Chapter 17
Three Bodies
ALISTAIR
I don't remember the drive.
I am aware of Henderson beside me, the car moving, the roads, but none of it registers as anything other than distance between me and the hospital, distance that is closing too slowly, distance that is the only thing standing between me and knowing whether my small family is alive.
Three bodies.
The security operative's voice on the phone, controlled, but only just. I'm seeing three bodies. Three. Ivy, Alex, Brumilde. All three of them in that house when the nursery wall came down. All three of them on the floor when his men got inside.
I have been a controlled man my entire adult life.
Control is not something I practice; it is something I am, something built into the architecture of me by necessity and by loss and by twenty years of being the person in the room who can’t afford to come apart.
I’ve held myself together through things that would have broken other men and I have done it without effort because the alternative was never available to me.
Right now it’s taking everything I have.
Henderson pulls up outside the entrance. I am out of the car before it has fully stopped.
The hospital smell hits me first: antiseptic, recycled air, the particular quality of a building full of people at their worst moments—and I am moving through it before my eyes have adjusted to the light, Henderson at my shoulder, his voice low and fast acquiring information from the desk, a bay number, a direction, and then I am walking down a corridor that is too long, past curtained bays, past a nurses' station, past everything that is not her.
Henderson stops outside a curtain.
I push through it.
Ivy is on the bed.
Alive.
She’s covered in dust and blood, but she’s alive. The word arrives in my chest like a physical thing—enormous, almost violent in its relief—and for one suspended second I stand in the entrance of the bay and look at her and feel it move through me from the top of my skull to the soles of my feet.
Head wound dressed—white gauze, blood at the edge of it they haven't cleaned away. Pale. A scrape along her jaw. An IV line in the back of her hand. Eyes open. Looking at me.
I cross the room and sit in the chair beside the bed and take her hand—carefully, around the IV—and we look at each other for a long moment and neither of us speaks.
Her fingers tighten around mine.
Something in me that has been held very tightly since the security line rang simply lets go.
A fracture, clean and quiet. I drop my head forward for just a moment and breathe and then I bring it back up because she is looking at me and I’m not going to do this in front of her, I’m not going to make her comfort me when she is the one in the hospital bed.
She reaches up and puts her hand on my face and I turn into it and close my eyes and allow myself—precisely one moment—to feel the full weight of what this day has been.
Elena's face. The security line. Three bodies.
The drive. I hold it for that one moment and then I put it somewhere I can deal with later and open my eyes.
“Hey,” she says softly.
“Hey,” I say.
She is watching me.
“She's gone,” I say. “Elena. It's finished.”
Something moves across Ivy's face—relief and grief and the complicated thing that lives between them.
“Thank you,” she replies.
Her gratitude makes me flinch. I may have eliminated the threat, but at what cost?
A nurse appears at the curtain.
She is carrying Alex.
I spring up, more relief flowing through me as I see the small restless weight of him in the nurse's arms, one fist working at the air—and the feeling is a second wave, enormous, crashing through whatever was left of my composure.
There is a dressing on his forehead, too, white and neat, and I don't ask what's underneath it.
Not yet. The nurse says something in a soft Scottish accent: concussion, mild, he'll need to stay overnight for observation, there's a laceration that’s been stitched, poor bairn—and Ivy is already reaching for him.
He goes to her immediately. Both hands reaching, tucking his face into her neck, and she holds him against her chest with the careful intensity of a woman who has been thinking about nothing else since she woke up in an ambulance.
I put my hand on his back.
I can feel his breathing. Small, even, steady.
“Brumilde?” Ivy asks, into the quiet, without looking up.
“Still in surgery,” I say, repeating Henderson’s urgent whisper from moments ago.
After a while Ivy's eyes begin to close. She doesn’t fight it. I watch as she drifts away, then take the sleeping baby Alex and settle back into the chair, cuddling him close.
“I won’t leave your side,” I say to her sleeping form.
Ivy's hand in mine. Alex warm against my chest.
I look at her face against the pillow and remember the first time I saw her.
Canary Wharf. A protest outside my building: placards, chanting, the neon green paint they'd hurled at the base of our logo. The blast was nothing I could have predicted or prevented. I watched the crowd panic and scatter. I watched her fall.
She had been trying to get up when I reached her—stubborn even then, even bleeding, even barely conscious—and I caught her before she went down again and she looked up at me with those eyes and the low sun was behind her and she said something about hallucinating and I thought: this woman is going to be a problem.
I was not wrong about that.
I rescued her from an explosion that had nothing to do with me, but I put her in the path of one that did.