POV: Jasmine
I stayed in the room.
The nurses came in twice and I did not look up at them. They did the things they had to do quietly and around me. They took readings. They wrote on a clipboard.
They did not ask me to leave.
The machines kept their three-part rhythm — the hum, the beat, the slow push of air. I matched my breathing to the ventilator without meaning to. His hand stayed warm in mine.
It got cooler.
I noticed it slowly. The edge of his thumb where my own thumb had been pressed for hours. The temperature dropped one degree. Two. I am sitting here noticing the temperature of his hand.
I did not let go.
Sometime in the third hour after midnight a different nurse came in. She put her hand on my shoulder. She bent down and looked at the screen above his head, and her face did the thing the doctor's face had done in the corridor.
The slow electronic beat began to space out. I watched the gaps between the lines on the screen open the way I had once watched a candle work its way down to the wick.
His hand was cool now. The warmth in it was the warmth my hand had given it.
I leaned forward. I put my forehead against the side of his face. I felt the last small movement of air the ventilator was still doing for him. I pressed my mouth against his temple and I said it without sound, just the shape of the words against his skin.
I love you. I love you. I love you.
The beat stopped.
A small flat sound came from the machine. The nurse moved past me and turned them off, one at a time, the way you turned off lamps in a room you were leaving.
The room went silent for the first time since I had walked into it.
I did not move.
I sat there with my forehead against the side of his face and my hand around his hand and I understood, in the silence, that he was gone. That the thing I had been talking to for the last three hours had been listening or had not been listening, and either way it did not matter now, because the listening was over.
Something opened inside my chest. Not broke. Opened. The way a door opened when the lock had been holding for a very long time and the lock had finally given.
I made a sound I had never made before. It came from somewhere below my ribs, low and animal and private, and I pressed my face harder into the side of his neck because there was nowhere else in the world to put it. I held his hand against my chest and I felt the weight of it — the full, terrible, permanent weight of a hand that was not going to close around mine again.
I cried the way I had not cried since I was a child. The kind of crying that does not care what it looks like. The kind that uses your whole body. I felt it in my stomach and in my teeth and in the dress that was still on me, the fine dress, the ridiculous dress, pressed against the side of his bed while my shoulders shook and shook and I could not make them stop.
The nurse did not touch me. She stood at the door and she let me have it. She had done this before. She knew what the sound meant.
I do not know how long it lasted.
When it was over I was still holding his hand. My face was wet against his neck. The room smelled like hospital and like him — underneath the hospital, still him, still the soap he used, still the skin I had pressed my face into a thousand times in the dark.
I sat up. I wiped my face with the back of my hand. I looked at him.
He looked like he was sleeping. That was the cruelest thing. He looked like the version of him I had watched for years from the other side of our bed — mouth soft, eyelids still, the face he made when the day was done and he had given it back.
I put his hand down on the sheet. I pressed my palm flat against his chest one last time. I felt the stillness where the heartbeat had been.
"Okay," I said, to no one, to him, to the room. "Okay."
I stood up. I walked out.
Finn and Asher stood at the same time.
Aurora was on the chair beside Finn, asleep under his jacket. Nora was beside Leo, both of them upright, watching me come through the door.
I did not say it. I shook my head once.
Asher made a small sound I will not remember the shape of. Finn did not make a sound. He went very still, the way a man went still when the thing he had been bracing for arrived and was worse than the bracing. Nora put her face in her hands. Leo bent forward over his own knees.
Asher reached me first. He did not put his arms around me. He understood that I would come apart if he held me, and that I could not yet afford to come apart. He put his good hand against the side of my arm. That was it.
I leaned into it for one second. I straightened up.
"I want her at home," I said, my voice scraped down to something I did not recognize.
Asher nodded once. "We will do the small thing here. We fly when you are ready."
"Tomorrow," I told him.
He did not argue. None of them did.
The Italian service was small. A priest who had not known him spoke gently in two languages. Cypresses behind a stone chapel. White flowers on the box. Aurora in a dark blue dress in my arms, with the rabbit in hers, watching everything with a face that did not crack once.
She did not ask where he was. She had stopped asking the night before.
We flew home the next morning. Aurora slept on me for most of the flight. I did not sleep.
The formal funeral was the one I had to be a person for. Liam had been a public man, and a public man got a public goodbye.
I wore black. Aurora wore navy. She was three feet tall and the most composed person in the cathedral.
Jackson was four pews back. Dark suit. Neutral face. He looked at the front of the room where his son was, and at the end of the service he stood, nodded once toward the front row, and walked out.
He did not approach me. He did not approach her. That was its own kind of move. I noted it. I filed it. Later.
We came out into a press scrum. Aurora was on my hip. Finn on my left, Asher a step ahead, moving me through the crowd.
In the car, Aurora fell asleep against my chest.
I noticed, then — for the first time, allowing it through — that Asher was in the front seat and Finn was in the back beside me, and that this had not been planned out loud by any of us.
It had simply happened. It had been happening since the corridor.
I closed my eyes. I did not say it out loud.