“So. I am asking you, Ivy. To keep my secret. Please.”
“It's not my secret to tell. I won't tell him. I won't tell any of them.”
She reaches across the desk and takes my hand. She squeezes once, hard, and lets go.
“Thank you, my darling.”
“There you are.”
Alistair's voice behind me. I jolt and turn. He is in the doorway, sweaty from the gym, a towel around his neck.
I smile. “I came for coffee.” My voice sounds normal.
“That's no surprise,” he murmurs, winking at me. My tender parts wake up. God, the man is delicious.
“Come in for a cup, darling,” says Isobel. “We have something to discuss.”
CHAPTER 21
Bloody Jungle
ALISTAIR
After our coffee, Isobel hands over a bundle of flowers the size of a small child that the gardener had just cut from the garden.
“I have some business to take care of this morning. Please take these to Brumilde with my love—they are her favorites.”
Lavender and sweet peas and sprigs of rosemary, and the old-fashioned roses she grows along the south wall. Still wet at the stems. The brown paper is ribboned at the base the way her gardener does it. She is fully dressed but she is not coming. Perhaps she will rest, but knowing my mother, I wouldn’t count on it.
Ivy is quiet on the drive. She doesn’t put her hand on my thigh the way she usually does, and her thumb works at the edge of a nail she has been chewing. The new development with Hargrove is worrying.
The hospital lobby smells of antiseptic mixed with both hope and despair.
Christopher is pacing the corridor outside Brumilde's ward when we get there. He sees me and stops pacing and then starts again. Ariana is on the bench with her hand on the small curve of her stomach, and Henderson is against the wall opposite, and the specific quality of his stillness tells me they have been arguing. He comes forward to shake my hand and give me an update.
A nurse comes out of the ward as I approach, clocks the flowers in my arms.
“That's a lot of garden,” she says. “Come on, give them here—she's got half the florists in Ascot in there already, but we'll find a spot.”
I hand them over. She tells us Brumilde is stable, that she came round briefly in the night and said something about baby Alex which had everyone a bit misty-eyed, and is sleeping again now. No visitors for today. They'll call if there's any change. She takes the flowers into Brumilde's room, which, she informs us over her shoulder, is already, in her professional opinion,a bloody jungle in there.
Ivy laughs, once—a small damp surprised laugh—and I feel the relief of it move through my chest.
Alex is in the pediatric ward three floors up. He is awake, sitting up in his cot, the dressing looking wrong on his forehead. When Ivy comes into his line of sight his face brightens and both his small arms come up at once.
Ivy makes a sob-like noise and crosses to him and lifts him out of the cot. He tucks immediately into her shoulder. I put my hand on his back, and he looks up at me over Ivy's shoulder with those solemn eyes, and for a moment the three of us stand like that.
The discharge paperwork takes half an hour. When we come back down the corridor with Alex asleep in his car seat, Christopher and Henderson and Ariana are exactly where we left them, arranged in the same uncomfortable geometry, none of them having spoken to each other while we were gone.
I set the car seat down carefully beside the bench and take Ivy's hand in mine.
“There's something I need to take care of this afternoon,” I say. “Will you be all right without me for a few hours?”
Ivy looks at me for a long moment, and I watch the decision move across her face. Christopher stands ten feet away pretending not to listen.
Then she says, “No.”
Henderson hears it, too. Of course he does. He turns to Ariana. “Ari.”
