POV: Jasmine
The man on the phone said there had been a road accident.
He said the vehicle had been travelling from the inn toward the villa. He said three passengers had been taken to the regional hospital. He said the name of the road. He did not say which of the three was hurt and which was not. He did not say whether there had been a fourth.
I asked once. He did not have the information. He gave me an address and a ward number and told me to ask for Dottoressa Ferraro when I arrived.
I hung up.
I stood on the terrace in the dress that was just fine and looked out at two hundred people who had not yet been told anything, and I did not tell them anything. I picked Aurora up. I walked down the terrace stairs. I got into a car. A woman from the wedding company drove ahead of me, and I followed her tail lights down the hill without seeing the road.
The hospital corridor was the colour of nothing.
That was the first thing my brain offered up when I came through the doors with Aurora on my hip and the wedding dress dragging behind me.
I felt the looks as I walked. A nurse turned her head and did not turn it back. An old man in a green chair stopped reading. A young man on a phone went quiet mid-sentence. The corridor took me in the way corridors took in a thing that did not belong, and I did not have the energy to be embarrassed about it.
Aurora's arms were around my neck. She had not cried. She had held on. She is reading me. She is matching me. Hold yourself together for her.
Finn was at the end of the corridor.
I saw him before he saw me. He was standing against the wall with his hands at his sides and his eyes on the floor, and his face was the worst thing in the building. He looked like a man who had already begun the conversation he was going to be having with himself for the rest of his life.
He looked up. He came down the corridor toward us — not fast, the way a person walked when they had not yet decided whether they were allowed to come closer.
His voice was low and broken at the edges. "Jas."
I stopped in front of him. "You are not hurt."
He shook his head. "I was not in the car. The phone call — I stayed behind on the gravel."
"Where is Liam," I said.
The sentence came out before any other sentence could. Not where are they. Not what happened. Where is Liam. Because I had read his face in the first half-second and I had seen the name he was not saying, and every cell in my body had already done the math.
Finn's throat moved. "Asher is in the small room. The wrist is broken but he is okay. Leo is next door. Walking."
I shifted Aurora higher on my hip. "That is not what I asked you."
He looked at me. Something behind his eyes came apart.
"He is in surgery, Jas," he said, and his voice cracked clean through the middle of the word.
I felt Aurora's wet eyelashes against the side of my neck and realised she had been crying silently, the way I had taught her without meaning to teach her.
"Take me to him," I said.
He turned without a word and led us down the corridor. The dress dragged behind me on the linoleum.
We turned a corner. A woman in a white coat was standing outside a set of double doors with an interpreter beside her. The doctor was small and dark and had the face of a person who had said many sentences in the last hour she did not want to say.
The doctor stepped forward. "Signora Harlow."
I did not stop walking. "I need to see my husband."
The doctor put her hand up — not blocking, but the gesture was clear. She spoke in careful English, choosing each word the way a person chose where to place their feet on bad ground.
"He is in the operating room, signora," she said. "You cannot go in. I need to speak with you first."
I stopped. I looked at the double doors behind her. I looked at her face.
"Talk to me," I said.
I looked at Finn. He was already holding out his hands for Aurora. She went to him without being asked. She put her face into his shoulder. He took her weight and turned toward the chairs along the wall.
The doctor talked. The interpreter translated. The two voices laid over each other in a slow, careful rhythm. Severe traumatic brain injury. The bleed was significant. They had stabilised him in the ambulance. Internal damage — the spleen, the chest. The surgical team was already in the room. There was no version of the next hour in which they did not operate.
I listened without moving. I did not feel my body. The body had gone somewhere else for the duration of this sentence.
I looked at the doctor. "How long?"
She exchanged a glance with the interpreter. "We do not know. Several hours. Possibly more."
I did not look away. "Tell me what you are not yet telling me."
The doctor began to speak in slow English, this time without the translation, because she wanted me to hear the actual words from her own mouth.
"Signora Harlow. Even if the surgery is successful," she said, very carefully, "the damage may be irreversible."
The word landed in the corridor and did not echo.
I stood in the dress that was just fine, in front of double doors I was not allowed to walk through, and I felt every piece of foreboding I had carried for the last five days collapse into a single point under my collarbone. Not vindication. Just the sick, airless confirmation that the body had known before the mind, the way it always did.
I had known on the boat. I had known in the salon. I had known on the terrace when the hills went gold and I could not feel them. I had known last night in his arms when the fear would not leave.
I had known, and I had not said it, and now I was standing in a corridor that was the colour of nothing, and he was on the other side of a door I could not open.
"I will wait," I said. My voice did not sound like mine.
The doctor nodded once. The interpreter touched my arm — briefly, the touch of a woman who had done this before and knew that more than that would break something.
Finn was against the wall with Aurora asleep on his chest. He looked at me over the top of her head.
I walked to the row of plastic chairs. I sat down. The dress pooled around my ankles like a small lake of fabric.
I put my hands in my lap. I did not let them shake.