"It wasn't your fault."
This was a thing to say. Whether it was true was a question I pushed behind the same locked door where I'd put everything else I couldn't afford to feel right now.
"Sophie. You need to go. Your flight."
"I can'tleave—"
"The ambulance is coming. I'm here. You can't do anything here."
She stared at me like she hadn't understood the language.
"I can't leave," she said again, smaller this time. "Nora, I hit him."
"I know." The words came out too sharp. I couldn't soften them. If I softened anything, I was going to come apart. "Give me your keys."
"What?"
"Keys. Insurance. Phone on. If anyone needs you, you answer. But you are shaking so hard you can't stand, and I cannot manage you and him at the same time."
"Nora—"
"Now."
She handed me the keys. Then her wallet. Then her phone, because she couldn't make her fingers work well enough to open the taxi app, so I did it for her. She kept saying, "I should stay," and I kept saying, "You can't help here," until the words stopped meaning anything and became only instructions.
When the taxi stopped at the bottom of the hill, safely away from the slope, its hazards blinking, I shoved her phone and wallet back into her coat pocket, kept the car keys, and got her moving. She made it three careful steps before her knees started to go, so I took her elbow and half-walked, half-slid her down the last stretch, looking back at Ethan every few seconds.
Before the door closed, she looked at me one more time — a look that contained everything she wanted to say and nothing she was able to — and whispered, "Tell them it was me."
The taxi turned the corner and she was gone.
I turned back to Ethan.
He was stillon the ground. Eyes open. Staring at the sky with the focused blankness of a person channeling every available resource into not screaming.
"Hey," I said, kneeling next to him. "Ambulance is coming. Two minutes."
"Cool," he said. His jaw was so tight the word barely made it out. Then: "I think your best friend's car won."
A seam cracked behind my ribs. Not laughter — something adjacent to it, made of a completely different material.
"Don't make me laugh right now."
"I'm not trying to be funny. I'm trying not to cry. Different skill set." He closed his eyes. Opened them. "The brackets."
"What?"
"The shelf brackets. Inside. They were on sale."
I had left them on the counter. They were still inside, next to the remains of pasta and three mugs of wine. Every normal thing from twenty minutes ago, still exactly where we'd left it.
"They're safe," I said.
"Good." His breath hitched. A look moved in his face that was bigger than pain. "That's good."
The siren arrived — thin at first, then sharp, then everywhere.
They didn't just load him. They moved him with a precision that made my stomach drop, one of them talking him through every breath while another cinched a wide strap around his hips before the lift. He winced in a way that restructured his entire face, and one of the paramedics said something in French I caught only half of —fracture probable, bassin— and my brain filed the words without processing them, a bill you can't afford to think about right now.
