Lily looked up from where she’d lowered herself onto the edge of a stool, her arm finally dropping from the angle she’d held it at for what felt like forever.
“Beds?”
“Dog beds,” I said. “Temper your enthusiasm.”
Exhaustion ghosted across her face in a smile. “I’d sleep on concrete right now. The actual floor.”
“You don’t have to,” I said. “Come on.”
Moving Finn again was a quiet, careful operation. He didn’t wake, didn’t register it at all, his weight distributed between usas we lowered him onto the bed I’d set up. We adjusted his position until Fiona was satisfied his shoulder sat at the right angle.
I pulled a blanket over him and stood there for a moment, looking at his face.
He looked strange like this. The scar above his eyebrow seemed starker against his pale skin, the dark stubble dusting a jaw that had lost all its usual tension. It was the absolute stillness that was wrong, an absence of animation that made him look like a stranger. Smaller, somehow.
“He’s going to be okay,” Fiona said from beside me, reading whatever had appeared on my face.
I looked at her. “Yeah?”
“I did everything that could be done with what we have,” she said, her voice measured but honest. “Now we need him to wake up. Which he will.”
Fiona looked at me, then at the bed I’d set up a careful distance from Finn’s. A small smile touched her lips. “Libby,” she said, “you can move that.”
I didn’t respond.
“We have eyes,” Lily offered helpfully from across the room, adding in a much quieter voice, “and ears.”
I blushed hard but remained silent.
I moved the bed.
The room settled into an exhaustion-laden silence.
Lily sat on her bed and let out a breath that seemed to come from somewhere cellular. “I don’t think I’ve ever been this tired in my entire life,” she said, and the simple exhaustion in her voice felt like the most honest thing anyone had said all day.
“Same,” I said.
Fiona settled onto the floor beside Finn’s bed, her back against the wall, close enough that her hand rested near his arm without quite touching it—near enough to feel any change,near enough to be there, not quite close enough to disturb him. The cat appeared from the hallway and assessed the room with the practiced authority of something conducting a formal inspection, then chose Lily’s lap with the decisive confidence of a creature that had made its decision.
“We should take shifts,” Lily said, reaching down to stroke the cat’s back. “Like we did at home.”
“I’ll take first,” I said, less an offer than a statement of fact.
Fiona shook her head, her expression leaving no room for argument. “No. You’ve done enough. You need to rest.”
“I’m fine,” I said.
“Libby.” Her gaze was direct, cutting through any protest I might have made. “Your hands haven’t stopped shaking since you came back inside.”
I looked down at them. She wasn’t wrong.
“Okay,” I said, and the word came out with more surrender than I’d intended.
“Get some rest,” she said. “I’ll wake you in two hours, and if anything changes before then, I promise I’ll wake you.”
I looked at Finn one more time: at the steadiness of his breathing, at the blanket I’d pulled over him, at Fiona’s hand resting near his arm.
Then I moved to the space next to him, lowered myself onto the bed, and pulled a blanket around me.
