what’s your next case?  The one that’s set for trial in October.”

This time, it was quite a while before she responded, as her mind appeared to chase itself around in seemingly endless circles.  “Let me see,” she said finally.  “I guess  I guess it must be the Indian case  Is that right?”

Carson looked at Purcell and smiled.  “Yes, that’s right, Sweetheart,” he said.  “That’s absolutely right!”

After that,