Chapter 2: The Empty Inhaler

Eleanor took the phone out of Iris's hand and threw it at the corridor wall.

It broke in three pieces, and the screen went on cracking after it landed, a small ticking sound. A nurse passing with a tray looked at the three of them and sensibly kept walking.

"You will not run to some lawyer," Eleanor said, brushing a splinter from her sleeve. "You are a guest in this family, Iris. Guests don't threaten the host."

"Six years and I'm still a guest." Iris crouched, picked the SIM card out of the wreckage and shut her fist on it. "Good. Guests can leave."

"With what? The house is mine, the cards are mine, this wing is paid for by the foundation I chair." Eleanor smiled with half her mouth. "I froze your accounts while you were still on that ballroom floor."

Iris turned to her husband. Damian was leaning on the wall with his arms folded, looking at the pieces of the phone and nowhere else.

"You knew."

"Mother handles the family money."

"Theo's medicine comes out of those accounts."

"Then you should have thought of that before you hit me in front of four hundred people." He touched his cheek, where a faint pink mark was left. "Sign the statement, Iris, and everything switches back on."

She waited for it to hurt, the old thing that had sat in her chest through six years of empty chairs. What she noticed instead was that her feet were cold. She had lost a slipper somewhere between the car and the ballroom and had been walking on one bare foot all night.

"Keep the cards," she said.

Behind them a door clicked, and a thin voice said, "Mommy?"

Theo stood in the doorway in a hospital gown with the IV pole dragging behind him and one hand pushed deep into the pocket. Iris reached him in three steps and went down on her knees.

"You should be in bed, baby."

"I heard shouting." His eyes went past her to the end of the corridor. "Is Daddy mad at me?"

Damian pushed off the wall and crouched, smiling stiffly. "Hey, champ. Nobody's mad. Come here."

Theo stepped back so fast he tangled the IV line, and his hand clamped tighter inside the pocket. Iris saw it, and Damian saw it too. His eyes dropped to the little fist, to the shape of a plastic cap pushing against the cotton, and the smile left his face by degrees, like lights going off room by room.

"Why is he hiding that from me?"

"Ask yourself," Iris said.

"I didn't cough on purpose, Daddy." Theo's chin was shaking. "I tried to stop. I'm sorry."

Damian opened his mouth and nothing came out of it. Iris watched him look for a sentence, any sentence, and not find one. It was Eleanor who found one.

"That's enough sentiment. Nurse, take the boy back to bed."

Iris stood up and stepped in front of her son. She didn't say anything, she just stood there, and the nurse who had started forward stopped.

The far door swung open, and a grey-haired man in a creased tuxedo came down the corridor holding a clear evidence bag. "Mrs. Hale," Dr. Aldous said, and the look on his face made Eleanor's smile slide off. "A word. Now, in private."

*****

His office smelled of cold coffee. A man in a wet overcoat was already in the visitor's chair with a briefcase on his knees, and the grey under his eyes said he had driven all night on one sentence and a dead phone line.

"Ready to sign," Elias Vance said quietly. "That was all you said. It was enough."

Aldous locked the door and put the bag on the desk. The blue inhaler lay in it.

"When did he last use this?"

"At six. I held it to his mouth myself and nothing came out, I thought it was the asthma, I thought..."

"Nothing came out because there was nothing in it." He tilted the canister under the lamp. "It's empty. Not used up. Someone drained it and glued the cap back on so it would still rattle."

Iris didn't say anything for a while. She was looking at the little blue thing and counting how many mornings she had slipped it into the pocket of his school bag herself.

"Someone knew he'd reach for it," she said.

"Someone knew he would trust it." Aldous rubbed his face. "I have a girl his age at home. She uses one of these every morning before school and I've never once thought about what's inside it." He set the canister down very carefully. "With lungs like his, an hour without medicine can be survivable if he's lucky. He wasn't lucky. He was at a ball with a cardiologist at table nine."

Vance opened his briefcase and took out a single page. His hand wasn't quite steady. "There's something else, and you should sit. Eleanor's petition for temporary custody was stamped by the family court at seven forty tonight."

"He collapsed at a quarter past eight."

"She filed thirty-five minutes before."

Nobody said anything. Iris thought of Eleanor at table one, buttering a roll, with the petition already sitting in a judge's tray across town.

Through the narrow glass panel in the door she could see the corridor, and in it three people standing side by side under the white light. Eleanor, upright, hands folded. Damian, hands in pockets, eyes on the floor. Vivienne, who had not been there ten minutes ago, in a camel coat over the silver dress, resting one hand lightly on his shoulder.

Vivienne looked up as if she had felt it. She found Iris through the glass and smiled, a small patient smile, the kind you give someone who is only just beginning to understand.

Eleanor was smiling now too, and Damian, who hadn't looked up once, didn't have to. Iris went from one face to the next and could not tell which of them had emptied her son's inhaler.