“Like it?”
She couldn’t speak, just nodded.
“If you like it, it’s ours,” he’d told her, then laughed, a bit ruefully. “It’s ours even if you don’t like it, actually. I put a payment down last week.” He climbed back into bed and kissed her belly through her T-shirt. “It will be a great place to raise them in the summer. There’s nothing around. They can get away from everything.” Away from the Darling name, he’d meant. From the paparazzi and the tourists who drove by the London house to gawk, from the fans and the stalkers. His kisses trailed up, to her collarbone, her neck, her lips. “So can we.”
She turns her thoughts away, won’t let herself remember what they’d done next. They’d had two summers with the twins, a few stolen weekends during the rest of the year. One Christmas holiday, their last as a family. So cold in the morning she could see her breath, and even Robert, normally a furnace of warmth, had yelped when she’d pulled back the covers. She’d worried the twins would catch cold, so she’d warmed their beds with the ancient hot-water bottles she’d found in a cabinet and made them wear sweaters to bed.
What else had she worried about in those days? Simple things, probably. Whether the twins would ever sleep through the night. Croup—Isaac had it several times. Making sure Jack, who was always so hard to catch, so fast moving, didn’t get too close to the water on cold afternoons, or plunge in over his head in the summer. Normal things, although they seemed like the end of the world at the time.
But now she knows she’d worried about the wrong things. She never sat up at night worrying about drunk lorry drivers, about how small Robert’s beloved sports car was, how a collision could crush it like a tin can in a giant’s fist. She’d never imagined the awful wheezing sounds Robert could make, and how even more terrible than the noise was the silence when he stopped. Most of all, she never thought to worry about how gut-emptying it would be to hear absolutely nothing from the back seat where the twins sat, no matter how many times she screamed their names.
She would give anything, would give her entire life, to go back in time for one more day when her husband’s cold feet and her baby’s croupy cough were the only things that kept her from sleeping. But she can’t. So she puts the car in neutral and coasts the rest of the way down the hill, between the stone walls that mark the entrance to Grace House. She stops in a pool of shadow and gets out beneath the giant elm that saved her son but took her daughter in exchange.
Chapter Seven
The nurses are waiting, peering out the window of the front hall. By the time Holly reaches Grace House’s door they’ve come out and cluster about her. They all begin to talk at once, a swirling cloud of words she can barely follow.
She raises a hand. “One at a time.” She points to the woman closest to her. It’s Maria, who has operated as charge nurse for the past year. “Walk me through what happened. And let’s do it inside, so you can show me as you talk.”
They go through the day step by step. Who was on duty, what procedures were followed, how it was discovered that Eden was missing. Everything, it seems, was done as Holly has wanted, right up until the moment the nurse opened the door and found Eden gone.
Everything, that is, but the window. But each nurse insists that she did not open it, that it always remained closed on her shift, as Dr. Darling had ordered. They have no explanation for how it could have been found ajar. They walk en masse down the hall to the former library, now converted to Eden’s room. Holly opens the door, and the four women crowd around her in the doorway, anxious, she can tell, to show that they’ve searched every inch and that Eden cannot be found, that she will not magically appear from behind the curtains or inside the closet. But Holly asks them to wait outside, closes the door firmly behind her. She takes a deep breath and looks around.
The room hasn’t changed since her last visit. The hospital bed is still tucked in the far corner. An IV pole stands next to it, empty bag dangling. There’s a heart monitor, electrodes slung around its top. A vase of daisies, lilies, and roses is tucked into the niche opposite, the flowers wilted and fading. The room is empty. What else had she expected?
Still, she looks. She slides her hand beneath the pillow, pulls down the sheets. Checks under the bed, which is spotlessly clean. Opens the closet, where dressing gowns and medical supplies are neatly stacked. She finds nothing unusual, nothing out of place. At last she crosses to the window. She’d asked Maria to leave it as it was when they’d discovered Eden was missing. It’s open to its full height, something Holly has always expressly forbidden.