Chapter 16
Phil
The first thing I notice is the smell.
Clean. Artificial. The kind of clean that doesn’t belong to places where people actually live.
Antiseptic.
It sits at the back of my throat, sharp and unmistakable.
I keep my eyes closed.
Not deliberately. They just don’t open.
There’s a heaviness to my body that doesn’t feel like sleep. It feels like weight. Like something has been placed on top of me while I wasn’t paying attention.
I try to move my hand.
Pain answers immediately. Deep and insistent and impossible to ignore.
Memory arrives more slowly.
Dark alley.
Footsteps.
Christina’s voice.
The sound of impact.
My eyes open.
The ceiling above me is unfamiliar. White, flat, interrupted by a long fluorescent light that hums faintly to itself. I stare at it for a moment, trying to understand why I’m looking at something that doesn’t belong to my life.
Hospital.
The word settles without resistance.
I turn my head slightly.
That was a mistake.
Pain blooms along the side of my face, spreading outward in slow, controlled waves. I inhale carefully, waiting for it to settle.
It does.
Mostly.
My right arm feels heavy. There’s something attached to it. A tube. A machine beside the bed emits a quiet, regular sound that I recognise instinctively as reassurance.
I’m alive.
The thought arrives without drama.
Just fact.
Something shifts in the chair beside the bed.
I hadn’t realised anyone was there.
“Phil?”
Alex.
His voice is low, steady, and unmistakable.
I turn my head toward him more carefully this time.
He’s sitting beside the bed, leaning forward slightly, his elbows resting on his knees. He looks tired. His hair is flattened on one side like he’s been running his hand through it repeatedly without noticing.
Relief crosses his face when he sees my eyes open properly.
“There you are,” he says quietly.
My throat is dry when I try to speak.
“Christina.”
The word comes out rougher than I expect.
Alex nods immediately.
“She’s fine.”
The tension that had been sitting somewhere behind my ribs loosens slightly.
“She’s here,” he adds. “She just stepped out with Emma. They’ve been here all night.”
All night.
I try to assemble time into something logical.
“What time is it?”
“Just after eight.”
Morning, then.
I nod slightly, the movement small enough not to hurt.
Fragments return in pieces.
The alley.
Her hand in mine.
The man’s voice.
My stomach tightens.
“You shouldn’t be sitting up yet,” Alex says, noticing the shift in my posture.
“I’m not.”
He almost smiles.
There’s a bruise forming along his jaw I hadn’t noticed before.
“What happened?” I ask.
He leans back slightly.
“Ambulance arrived fast. Tommy called them while Chris and Nick made sure the three wankers didn’t come back.”
His voice remains calm, factual. The way it always does when describing something that had the potential to go much worse.
“They’re in custody,” he adds after a moment.
The words don’t register immediately.
“What?”
“The arseholes,” he clarifies. “Police picked them up about half an hour later. Someone at the pub knew their names.”
Of course they did.
Villages like Fellside remember everything.
“They’ve been arrested,” Alex continues. “Assault. Racially aggravated assault.”
The word lands harder than the others.
Not because it’s unexpected.
Because it’s real now.
I close my eyes briefly.
Not from pain. From the weight of it.
“You did exactly what you should have done,” Alex says quietly.
I open my eyes again.
“I didn’t do anything.”
“You stayed between them and her,” he says after a moment.
I don’t answer.
Because there’s nothing to say.
Because there was never another option.
Footsteps approach outside the door.
I hear them before I see her.
Christina appears in the doorway.
She stops when she sees my eyes open.
For a moment, neither of us moves.
Her hair is pulled back loosely, strands escaping around her face like she hasn’t been aware of them. She’s wearing the same clothes from last night. Her eyes look different. Not weaker. Just more aware of things she shouldn’t have had to see.
“Hi,” she says softly.
My chest tightens.
“Hi.”
She walks toward the bed slowly, like she’s afraid sudden movement might undo something fragile.
Emma appears behind her, hovering in the doorway.
Christina reaches the bed and stops. She doesn’t touch me immediately. She looks at my face first.
Her fingers lift slowly and brush against my hand, careful of the IV line.
Her touch is warm.
Real.
“You scared me,” she says.
“I’m sorry.”
Her head shakes immediately. “No.” She tightens her grip slightly. “You don’t apologise for that.”
I study her face.
Looking for damage.
Looking for anything that suggests they reached her.
“You’re okay?”
She nods.
“I’m okay.”
Relief settles into something solid inside me.
Behind her, Emma steps forward.
“You look awful,” Emma says bluntly.
Christina exhales a small laugh.
“That’s not helpful.”
Emma shrugs.
“He knows I mean it affectionately.”
“I do,” I say.
Emma smiles faintly, then steps back again.
Alex clears his throat.
“We’ll give you two a minute.”
He and Emma leave quietly, the door closing behind them.
Christina pulls the chair closer to the bed and sits down.
Her hand never leaves mine.
For a while, neither of us speaks. The machines beside the bed continue their quiet work, indifferent to everything that changed last night. Morning light pushes weakly through the window behind her, catching in the loose strands of her hair and turning them gold.
I watch her.
Just enough to reassure myself she’s still here.
That she isn’t hurt.
That they didn’t take anything from her I can’t get back.
“If you want to leave,” I say.
The words come out before I’ve fully decided to say them.
She looks up.
“Leave?”
“Fellside.”
Her fingers still slightly around mine, but I feel the shift in her attention immediately.
“We could go somewhere else,” I continue. “Somewhere bigger. Somewhere people mind their own business.”
Her expression doesn’t change the way I expect it to. She doesn’t look relieved. She doesn’t look tempted.
She laughs.
It isn’t mocking.
It’s tired and fond and entirely herself.
“Phil,” she says gently, “if I moved every time someone had something to say about my heritage, I’d better invest in a caravan.”
I frown. “I’m serious.”
“I know.” She squeezes my hand slightly. “And I appreciate it.”
She leans back in the chair, studying me.
“But this isn’t new,” she says. “It isn’t specific to Fellside. It isn’t specific to anywhere.”
The words aren’t bitter.
Just factual.
“There are always people who think they get to decide where you belong,” she continues. “That doesn’t mean they’re right.”
I look down at our hands.
“I should have stopped it.”
She shakes her head immediately.
“You did stop it.”
I remember the alley. The sound of fists. The certainty that I couldn’t let them reach her.
“How do we stop it happening again?”
The question sits between us, heavier than anything else we’ve said.
She doesn’t answer immediately.
She thinks about it properly.
“We don’t,” she says finally.
The honesty of it hurts more than I expect.
She shifts slightly in the chair, leaning closer.
“But we make it harder,” she adds.
“How?”
She gestures vaguely, not at the hospital room, but at something beyond it.
“By existing,” she says. “By not disappearing. By not letting people like that decide the shape of our lives.”
Her thumb moves gently against my hand.
“And by having people who show up.”
I know who she means.
Alex.
Emma.
Chris.
Tommy.
Nick.
Rob.
They hadn’t hesitated.
They hadn’t needed explanations.
They’d just come.
“They stood up,” she says quietly. “All of them.”
I nod.
“They didn’t think about it.”
“No.”
She smiles faintly.
“That’s how you reduce the risk,” she says. “Not by running. By belonging.”
The word settles somewhere deep inside me.
Belonging.
I’ve never questioned mine here.
Not until now.
Not until I saw how easily someone else could question hers.
She studies my face.
“You’re part of that,” she says.
“I didn’t do anything special.”
“You did exactly what you needed to do.”
Her voice is calm.
Certain.
She isn’t trying to make me feel better.
She’s telling the truth as she sees it.
I don’t know how to argue with that.
So I don’t.
I just hold her hand.
And stay.