I want to scream, to yell, to demand to know why suddenly no one can say anything except my name, but anxiety has tightened around my neck like a noose, so I don’t do any of those things.
‘Tell me,’ I snarl, my eyes darting between the two men. They share a look that doesn’t reassure me in the slightest.
It’s Bram who speaks first. ‘He’s not dead,’ he manages to say, one inked hand tugging so hard at the roots of his hair that I’m a little concerned he might pull it out.
Pure fear slices through me, my mind running a montage of traumatic life moments so vivid that I can almost see them. ‘Not yet?’
‘We…’ He exhales roughly. ‘They don’t know yet. He…’
He can’t finish. He can barely start.
Fuck, this isbad.
Cam lays a solid hand on Bram’s shoulder before he turns his attention to me. ‘There was an accident,’ he says, in a tone I’ve heard him use countless times before. It’s his bad-news voice.
Suddenly I’m cast back to 1873, hearing those exact words from a then-teenage Cam, his stricken face blackened with jet dust and smoke. I can still remember the pounding of my heart in my ears and the rise of bile in my throat.
Cam’s voice just about makes it through the flashback, but I don’t hear everything, just odd words here and there.
Head injury.
Swelling.
Medically induced coma.
After that, it’s all white noise. The problem with working in medicine for so long is that I’ve lost the blissful ignorance, the blind hope that he’ll be fine, that he’ll just wake up in a day or three and skip merrily out of his hospital bed. Instead, I see a laundry list of potential complications, a worst-case prognosis, the risk of a whole host of lifelong issues.
Cam is still talking, but somewhere along the line I’ve stopped listening. I can’t stand here and listen to him tell me all the ways in which I could lose Quinn, because in my head, it’s already happened.
I’ve lost him, just like I feared I would.
‘Excuse me,’ I say, without looking either at Bram or at Cam. ‘I just need to…’
I don’t finish my sentence before I bolt out of the room and head straight into the accessible toilet in the waiting area, lurching into an unproductive heave over the sink. Myhands grip the porcelain, knuckles whitening with the pressure. Somewhere beyond the door I hear Cam calling my name. I already know I won’t be going back into that room.
In 1873, I ran as fast as my legs would take me to get to Josiah, to be by his side, whatever happened. This time is a little different.
I do run, and the speed my legs will take me is quite a lot faster than it was back then, but I’m not running to get to Quinn.
This time I’m running away.
ChapterTwenty-Seven
QUINN
Ididn’t see it coming.
If you’d have told me about Florence the day I stuck a copy of my divorce paperwork to the front of my fridge, I’d have thought you were talking out of your arse. I was used to love in two dimensions, paper thin and easily torn. I didn’t know it could be like this.
But watching Florence fumble into her clothes this morning in as short a time as possible changed something in me. She’s usually so calm, so in control of herself and of everything, that knowing she let herself unravel in front of me–forme– has me feeling all kinds of feelings.
I told her I was in love with her the other night. I didn’t mean to, but after everything that happened with Albert, I couldn’t hold it in. I’d been saying it in my head for ages, but as soon as the words made it out of my mouth, I was glad I’d held them back, glad I had something to say to her then that felt big enough for the moment.
Because that was the moment I knew it. The moment I knew she was the one.
Look, I know I’ve said it before. I’ve even legally promised my life to someone before, and we know how that turned out. But with Florence, everything is different. I’ve been restless my whole life, never able to switch my mouth off or quieten my brain. I always felt like I was chasing something, or maybe that I was running from it. But with her, everything goes quiet, slows down, makes sense.
I was like a snow globe being constantly shaken, and she’s taken hold of me with those steady hands and set me down on a shelf. And when the snow settled, there was her face, clear as day. And it was everything.