CHAPTER 18
Nothing Else Exists
IVY
I wake up to voices.
Low, familiar—Gregory's particular brand of concerned murmuring, Christopher attempting quiet in the way that never quite works for him, Ariana in the doorway with Henderson's hand at her back. The family has arrived. Of course they have. The Ravenscrofts close ranks around their wounded the way other families make tea. Immediately, instinctively, in quantities that can tip from comforting into overwhelming without much warning.
I love them for it, but I feel like I can’t breathe.
Alistair is looking at me.
“Could we —” I start.
“Yes,” he says.
Saying goodbye to Alex takes longer than anything else.
He is awake. Bright-eyed, the dressing on his forehead white and neat, and he’s already working at it with one determined fist—and when I take him from the nurse and hold him against me, I feel the specific gravitational pull of him, that particular warm solid weight, and I don't want to put him down.
“One night,” says the nurse. “He'll be monitored. He's doing very well.”
I kiss the undressed part of his head—the warm soft part that still smells a little bit like him—and hand him back.
I don't look back when I walk out because if I look back, I won't go.
Outside it has started to rain.
It’s the particular fine English drizzle that can't quite commit to being proper rain but also refuses to stop, the kind that makes the pavements shine and turns every streetlight into a smear of amber. We walk to the car through it and neither of us speaks.
Alistair drives. I sit, head throbbing, with my hands in my lap and watch Canary Wharf slide past the window, the glass towers, the lit-up offices, a Pret that is somehow still open, two men in suits sharing a cigarette under an awning outside a wine bar. A woman in a yellow mac walking a low-slung basset hound who is doing his best against the damp.
Alistair reaches across and takes my hand.
“I'm fine,” I lie.
He says nothing. He knows me too well.
His thumb moves slowly across my knuckles. I watch it and feel something loosen in my chest that has been very tight since I opened my eyes in that ambulance. The rain taps against the window.
I think about Brumilde in surgery. Alex in his cot. The nursery without walls. The email I was going to finish.
Just one more minute.
Alistair's hand tightens on mine. He is watching the road but something in his jaw has changed and his thumb has stopped its slow movement and is pressing into my palm with a deliberate warmth.
I turn my hand over in his and he looks at me then. Just briefly. Just long enough, and pulls over.
The rain drums louder on the roof of the car.
He reaches for me across the centre console, one hand cupping my face, tilting it up, and kisses me. Not gently. Not the careful, checking-in kiss of a man handling something fragile. The other kind. The kind that says:we’re here, we’re alive, and nothing else exists right now.
I make a sound against his mouth and reach for his jacket lapels.
His hand slides from my face to my throat, down my collarbone, across my ribs, unhurried, deliberate, relearning the new version of me, and I arch toward him and he pulls back just enough to look at my face and whatever he sees there makes his eyes turn fierce.
“Ivy.” His hand finds the hem of my dress, what's left of it, creased and dusty from the day, and travels upward along theoutside of my thigh, warm and certain. Goosebumps chase his fingers, my skin prickling under the damp chill seeping through the car windows. I shift in my seat, turning toward him as much as the car allows.
