Chapter 19
Eve
It’s been three days since my last email.
Still nothing.
I’ve refreshed my inbox so many times that I could probably do it blindfolded. Each time, I tell myself I won’t check again until later. Each time, I fail within the hour.
I even tried calling him yesterday. The call didn’t connect. Just a click and silence.
There are reasonable explanations, of course. Poor signal. Travel delays. A broken phone charger. But somewhere beneath all the logic is a smaller, meaner voice that won’t shut up.
Maybe he didn’t mean what he said. That maybe his emails were just words sent from far away. Men are good at that, aren’t they? Saying the right things until something easier comes along.
The thought makes my throat tighten, though I try to laugh it off. Aaron isn’t like that. He isn’t. Still, the doubt sits there, sharp and insistent.
By the tenth inbox refresh of the day, I’ve given up pretending to work. My notes blur together, my tea’s gone cold, and my stomach won’t settle.
Then my phone rings.
The sound makes me jump. For a second, I can’t even move. My eyes fix on the screen, half terrified, half hopeful.
Unknown Number.
My first thought is that it could be him. My second is that if it isn’t, I don’t want to know who it is. I hesitate long enough for the phone to nearly stop ringing before I swipe to answer.
“Hello?”
There’s a short pause, then a man’s voice, steady but unfamiliar. “Hello, is this Eve Crawford?”
“Yes,” I say cautiously.
“My name’s Will Harper. I’m a friend of Aaron’s.”
For a moment, everything inside me stills. “Oh. Right. Yes, of course. Hi.”
“I got your number from Jon,” he says carefully. “Jon spoke to Hunter at Morton Hall, and Hunter passed it along to me.”
Something cold twists in my stomach. My mind leaps ahead before I can stop it. “Why? What’s happened? Is Aaron all right?”
There’s a pause—just long enough to confirm what I already know.
“His team was caught in an incident,” Will says, his voice measured but tight. “An IED went off near their convoy.”
I press a hand to my mouth. The room tilts slightly, the edges blurring.
“It took a lot of coordination to get him out,” he goes on quietly. “There was chaos, a lot of negotiation, but we managed to move him across the border into Turkey. That’s why I’m only calling now. I needed to make sure he was safe first.”
My throat feels dry. The words scrape out of me. “Is he… is he okay?”
Will exhales, and that sound alone tells me the answer.
“He’s alive,” he says. “But he’s in a coma. They airlifted him to London yesterday. He’s at St Thomas’.”
For a moment I can’t speak. The words don’t fit in my head—alive and coma colliding until neither makes sense.
“I thought you’d want to know,” he says softly.
I nod, though he can’t see it. “Thank you,” I manage, my voice barely there.
When the call ends, I realise I’m still sitting perfectly still, the phone pressed to my ear, as if moving might make it true. I’m not sure I even breathe.
Then, slowly, I save Will’s number. I type it wrong twice before I manage to get it right. The thought of losing it—of losing that one thin thread of connection to Aaron—is unbearable.
Once it’s saved, I just stare at my contacts list. I scroll aimlessly, like the right name might tell me what to do. Tears sting behind my eyes, my heartbeat loud enough to hear.
Before I can overthink it, I tap Jennifer.
The phone rings once, twice. She answers on the third. “Eve?” Her voice is bright, surprised. “Everything okay? You never call.”
Something in me cracks at that.
“No,” I whisper. “It’s not.”
There’s a pause. “What’s happened?”
And that’s when it all comes out—the call, the incident, the coma, the hospital. The words trip over each other, uneven and desperate. I try to stay calm, but somewhere in the middle of it my voice breaks, tears streaming over my cheeks.
Jennifer goes quiet, just listening. I can hear her breathing on the other end, steady and present.
Then her voice changes, brisk but gentle. “Right. Pack a bag. I’ll be there in forty minutes.”
I blink, wiping at my face. “What? Why?”
“To drive you to London,” she says, as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world.
“Jennifer, no. You’ve got the kids, and—”
“They’ll survive,” she cuts in. “Tom can handle bedtime, and if he can’t, he’ll learn fast. You need to be there.”
“I don’t even know if they’ll let me see him,” I say, though it comes out half-hearted, more from habit than conviction.
“Then we’ll find out when we get there,” she replies firmly. “You’re not sitting alone, staring at your phone all night.”
I press a hand to my eyes. “You don’t have to—”
“Yes, I do,” she says softly. “Now stop arguing and pack.”
The line goes quiet again, but it’s a different silence this time—solid, certain.
When she hangs up, I sit there for a few seconds longer, the echo of her words still in my ear. Then I stand, numb but moving, and start throwing things into a bag without really seeing what I’m packing.
By the time we reach London, the sky has already slipped into evening.
The drive passes in a blur. I barely remember getting in the car, let alone the miles in between. Jennifer doesn’t press for conversation, and I’m grateful. The silence feels like mercy.
I spend most of the journey watching the lights change outside the window, counting them without really seeing them.
My thoughts loop through the same awful reel—the blast, the call, the words he’s in a coma.
Every few minutes I catch myself imagining what he looks like now, and every time I have to force myself to stop.
At some point, I texted Will. The message was clumsy, half mistyped, but he replied almost straight away. He told me Aaron’s in the Private Patients Unit at St Thomas’. He’s already given them my name and told the staff I’m Aaron’s partner, so they’ll let me in.
Seeing those words… Aaron’s partner, made my throat tighten. It should have felt lovely, a small, solid truth. Instead, it just reminded me how fragile everything suddenly is.
When we pull up outside the hospital, the lights catch the car windows, soft and silver. I take a deep breath, unbuckle my seatbelt, and realise my hands are shaking.
Jennifer glances at me. “Ready?”
I nod, even though I’m not. Not at all.
“Only one visitor at a time.”
The nurse says it kindly, but it still feels like a threat. Jennifer squeezes my hand and tells me she’ll wait. I nod and somehow make my legs move.
The corridor feels too long, too bright. When I step into his room, the world narrows to a single sound—the steady rhythm of the machines keeping him alive.
Aaron lies so still it hardly looks like him.
There’s a bandage across his forehead, another wrapping the side of his head.
Cuts mark his face and arms, small but cruel reminders of how close it was.
The machine beside him releases a soft hiss with every breath, and I realise it’s doing the work for him.
For a moment, I just stand there. I want to cry, but the tears won’t come. What I feel isn’t sadness; it’s fear—sharp, consuming fear that I’ll lose him before we even had the chance to start properly.
I move closer, fingers trembling as I reach for his hand. It’s warm, at least. That tiny detail becomes everything.
The knots in my stomach draw tighter. I lean forward, my voice barely above a whisper.
“If you wake up, I’ll stop hiding,” I tell him.
“I’ll move. I’ll travel. I’ll do everything I’ve been too afraid to do.
I’ll be brave for both of us. But I need you to wake up, Aaron.
Because I want to enjoy life with you. Every second. Because you never know when it ends.”
The machines keep their slow, steady rhythm.
And I stand there, holding his hand, trying to believe that he can hear me.