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"All right then," Johann conceded. "Selena it is."
"Then we are agreed," Ian said, thoroughly disgusted by the entire affair.
"On what?" Maeve asked, frowning.
"The patient, Mother. We shall call her Selena."
Maeve's frown deepened. "Oh. I thought you'd decided that hours ago."
"Her fever's gone."
Ian heard Edith's words through a fog of exhaustion. It took a moment to register. Fever ... gone. He snapped up so quickly, the chair wobbled beneath
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him. Suddenly he was wide-awake. He ran a hand through his dirty hair and surged to his feet. "Are you certain?"
"Aye, Doctor. I am." She handed him the long, narrow thermometer designed by Hicks.
He took the prismatic strip of glass and looked down at it.
His knees almost buckled in relief. He realized in that instant the magnitude of his obsession with her. As desperately as he wanted her to live, he hadn't thought it would happen. Not really. Not with his view of the Almighty.
He reached out for the back of the chair and clutched it for support. "Jesus, it is almost normal."
"You said if her fever went away, the poor wee thing might have a chance."
He gave Edith a grin. "It's a start, anyway, Edith. Hurry up now, let's get this ice off of her and close the windows. Get her a warm flannel nightdress and drawers, and new sheets and blankets."
"Aye, Doctor," Edith answered with a smile, and bustled from the room, leaving him?for once?alone with his patient.
Ian pulled his chair back to Selena's bedside and sank onto the familiar straw seat, leaning toward her. He felt an overwhelming surge of emotion for the woman who lay motionless before him.
"You did it." His voice broke. "You did it." He took one of her hands in his, reveling in the warm, dry, healthy temperature of her skin. "That's it, Selena. You're doing my work for me."
She lay there as always, limp and unresponsive, the slack opening of her mouth invaded by tubing. The rough, rattling determination of her breathing was the most beautiful sound he'd ever heard. It was the fight for life, and she hadn't once given up.
"I never tried as hard as you're trying right now," he whispered, surprised by his own confession and the
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truth of it. All his life, he'd taken the easy road and run away from anything that frightened or confused him. Normally he didn't think about his cowardice or his failures, but now, sitting here all alone with his goddess, he couldn't avoid thinking about them, his lost and broken dreams. He remembered a dozen moments, memories he'd thought had seeped away.
Times Maeve had taken him in her arms and read him stories and stroked his hair and kissed his brow; times she'd stared at him, unable to remember his name; times she'd screeched at him in front of his boyhood friends, railing at him about some imagined slight. And then there were the dark days, after his father's death, when she'd strolled through the manse like a lost spirit, moaning, crying, unrecognizing of everything and everyone. For almost two years, she hadn't spoken a word to anyone except those damned stuffed animals she kept in her room. He remembered so many nights, standing at her open door, his slim, adolescent body pressed into the shadows, watching her talk to those animals. They both needed consolation in those days, but she'd never come to him, never even looked him in the eyes.
So many failures. So many lost chances .. .
He leaned back, sighing heavily. "Christ, Selena, why can't I forget? What's wrong with me?"
He looked down at his silent patient, realizing he'd just said more to her than he'd ever said to another person.
It was a little frightening. In the endless hours he'd sat at Selena's bedside, he'd somehow given her a personality, a past and a future. Even worse, even more warped, he'd begun to fall in love with the fiction he'd created. A woman who didn't really exist.
God help him.
She was floating. The wind around her was warm finally. It buffeted her on soothing currents, rocked
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