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Morning broke. There was a small window, high up in his room, and the light gradually shifted.
Eleanor stood, stretching, and for the first time all night, contemplated leaving him. Just for a moment. There were restrooms at the entrance to the ward and she was in dire need of freshening up.
“I’ll be right back. Don’t you go anywhere,” she murmured. And for one second, she thought she saw something. It was impossible to quantify, impossible to explain, but the parts of his face that were visible beneath his bandages shifted, almost as though he recognized her voice.
“Did you hear me?” She asked, moving back to the bed, putting a hand on the small part of his chest that was exposed.
Nothing. No response. With a heavy sigh, she slipped out of the room and made her way to the facilities.
The same nurse was on duty, but her hair was up now. “You’re still here?” The nurse asked.
Ellie nodded. “I’m not going anywhere.”
“The rest of the family’s just arrived,” the nurse said. “And the doctor’ll be along to explain things to them soon.”
Xavier’s family was here? Her heart ratcheted up a notch. How could she explain her being there to them?
“His family,” she murmured.
The nurse’s expression flashed with a look that was close to sympathetic. “His parents and his fiancé.” The nurse looked down at her paper, giving Ellie a moment to absorb this information in relative privacy.
“His…” Everything shook, like the earth beneath her was rumbling. She dug her feet into the floor but her body was like a feather in the breeze.
“Yes. His fiancé,” the nurse said gently. “I presume you know her?”
For the second time in twenty four hours, Ellie gripped the counter top, her expression deathly white. “I…”
The nurse stood, alarm on her features. “You’re not going to pass out, are you?”
Ellie shook her head and straightened. There had to be some mistake. Xavier wasn’t engaged. He couldn’t be!
“No. I’m…” she couldn’t finish the sentence. She wasn’t fine. She was so far from it.
Her legs were wobbling but she forced them into action, walking down the hallway, towards the room she’d been in all night. She didn’t go in though. She stood outside the window, staring in, her heart racing and then abruptly coming to a stop at the sight before her.
Two parents. A mother. A father – so like Xavier! And a woman. A beautiful woman who was everything Ellie wasn’t. Curvaceous and blonde, and so very expensive, dripping in designer clothes and jewels. She had a hand on Xavier’s chest, just as Ellie’s had been, a moment earlier, and the most enormous diamond ring sparkled in the bright light of his room.
There was only one thing the two women had in common: their hearts were breaking.
The other woman – Xavier’s fiancé – sobbed over his broken body, just as Ellie had.
Ellie gasped, she couldn’t help it, and the nurse was there, an arm around her shoulders, comforting.
“You didn’t know?”
Ellie sucked in a breath; it hardly reached her lungs. “It can’t be true.”
But the ring, the woman’s inclusion with his family. Even as she uttered the denial, she knew she was wrong. This woman was engaged to marry Xavier.
“Come on, dear. Come and have a seat out here.”
Ellie nodded, completely numb, in absolute shock. And a primal need to stay with Xavier tore through her. She didn’t care about these other people! She, Elizabeth Jones, was the one who would make him better! She was who he needed at his bedside!
Only it wasn’t. His parents and fiancé were with him now. His family. She moved down the corridor, her life seeming like shards of glass, broken and sharp, too difficult to contemplate.
“Excuse me, miss?”
The voice from behind was husky and accented. Elizabeth spun around to see Xavier’s mother, her face lined, the worry there obvious.
