Chapter 39:

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The blade had punctured his liver.

Darcy learned this in a hallway from a surgeon who spoke in the flat, efficient cadence of someone delivering information they’ve delivered many times. Severe hemorrhage. Emergency surgery. Uncertain prognosis. The words passed through her like radio signals, landing somewhere she’d process them later.

Nell sat on the hallway bench with her legs hanging off the edge, Grant’s blood still on her hands because nobody had thought to wash them yet. She was quiet. Not the forced quiet of the last year—the numb quiet of a child in shock.

The surgery took five hours. Darcy sat with Nell’s head in her lap and watched the light above the operating room door and didn’t move. A nurse brought water. Darcy took it and didn’t drink it.

𝖮r𝗀аn𝗶𝘻𝗲 𝘺𝘰u𝗿 𝗹𝗶𝗯r𝖺𝗋𝘆 о𝘯 𝗴a𝗹𝗇o𝘷е𝗅𝘀.𝗰o𝘮

They wheeled him out at midnight. Eyes closed. Face the color of the sheets. The ventilator did his breathing for him, a mechanical rhythm that sounded nothing like a person.

Darcy leaned close to his ear.

“Grant, Nell just got you back. You can’t leave her again.”

No response.

“Daddy, wake up.” Nell stood on her toes to see over the bed rail. “I want to play with you. I’ll call you Daddy every day. I promise.”

Nothing.

They moved him to the ICU. Darcy signed forms. Nell fell asleep in a chair. A doctor explained that the next seventy-two hours were critical, and then the next seventy-two after that, and Darcy understood that critical was a word doctors used when they didn’t want to say the other word.

Day two. Day three. Day four.

Darcy didn’t leave. She slept in the chair when her body forced her to, ate when the nurses brought trays, and spent the rest of the hours watching the monitors and holding Grant’s unbroken hand—the left one, the one that still worked—not because she’d forgiven him but because Nell needed to see that someone was there, and because letting go felt like giving permission for something she wasn’t ready to permit.

Nell talked to him. Every day, for hours. She told him about Mr. Hops and the space vet plan and the girl at school who shared her crackers. She told him about the french fries and how the third batch was acceptable but the fourth batch, whenever he made it, had better be good. She told him about the purple doll, which she’d named Violet, and about how Violet was waiting for her back at the hotel.

On the fifth day, her voice went hoarse. On the sixth, she could barely whisper. On the seventh, she sat beside the bed in silence and held his fingers and stared at his face with an intensity that made Darcy’s chest ache.

“Mommy, why won’t Daddy wake up?”

Darcy pressed a cold towel against Nell’s swollen eyes.

“He will.”

“I’m scared. I don’t want him to die.”

Darcy looked at Grant—the monitors, the tubes, the stillness of a body that was alive only in the technical sense—and felt something crack.

“Grant.” Her voice came out harder than she intended. “If you don’t wake up, we will never forgive you.”

She meant it. Both parts. The threat and the we.

His fingers moved.

It was small—a twitch, a contraction, the kind of reflex that could mean anything or nothing—but Nell felt it in her hand and gasped.

His eyelids fluttered. Once. Again. The room’s fluorescent light hit his pupils and he winced, turning his head an inch to the side, and his mouth formed a shape before the sound arrived.

“Darcy. Nell.”

“Daddy!” Nell was on her feet, leaning over the rail, laughing and crying at the same time. “Daddy, you’re awake!”

“I’m sorry I made you worry.”

“We should thank you.” Darcy’s voice was controlled. Her eyes were not. “Thank you for saving us.”

He tried to smile. It came out wrong—lopsided, weak, the smile of a man who barely had the muscles for it—and Darcy had to look away because if she kept looking at him she was going to say something she wasn’t ready to say.

“I’m going to get the doctor.”

She walked out of the room. In the hallway, with the door closed behind her, she put her back against the wall and let the tears come. They’d been waiting for seven days.

Grant’s condition stabilized. The surgeon said he was out of danger. The word danger had been replaced by recovery, which was a word Darcy preferred.

She booked two flights to Carrow.

She didn’t say goodbye in person. She left a message with the nurse’s station, and she sent Grant a text from the airport—the first time she’d voluntarily contacted him since leaving the villa a year ago.

“Grant, I won’t prevent you from seeing Nell. Please spend time with her whenever you can. She needs her father.”

A pause. Then a second message, sent before she could reconsider:

“Take care of yourself.”

She powered off her phone and boarded the plane with Nell asleep against her shoulder, and somewhere in a hospital bed six hundred miles behind them, Grant read both messages and held the phone against his chest with his one good hand and closed his eyes.

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