It was 2:28 AM when the phone on Natalie's nightstand awoke her from a deep, dreamless sleep. She groaned and ran her hands down her face, letting it ring a couple more times while she gathered up the mental energy to answer it. She did not need to look at the caller ID to know who was calling, since there was only one person who ever called her at this time of night. For the first year or so that she worked for Adrian Monk, she'd found his late-night anxious calls extremely annoying, and had even asked him once or twice to stop, unsuccessfully. Now she still found them annoying, but they had become routine, a part of their relationship she would miss if it ever stopped.
She reached for the phone and answered it in a tired voice. "Mr. Monk?" she said, expecting to hear his usual awkward greeting in return. Instead, all she heard were sharp, hitched breaths and quiet whimpering.
Concerned, she pushed herself up into a seated position. "Mr. Monk, what's wrong?"
Several worried moments passed before he was able to answer. "Natalie," Monk said in between sobs, "are you—are you okay?"
Her tired brain short circuited at the question, unable to comprehend why he would ask her that when he was the one calling her in tears at 2:30 in the morning. "What?" was all she could say.
"Are you okay?" he repeated, starting to sound agitated.
"Yes I'm okay, I'm fine, I'm just confused. What's wrong?"
He struggled to speak through his tears. "I had—I had a nightmare."
That still didn't explain why he was worried about her, but Natalie felt her heart sink. He'd called her for comfort after nightmares before, and she'd never seen him this level of distraught over any of them until now. It must have been particularly bad. "What was it about?"
She waited patiently as he tried to regain his composure enough to explain. "It was about… you didn't show up for work," he started, his voice still shaking. "I kept—kept trying to call you but—you didn't answer, no one could get a hold of you or figure out where you were for hours, and then—and then I finally found out you…" He struggled to continue. "You were in—you were in a car accident, and you didn't—didn't…" He couldn't finish what he was saying, but she didn't need him to.
"I'm sorry Mr. Monk, that must've been awful."
"It was so real, when I woke up I wasn't sure—I had to call you to—to check…"
"It's okay, I'm still here." Her impulse was to assure him nothing was going to happen to her, but she knew as well as he did that those kinds of promises were meaningless.
"I just—I've already lost so many other people… sometimes it feels like—like I'm just waiting for whatever's going to inevitably happen to you. I don't know what I'd do…"
Natalie wasn't sure how to respond to that. She hated the idea that her boss and friend worried so much about her dying that it manifested in his dreams. "Would it help if we talked about something else for a little bit? Just to take your mind off your dream and calm you down so you can go back to sleep."
"Okay." He was still crying, but not as intense as he was a few moments ago. "What should we talk about?"
"You were reading a book earlier when I left. What was it?"
"It was a geology guide called Introduction to Rocks and Minerals…"
It didn't take him long to settle into talking about one of his favorite topics, and after explaining to her all about various types of rocks and how they were formed and how to identify them, the tears had finally stopped, and he seemed more calm than before.
Natalie glanced over at her alarm clock. "It's almost 3:00 AM, we both need to get some sleep. Are you feeling better?"
"A little."
"You think you can try and go to sleep?"
"I don't know…"
An idea came to her. "Okay, how about this. I'll put my phone on speaker and leave it on while I sleep, that way you can hear me moving around or breathing and know I'm okay, and you won't need to call me to check on me again."
"Natalie?"
"Yes?"
"Thank you."
"You're welcome Mr. Monk. Now try to get some sleep, okay? I'll see you in the morning."
"It already is the morning," he pointed out.
Natalie sighed, too tired for his pedantry. "I'll see you in a few hours then. Goodnight." She put the phone on speaker and set it on her nightstand, ready to take advantage of those few hours and get some rest.
It wasn't unusual for Monk to insist on punctuality and become anxious whenever Natalie ran even as little as a couple minutes late to his apartment in the morning. It was unusual, however, for him to pace up and down the entryway, phone in hand, ready to call her in a panic if she didn't show up at his door at exactly 8:00 AM on the dot.
"Oh," she said, startled when she opened the door and saw him standing right in front of her. "Good morning. Did you get any more sleep after we talked last night?"
He looked visibly relieved to see her. "Yes, yes I did."
It was then that she noticed the phone he was holding and realized why he was pacing by the door. She stepped into the apartment and headed toward the kitchen to start making coffee. "Were you worried something was going to happen to me on the way here?"
"What?" he said, feigning disbelief. "No, I just got off the phone, and I heard you coming up the stairs, so I thought I'd—go greet you at the door." He gave a fake chuckle as he followed her into the kitchen and returned the phone to its stand. "Of course I wasn't—I wasn't worried about you making it here safely…"
She rubbed his shoulder and gave him an understanding smile. "No, of course not."