POV: Jasmine
We sat down because there was nothing else left to do with our bodies.
The corridor outside the operating room was narrower than the one we had come in through, with a small window at the far end, a row of plastic chairs along one wall, and a clock above a door I did not let myself read. The clock was loud. The clock was the only thing in the corridor that was making a sound.
Asher sat in the chair next to mine with his cast in his lap. Finn did not sit. He stood against the wall opposite us with Aurora against his chest, where she had been since the doctor had finished speaking. Leo sat on the other side of Asher with his elbows on his knees, looking at the floor.
I was still in the dress. The long white skirt of it was around my ankles like a small lake of fabric.
The doors at the end of the corridor opened.
Nora came in fast, her hair half out of its braid, eyes already wet. She saw the dress. She saw Leo. She crossed the corridor in five steps and took Leo's face in both her hands.
He put his forehead against her stomach.
She let go of him after a while and came to me. She did not try to hug me. She had read me before she had touched me.
She sat down on my other side. She put her hand on my wrist. That was all.
"Tell me," I said to Asher eventually. "All of it. From this morning."
He nodded once. He took a slow breath. He laid it out the way he laid out a board report — quiet, in order, no detail withheld and none decorated.
"We came down the inn drive at the time we had agreed," he began, his voice flat and precise. "The car was on the road by six minutes past. I was in the seat behind the driver. Liam was beside me. Leo was on the bench at the back. Finn was on the gravel still. The phone call came as we were closing the doors."
Finn shifted against the wall. "I remember. I waved you off."
Asher looked at him briefly. "You waved us off."
He kept going. He was holding the account steady for both of us.
"We took the curve below the cypress at — not fast. The driver was not driving fast," he said. "There was a truck in the oncoming lane carrying something agricultural, and it had taken the curve wider than it should have. The driver swerved toward the edge of the road. The gravel gave way under the tyres. The wheel on my side dropped off the edge. The car turned over once. We slid, and then we stopped. Liam was on my side."
He stopped for one second. His good hand closed around the edge of the cast. He did not let himself do anything else.
His voice dropped lower. "I could not see him properly when we stopped. There was glass everywhere. The roof had come down on his side and I could hear him breathing but I could not see his face. I tried to move the metal with my hands. That is how I broke the wrist. I did not feel it break. I kept pulling. Leo was already out. He came around to the other side and tried from there. We could not get him out alone."
He stopped again. When he spoke next his voice had changed — stripped down to something I had never heard from him, something underneath the control.
"I sat on the road beside the car and I held his hand through the gap in the door, and I talked to him, and I do not know if he heard me, and the ambulance took eleven minutes, and those were the longest eleven minutes of my life."
I reached over and put my hand on top of his, because his hand had begun to shake and he had not noticed yet.
He turned his hand under mine so that our palms were touching.
I looked across the corridor.
Finn was leaning against the wall with Aurora's small body against his chest. Her face was in his neck. She had stopped fighting sleep, and now she had given in to it the way her body always gave in — all at once, head heavy, mouth slightly open, one hand still wound into his shirt at the shoulder.
He was holding her with one arm under her thighs and the other up the centre of her back. He was not moving.
His face was not quite awake. He was somewhere behind his own eyes, in the small private room of what he was going to carry out of this corridor whether or not the man he loved came out of that theatre alive.
I noticed, then, in the half-second before I looked away — because the noticing was not allowed, and because I had been raised to recognize a thought I was not allowed to have and refuse it — that he was holding her exactly the way he had been holding her since she was a baby. As if she had always been partially his.
I looked at the floor between my feet. I looked at the long white edge of the dress. I looked at the cast in Asher's lap.
The doors at the end of the corridor opened a second time.
The surgeon came out. He was a small grey man in scrubs that were not as clean as the scrubs he had gone in wearing, already pulling the cap off his head. The interpreter was a step behind him. I stood up. The dress made the sound the dress made when it moved.
The surgeon stopped in front of me. "Signora Harlow."
I gripped the fabric at my side. "Tell me."
He spoke carefully, the interpreter translating half a beat behind. "He has come through the operation. We were able to control the bleed. The spleen has been removed. The chest is stable. He is not yet out of danger. He is critical. But he is stabilised."
My voice came out steady and not my own. "He is alive."
The surgeon nodded. "He is alive. And — signora — he is unconscious."
The corridor did something. The walls — I do not know how to put it. The air shifted by half an inch in every direction at once. I did not let myself feel it. Not yet. Not until I had seen him.
"Take me to him," I said.
The surgeon gestured down the hall. "This way, please."
I turned. Nora's hand on my wrist had gone. Asher had stood. Leo had stood. Finn had not moved, because Aurora was asleep against him and he was not going to be the man who jolted her awake. He looked at me over the top of her head.
I looked at him. I did not say anything. I did not need to.
I followed the surgeon down the corridor, and the dress moved with me, soft and ridiculous against the floor, and I felt the eyes of the three men I loved in three different ways carry me down the length of it.
The nurse at the door was waiting. She looked at me to confirm I was ready. I nodded back.
I walked in alone.