CHAPTER 4: THE COLLAPSE

"Easy for you, Alden. Your marriage is perfect."

Ansel said it to the phone on the shelf, not to him. He hadn't moved since he'd flipped it over, and the words came out flat and fast, as if they'd been sitting in his mouth for a while.

Alden had spent the last half-minute trying to stop exactly this. He had watched Ansel smile at that screen, and he had watched Nerys watch him do it, and he had reached for the only tool he'd ever trusted.

"On the bright side," he'd said, "you've just set the record for the fastest pregnancy in history. Usually takes nine months."

Nerys had snorted before she could stop herself. Della's mouth had twitched. Ansel hadn't even blinked.

Now he looked up. His eyes were red at the edges.

"Mate," Alden said. "I'm only trying to help."

"I know you are. That's the problem." Ansel jabbed a finger in the air between them. "You two walk around like you've got an instruction manual. You never fight. You finish each other's sentences."

"We fight," Della said quietly from the far rail.

"You joke. It's the same thing with better lighting."

Alden almost laughed. It came out as a cough. Never fight. He had just been dragged across a dance floor by his sleeve and shut in a cupboard. He thought of the phone in his own pocket, and what he'd done on it that morning, the one thing Della still didn't know about.

If you only knew.

He felt her eyes on the side of his face. He kept his own on Ansel.

"I'm not going to argue about whose marriage is better," he said. "We've been married a few hours. It's a bit early to keep score."

"That's exactly what someone with a perfect marriage would say."

"Ansel," Nerys said, in a voice like a dropped plate. "Stop talking."

From the main hall, a woman screamed.

It was high and raw, and it cut straight through the music. Then glass broke, a long crash of it, and the track stuttered and died. In the silence that followed, two hundred people started shouting at once.

Nobody decided to run. They were just all in the corridor, then at the double doors, then through them.

The ballroom was a wall of backs. Alden shoved his way in with his elbows, saying "Sorry, sorry, let me through, please," and a handbag caught him in the ribs. Then the crowd opened, and he saw the cake table. The bottom tier had tilted sideways. A knife lay on the parquet in a smear of white icing, and next to it, flat on her back, lay his mother.

One hand was pressed to her chest, fingers spread. The other arm was flung out wide. Her pearls had slipped sideways. A woman in a green fascinator was fanning her face with a menu, and a man he half recognised kept saying "Give her air, give her air" while standing so close that nobody could.

"Mum!"

Alden dropped to his knees. His trousers skidded on a patch of spilled champagne. He took her free hand, and it was cold, and some small part of him noted that her hands were never cold.

"Mum. Look at me. Can you hear me?"

Her eyes opened slowly. They found his face. Her lips moved.

"My heart," she whispered.

Something dropped in his stomach. "Somebody call an ambulance!" he shouted, and half the room pulled out phones. "Now! Please!"

"Already on it!" a man called back.

"What happened?" Alden demanded of the faces above him. "Did she fall? Did anyone see?"

"She went down right by the cake," the woman in the fascinator said, round-eyed. "She was perfectly fine. Then she just went."

A shape knelt beside him, a rustle of white satin and a smell of freesias. Della's hand landed on his shoulder, and he leaned into it without thinking. She was breathing fast. He could feel it through her palm.

"Marguerite," Della said. "It's Della. Can you hear me? Did you hit your head?"

Marguerite's eyes slid toward her, then away again. She didn't answer.

"Mum, stay with me," Alden said. "You're all right. I'm here."

"Don't go," Marguerite whispered. Her fingers closed round his wrist, and they were strong, much stronger than they should have been for someone who couldn't breathe.

"I'm not going anywhere," Alden said.

The ambulance took eleven minutes. Alden counted every one. He kept saying her name, and he kept rubbing her cold hand, and by the time the blue light swung across the ballroom windows he had four crescent-shaped marks on his wrist where her nails had been.

Two paramedics pushed through the crowd, a tall woman and a stocky man carrying a green bag. "Right, everyone back, please. Give us some room."

They were quick and kind. Oxygen mask, a clip on her finger, a rapid string of questions. "Any history of heart trouble, love? Chest pain? Pain in the arm?" Marguerite nodded at some questions and shook her head at others, and Alden couldn't tell which were which.

"Are you family?" the woman asked him.

"I'm her son," Alden said.

"We're taking her in to get her checked. It's probably just a precaution, but I'd rather she was seen." She was already raising the rails on the stretcher. "One of you can come in the back."

Della was on her feet before the sentence finished. "I'll come. I'm his wife."

She said it, and it landed, and for a second, in the middle of all that noise, Alden felt the weight of the word. She stepped forward, both fists full of her skirt.

Marguerite's hand shot out from under the blanket and caught his wrist again.

"Not her."

It came out rasping through the mask. The male paramedic glanced down, startled.

"Please," Marguerite said. Her eyes had filled. They looked huge and wet and frightened. "Not her. Just you, Alden. Please."

Nobody spoke. Alden felt every face in the ballroom turn toward them. He looked at his mother's hand, and then at Della, standing there in her wedding dress with her chin lifted, waiting.

Say we'll both go. Say it. Say we're married, and I'm riding with my wife.

He opened his mouth.

"Only room for one in the back anyway, love," the male paramedic said gently. "Sorry. We need the space."

Marguerite made a thin, wavering sound, almost a sob.

Della looked at him. It lasted a second, maybe two. He watched her read all of it: the grip on his wrist, the paramedic, his silence.

"Go," she said.

"Della—"

"Go, Alden." Her voice was steady. Her eyes were not. "She needs you."

They wheeled his mother out through the lobby and down the venue steps into the night. Alden climbed in after the stretcher, ducking under the frame, and sat on a narrow bench with his knees against the rail. The doors swung shut with a heavy double thud. The engine turned over, and the siren whooped once.

He twisted round to look through the little rear window.

Della stood at the top of the venue steps in her wedding dress, the white skirt lit up blue and red, blue and red, blue and red. She hadn't moved. She hadn't waved. She stood small and straight with her hands hanging empty at her sides.

The ambulance turned the corner. She got smaller, and then there was a wall, and then there was only a dark window.

Alden turned back. His mother's eyes were closed, her breathing quiet and even behind the mask.

He realised he hadn't told Della he'd call.