"I wasn't feeling well," she says. "The nurse called. I tried to call you but you didn't—" She stops. Looks at my face. Looks at the door behind me, where Victor has appeared in the frame, and then back at me. "The lamp fell," she says. "I knocked it getting into bed."
I cross the room in four steps and sit on the edge of her bed and put my hands on her face and look at her — checking her the way I always check her, the rapid inventory of eyes and color and breathing that I have been running since the day I took her out of that house. She is pale but not alarmingly so. She is home, and she is whole, and the lamp is on the floor, and she is here.
"You're okay," I say.
"I'm okay," she repeats, then says. "You're the one who looks terrible."
"Thank you, Evie."
"I mean it in a caring way."
I pull her into me and hold on, and she lets me, and over her shoulder I can see Victor in the doorway of her room watching us with those pale eyes and an expression that I do not have time to decode right now, and my heart is still doing the thing, and Evie's hair smells like coconut, and the lamp is on the floor, and I know in my heart that Victor is right, we are not going back.
Chapter Thirteen
Alex
The scrape is on her left knee, which she shows me with the matter-of-fact precision of a child who has decided the injury does not warrant the level of panic it produced, and she is correct, and I am aware that she is correct, and I cannot stop checking it anyway.
"It's fine," she says. "I caught my knee on the nightstand when the lamp went. It's barely anything."
"Let me see."
"You do see it."
"Let me see it better." I turn her knee slightly toward the light and look at the scrape — shallow, already beginning to dry at the edges, the kind of thing that stings and looks worse than it actually is — and I breathe through the feeling of a person whose body has been running on adrenaline for the last forty minutes.That adrenaline has nowhere useful to go, so it simply stays, humming in my chest, looking for somewhere to land.
"First aid kit," I say, and stand up.
"We don't need the first aid kit for this," Evie says.
"We have a first aid kit," I say, "and we are going to use it."
She sighs with exhaustion, "Fine."
I go to the bathroom and open the cabinet under the sink where the first aid kit lives — a good one, properly stocked, the kind that has actual gauze and proper antiseptic rather than three old bandaids and a packet of something expired, because I have never been able to allow myself the kind of life where the first aid kit is not properly stocked — and when I stand up Victor is in the doorway.
I hadn't heard him follow us across the hall. I hadn't heard him come in, which means I left my door open in my panic, which means I need to go back and lock it, which means there are seventeen things I need to address, and I am standing in my bathroom holding a first aid kit.
My hands have started shaking now that the immediate fear has passed, which is the way it always works: the shaking comes after, when the body decides it's safe enough to fall apart a little.
He looks at my hands. He doesn't say anything. He reaches out and takes the first aid kit from me, not roughly, not with any particular production, just takes it the way you take something from someone whose hands are not working correctly, and he turns and goes back to Evie's room, and I stand in the bathroom for a moment and press my palms flat against the sink and breathe.
One. Two. Three.
When I come back to the room, Victor is sitting on the edge of Evie's bed with the first aid kit open on his knee, and Evie is watching him with an expression I recognize — the one she gives things she has decided are interesting enough to override her usual caution. He has the antiseptic and a cotton pad, and he is looking at her knee with the same quality of attention he gives everything, which is to say complete and unhurried.
"This is going to sting," he says. He applies it, and she makes a small sound through her nose and doesn't flinch, which he notices, and something in his expression does a thing I cannot fully read from the doorway. "Good," he says, simply.
"Did you do that on purpose?" she asks. "Say it would sting so I'd brace for it instead of being surprised?"
"Yes," he says.
She considers that for a moment. "That's actually a good technique."
"I've done this a time or two," he says.
"Patching people up?"
