Chapter Twenty-Two
Dan is wandering frantically in a hospital. Sweating, panicked.
There are no signs on the walls and he’s looking for the emergency room.
He can hear an ambulance siren, but he just can’t figure out where to go. His heart is pumping and he’s sweating with fear. All the time, doctors and nurses are shouting to one another while the siren wails in the background.
Dan can feel the sweat all over his body and he’s exhausted. It’s like his legs are leaden, getting heavier and heavier. Each step is like dragging an enormous weight behind him, but he has to find her. Julia.
He can save her.
Then suddenly, he’s in a room with lots of doctors wearing blue scrubs in front of him. He knows he has to get past them, has to see who or what is on the bed.
‘Julia!’ he cries out. ‘I’m here!’
The crowds part magically and he’s staring down at Julia’s body. It’s not like she’s on a hospital bed – instead she’s lying in a six-foot-long pit in the ground.
Her eyes are closed, her face remains beautifully pale and still, and she’s surrounded by gallons of red blood.
‘No!’ he screams over and over, trying to get into the pit with her. But he can’t.
People hold him back, their hands slick with her blood.
‘Why couldn’t you wait?’ he screams and his voice is hoarse. ‘Why did you do this—?’
Then he comes out of the nightmare as suddenly as he went into it.
There’s no blood-covered Julia, no pit.
He’s had a nightmare.
In reality, he’s in his room in Villa Artemis, with its white walls and the soft turquoise armchair beside the double doors to the balcony, which he left open. The muslin curtains move gently in the half-dawn of Tuesday morning.
He’s utterly shaken. He doesn’t want to go back to sleep in case he falls into that dream again.
He grabs the hated notebook and writes in it:
Tonight I had a nightmare about Julia in hospital. I’m running to find her but I can’t. Up and down all these corridors.
When I find her, it’s too late. She’s covered in blood. She’s dead. In a pit and everyone’s covered in her blood. I feel such anguish, like I’m responsible. Because I’m too late to find her.
Then the realisation hits him.
He was angry with Julia in the dream.
Furious.
How dare she risk her precious life. How dare she make the people who love her suffer.
And yet …
Dan knows there’s a deep grief in Julia that he can never reach. How can he be angry with her when she’s trying to cope with such pain?
Will she ever be able to let go of the pain?
Will he ever be free of it?
Winded at this thought, Dan lies back on the bed.
He probes inside his head, searching for the unaccustomed anger the way he’d reach for a sore tooth with his tongue.
He’s never angry with Julia in real life. He idolises her.
But idolatry is not love.