36

MIKE WAS SURE it was a dream. He felt a hand in his, and he’d opened his eyes just a crack. They didn’t seem to open much more than that. His face felt as if it had been inflated to twice its size, even his eyelids felt bloated. But when he focused he saw Ginny, bending low. He blinked to clear the milky paste from his vision. She was still there, whispering his name and telling him her name. She looked impossibly beautiful, so far beyond even his fondest recollection of her that he had to doubt his sight. She had changed somehow, in ways he could not put into words. She was plainer without the makeup and finery, but her beauty seemed to shine like an Edison bulb.

She was saying something. It was hard to understand. The ringing in his head made her urgent whisperings blend—syllables ran in unnatural ways, and sentences had no start or end. But he could see the feeling in her eyes and the care carved across her brow. He knew that what she was telling him was true. He didn’t need words to know that.

Mike wished he could talk. He tried, but when he moved his tongue and jaw, he was paralyzed with pain. The lower half of his face was swaddled in bandages and his tongue was a dead thing in his mouth. Everything hurt with a throbbing ache that went deep into the bone. He wanted to tell Ginny how sorry he was and how guilty he felt for not finding her. He’d tried, though his efforts seemed puny and halfhearted now. It had been his job to find her and he hadn’t done it. He understood as he watched her face that everything else should have come second to that. All that had happened in the last weeks, everything that had seemed so all-consuming, he knew to be almost trivial by comparison. He made a silent promise to himself and to Ginny that if he survived she would never come second again. He gripped her hand, and looked in her eyes, tears running into his bandages, hoping she knew.

With a sudden surge of energy, he realized what he had to do while he still held consciousness. He signed for a pen and paper, and Ginny, understanding almost immediately, produced both after a brief absence. It took nearly every ounce of his energy and focus and will, but Mike brought the paper close and with a dead hand wrote, “Read your diary. I love you, too!”

Ginny took it from his trembling hand, now so weak it fell to the sheet, laudanum and shock leaving him limp after so small an effort. She read it and even as he slipped into unconsciousness he heard a sound escape her lips, the wordless sound of love.

*   *   *

“You’ll have to leave now, miss,” a voice said from the door. Ginny squeezed Mike’s hand and kissed his forehead. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” she said, holding back her tears until she turned away.

Ginny went out into the hallway, not certain what she should feel. Half of her was elated that Mike was even alive. Half was so deeply uneasy about his condition that her fears nearly overcame her hope. The sight of Mike’s head, shrouded in bandages, his eyes swollen nearly shut, his shaking hands, had nearly unnerved her. Still, she held tight to his note, a life raft in the storm.

An arm went round Ginny’s shoulder and she started. “You’ll come home with us.” Mary said in a gentle yet unyielding voice, a tone that left no room for debate. She noticed the paper Ginny held. Mary didn’t ask what it held. Ginny felt she knew.

Mary and Ginny walked down the echoing tiled hallway, the hospital lights like halos at intervals in each direction. Tom waited at the end, giving them the space Mary had asked for. “I’ll have someone fetch your clothes,” she said. “You can get settled in the spare room. It’s really quite nice.” She somehow felt it necessary to reassure Ginny on that point, though she needn’t have bothered.

Mary took Ginny’s silence for trepidation, but it wasn’t that at all. It was closer to bewilderment, the feeling that her world had shifted and would not shift back, that everything she’d known had gone under the waves and she’d been deposited on some distant shore. She’d been washed up sputtering, exhausted, and gritty with the sand of her past.

“Thank you, Miss Mary,” was all she could muster.

Neither Mary nor Ginny noticed the figure across the street from the hospital entrance when they climbed into Mary’s carriage, but Tom let his eye linger on the dark silhouette, while his hand rested on the butt of his revolver. He thought about Mike for an instant, but there was a police guard on his door, so he forced himself to relax.

Carl lounged against the back of a coal wagon, watching them leave. He blew a last smoke ring and ground his cigarette against the back of the wagon with something between a sigh and a growl. Even he could not have said which.