Chapter 5 — Come Pick Me Up

My phone had come out of my coat pocket when I went down, and it was lying under the edge of the cabinet with the screen still lit.

I got two fingers to it and dragged it across the tiles.

The pain came up through my side every time I moved my arm, so I stopped moving my arm and used my shoulder instead, and it took three tries to get her name on the screen.

It rang.

"Aurelia, Finally yo—"

"Tamsin."

I heard her chair go back. I heard her say my name again, and then something else after it, but the words had started coming apart before they reached me and the phone slid out of my hand and hit the floor by my face.

She was still talking when everything went dark.

I opened my eyes to a dark ceiling.

There was a line taped into the back of my hand and a pull down my left side when I breathed, and I got my palm onto my stomach before I was properly awake.

I stared around with a sinking disappointment.

Nobody came.

The chair beside the bed was empty and pushed against the wall, and there was a folded card propped against the water jug with my name on it in Tamsin's handwriting.

Come to my office the moment you're up. We need to talk. — T

I read it twice, and I would rather she had written the worst thing straight out.

A nurse took the line out of my hand and helped me into my clothes and told me twice to take the corridor slowly.

I heeded her advice.

The bandage went from my hip up under my ribs, and it caught every time I put my left foot down.

Tamsin's office was at the end, past the lifts.

I got as far as the third door before I heard a familiar voice.

"Not that one. The other one, with the ice in it."

I stopped.

The door was open. Rosalie was sitting up in the bed with her ankle strapped and raised on a pillow, and my husband was in the chair beside her with a jug in his hand, pouring.

He handed it to her and put the jug back on the tray, and then he looked up at the doorway, and his hand stopped where it was.

"Aurelia?"

He was out in the corridor before I'd turned round, and he took my wrist and walked me past two doors, round the corner by the linen store, out of sight of her room.

"What the hell are you doing here?"

"Let go of me."

"Did you come here for her?" He was keeping his voice down, which was somehow worse than shouting. "Is that it? You've followed her into a hospital?"

I looked at him.

Five years I'd sat across a table from this man but right now I didn’t recognize him.

"I collapsed," I said. "In our hall. Somebody came and got me off the floor and brought me here."

He laughed, one note of it, with nothing in his face.

"You put her on those stairs at midnight, and this morning you turn up on the same corridor, and I'm supposed to call that a coincidence."

"I told you the cabinet caught me. I said it to you in the doorway while you were carrying her out."

"Show me, then."

His hand came up toward my side, and I got mine in the way and pushed it off.

"A doctor's seen it."

"Aurelia—"

"You don't get to stand in my hall and not ask," I said. "And then put your hands on me the next morning because you've decided I might be lying."

He stepped back and dragged his hand through his hair.

"Is this still the dinner?" He said it to the ceiling first, then to me. "I told you I'd make it up to you. I told you last night, I'll have Isaac book anywhere you want. You're taking a marriage apart over a meal."

"Do you know what the dinner was for?"

He opened his mouth.

"Darius?" Rosalie, from inside the room, thin through the wall. "They've come to do the injection. Can you come back? You know what I'm like with needles."

He turned.

I caught his hand.

"There's something I need to tell you," I said. "It won't take a minute, and I need you to hear it before you go through that door."

"If this is about Rosalie again, I don't want it." He was already half turned away. "She's in a bed with her ankle in a strap and you've done enough. Whatever it is, it can wait."

He took his hand out of mine and went back down the corridor, and the door closed behind him.

He never asked what it was.

Neither had he last night, on the step, with his keys in his hand.

All right, then.

He wasn't going to hear it from me.

Tamsin had my file open before I'd got the door shut, and she came round the desk and put me in a chair herself.

"Sit. Don't argue with me, I've been up since one."

She'd been my friend since long before she was my doctor, and she was the only person in that hospital who called me Aurelia without looking at the walls first.

The examination took ten minutes. She was gentle with the bruising and she wasn't gentle with her opinions about the corner of a cabinet, and when she'd finished she washed her hands and sat down on the desk instead of behind it.

"The bruising is bad and it's going to look worse tomorrow, but there's nothing torn and nothing bleeding inside you." She let that sit for exactly one second. "And the pregnancy is fine. It held."

I put both hands over my face.

"Fine as in fine," she said. "But you rest. I mean rest, not the version where you run a house. No stairs you don't need, nothing heavy, and no more nights like last night, because that's the part that worries me."

I nodded into my hands.

"Does he know?"

I took my hands down.

"No."

"Aurelia."

"And he isn't going to." I said it flatly, because if I said it any other way I'd have started crying. "I need you to keep it out of anything he can get his hands on."

Tamsin folded her arms.

"You know how this goes. You can hide it for a few weeks. You cannot hide it from a mate for nine months, and when it comes out it will come out badly, and he will ask why nobody told him."

"He had the chance to be told. Twice last night, and once ten minutes ago in your corridor."

"That isn't—"

"Tamsin."

She looked at me for a long moment. Then she reached back and closed the file.

"Fine. It stays with me."

She didn't get up.

"There's something else." She turned a pen over on the desk. "She came in on the same intake. Hale."

"I know. I've just walked past her breakfast."

"They ran her bloods when she came in." Tamsin put the pen down. "She's pregnant, Aurelia."

The room suddenly became dizzy.

"Gideon has been dead eight months," I said.

"I know how long he's been dead."

I sat there with my hand on the arm of the chair.

He'd taken the glass out of her hand at that table and finished it himself in front of forty men. He'd stood in my living room in the rain and told her she'd only just come out of her heat.

"That doesn't mean it's his," Tamsin said. "You know that. Say it back to me."

I clenched my fists.

"Aurelia—"

"Don't." I got hold of the chair arms and stood up, slowly, because of my side. "Don't say the next part. I know what you were going to say, and I've asked you before not to."

Tamsin shut her mouth.

Then she said, quieter, "He's your husband."

I got my coat over my arm and made myself smile at her.

"He isn't anymore."

I found a dark stretch of corridor past the lifts where no one was passing through. I stopped with my shoulder against the wall and closed my eyes.

The link was still there.

Six months ago, I had been shown how to reach through it. Since then, I had ignored it, convinced that I would never need the person waiting on the other side.

I had never opened it before.

I opened it now.

A familiar voice entered my mind almost immediately.

Aurelia?

My mouth trembled before I could answer. My breath came in wrong, and then I was crying, one hand pressed over my mouth to keep the sound from carrying down the corridor.

My fear must have bled through the link because the voice sharpened.

Aurelia. What happened?

I placed my other hand flat over my stomach.

I’ve made up my mind.

Silence held between us for a second.

Then the voice softened.

Tell me what you need.

I shut my eyes.

Come pick me up.