Will wiped his tears and climbed onto the bed beside me. We lay there together in the candlelight. He told me what had happened while I was gone, about the mobile team’s operations, the evidence they’d gathered, and the hours of silence when they didn’t know if I was alive or dead.
“The Baroness kept everyone focused,” he said. “She kept us working on the photographs and organizing the evidence, but I could see it on her face. She didn’t think you were coming back.”
“Did you?”
He was quiet for a moment.
“I had to,” he said finally. “If I let myself believe you weren’t, I . . . I couldn’t have kept going.” His fingers trailed absently across my bare chest, tracing the outline of my bandage without actually touching it. “And you were so pale and so cold and limp and lifeless—”
“I don’t remember any of that.”
“I know. You were unconscious. You kept mumbling about photographs, about keeping the film dry.” A shaky laugh. “Even half dead, you were thinking about the mission.”
“The mission matters.”
“You matter more.” He said it fiercely, a declaration. “You matter more to me than any mission or any country or—” He stopped himself. “Iknow that’s not how we’re supposed to think. I know the job comes first. I can’t . . . I just—”
“Will.”
He looked at me.
“I know,” I said. “Baby, I know.”
Something shifted in his face.
The tension that had been holding him together like tattered thread ripped apart, and I watched him crumble. It wasn’t so much a falling apart, but a letting go.
All the fear and grief he’d been carrying for hours poured out of him in a rush of tears he no longer tried to hide.
I held him while he cried.
It was all I could do.
My body was too weak for anything else, my mind still foggy and slow, but I could hold him. I could be here. I could be alive beside him.
Eventually, his tears faded.
Will wiped his face with the edge of the top sheet, embarrassed, but I pulled him back before he could retreat.
“Don’t,” I said. “Don’t apologize. You don’t have to pretend you’re fine.”
“I’m supposed to be the steady one.”
“Says who?”
He laughed weakly. “I don’t know. Me, I guess.”
“Well,you’re wrong.” I pulled his head down and kissed his forehead. “You’re allowed to fall apart, especially over me.”
“Especially over you,” he repeated. “Is that an order?”
“If it needs to be.”
He settled back down into the crook of my good arm, and we lay there a while longer, the candles burning low and the sky outside the window shifting from black to gray. I could hear voices from the kitchen—the Baroness, the American team, Bisch. The world going on without us.
“I should go out there,” Will said eventually.
“I know.”
