I can smell wintergreen…
And when I take a trembling step forward, hands outstretched, they find a warm chest I know all too well.
“You’re dead,” I whisper. “They said you were dead.”
Bastian pauses. Breathes. Then he says, “Looks like they were wrong.”
11
ELIANA
rescue /'res?kyo?o/: verb
1: to fix a broken sauce by whisking in fresh ingredients until the emulsion holds again.
2: this is a really bad idea, right?
There’s a moment when everything feels whole again.
I press my palms flat against his chest, just like I did that first night in his office when I stumbled into him in the dark. My fingers spread across the crisp cotton of his shirt, feeling the steady rise and fall of his breathing.
Back then, I’d been practicing blindness. Now, Iamblind, and touch is all I have to confirm he’s not another hallucination conjured by grief and exhaustion.
His heart beats beneath my hands. Strong and steady, just like the ultrasound said about our baby’s. One hundred and sixty beats per minute for the little one. Maybe forty for Bastian, if that. Two hearts, both still going.
Both.
Still.
Going.
“You’re really here,” I whisper.
“I’m here.”
My hands move up to his shoulders, his neck, his jaw, all that familiar terrain. The slight stubble. The razor’s edge of his cheekbone. The warmth of his skin.
He’s not dead. Bastian is not dead.
Which means everything I thought I knew about the last few hours is wrong.
Which means…
… the wholeness shatters.
“You let me think you were dead,” I grit out. “I went to yourfuneral, Bastian.”
“I can explain?—”
“I stood in that cathedral!” My hands shove against his chest. He doesn’t budge an inch, which only makes me angrier. “I listened to strangers talk about you like they knew you, as if they had any fucking clue who you really were, and the whole time, I thought—” I shove him again, harder this time. “I thought you were fuckingdead.”
The heartbreak hits me all over again, but this time, it’s tangled up with a temper so hot I can feel it burning through my veins.Imournedhim. I cried myself sick thinking about how I’d never get to tell him about our?—
No. I can’t think about that now. If I do, I’ll truly lose it.
More importantly, he doesn’t deserve to know.
“Do you have any idea what you put me through?” My hands are shaking so violently I have to press them against my thighs to quell the tremors. “I heard it on the news. And I just—I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’tthink. And then I had to sit there and pretend everything was fine while?—”
