“Big deal. You can always inject me with more.”
“No, I can’t.” She tries to sound calm. “The supply, the ones that match . . . you have a rare blood type and the source isn’t—I can’t get more of it right now.”
He stands still and looks at her. “What does that mean?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “I’m trying to figure it out. But you need to be careful for the next few weeks, okay? Only until I find a way to get more.”
“Can you?” For a moment, he looks less like a young man and more like the child she remembers, wide-eyed and scared. It tugs at her, and the last of her anger slides away. Unthinkingly, she reaches out to tousle his hair. He doesn’t move away.
“Of course,” she says, instilling her words with a confidence she does not come close to owning. “It may take some time, but of course.”
She’s relieved when he doesn’t ask anything else.
* * *
She decides to keep the windows open after all, just in case, and wakes at every little sound. She finally falls into a fitful sleep as dawn is stretching over the horizon, and stays in bed past her normal time. When she comes downstairs, Nan is in the kitchen.
“Good morning,” Nan says. “Can I pour you some tea?”
“That would be lovely, thanks.” Holly sits down and takes the tea gratefully. Her head feels as if it’s stuffed with cotton wool. “Where is everyone?”
“Your mother is in the library. She got a call about a charity dinner she’s helping to plan.”
“And Jack?”
Nan grins broadly. “Ed picked him up. He’s taking him to lacrosse practice. Jack was totally chuffed.”
Holly sits completely still. The anger that disappeared last night roars back, white hot, and every word, every thought, is acid. What is the matter with him that he can’t listen? Even after their talk last night. She tries to tell herself that it’s not all his fault, that she’s never explicitly forbidden him from playing, but then she thinks of Eden in that hospital bed in Cornwall and her stomach twists. Jack has so much, and he’s throwing it away. And for what? A stupid game.
“Dr. Darling?” Nan is hovering over her. “Are you all right? You’ve gone pale.”
“Where did they go?”
“The boys? The field is about fifteen minutes away. It’s walkable, but Ed drove them there.” She rolls her eyes. “Don’t worry—he’s an excellent driver. His dad taught him when Ed was ten, mostly to upset our mother. They’ll be fine.”
“No, they won’t.” Dimly, Holly realizes her hands are clenching. She makes an enormous effort to unfold them.
“Excuse me?”
“Jack has a . . . a condition. He’s not supposed to be playing sports right now.”
“I’m so sorry,” Nan says, looking horrified. “He said nothing to me.”
“I want you to give me the address of that field, and then I want you to leave.” Part of her knows she’s being unreasonable, that it’s not Nan’s fault, that she’s overreacting because she hasn’t had a solid night’s sleep in weeks and she’s holding on to hope for Eden by a thread, but the other part doesn’t care. She wants Nan gone.
“Are you . . . are you firing me?”
“Luckily it’s not up to her,” Jane says, coming into the kitchen. She still has her reading glasses on. “Nan, you’ve done nothing wrong. But why don’t you go home for the day all the same, with salary. Consider it”—she eyes Holly—“hazard pay.”
Nan nods. “I’m so sorry, Dr. Darling. I didn’t mean to cause problems.”
Holly doesn’t reply. Nan scribbles a note on the pad by the kitchen phone, rips it off, and leaves it on the table. “Here’s the address of the lacrosse field.”
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” Jane says. “Enjoy yourself today.”
Nan scoops up her sweater from the back of the chair and hurries away. Holly waits until she hears the door shut before she rounds on her mother.
“How dare you,” she seethes. “Do you know what she did?”
“Of course I do. I could hear you all the way in the library,” Jane says calmly. “Be that as it may, the girl has done nothing wrong.”
“She’s been after Jack to go to lacrosse, and this morning, her brother took him. Without telling me.” Holly knows, even as she says it, how ridiculous it sounds, how overprotective to Jane’s ears. But she doesn’t care.
“She’s not Jack’s babysitter, Holly. Nor is she your personal assistant, to be fired at will.” Holly starts to speak, but Jane holds up her hand. “Please. I’m well aware of the fact that every time I call your office, someone new answers the phone. Keeping help has never been your strong suit. But Nan does not work for you. She works for me, and she’s the best housekeeper I’ve had in quite some time.”
“And that’s more important than your grandson’s health?” Holly snaps.
Jane takes off her glasses and polishes them with the hem of her silk shirt. “How bad is it, really?” she asks.
Holly slumps down into her seat, her anger draining away. “It’s bad,” she admits. “Very, very bad.”
She takes a breath, decides to tell Jane the truth. At least some of it. “After the crash, Jack never really . . . He didn’t recover. Not like you think. He made some progress, of course, but . . . and then, by accident, I found . . . not a cure, exactly, more a temporary reversal. From Eden.”
“The fall,” Jane guesses. “That day he walked. I thought it must be something like that. Because of . . . who Eden’s father is?”
“Yes.” Holly nods. She skates to safer ground, to the science of it. “So far as I’ve discovered, a protein in Eden’s blood works like an antibody, binding to damaged cells and repairing them. But the reversal is short-lasting—a month, maybe two, without the protein and Jack will return to the way he was, like he did that first time. And I haven’t been able to duplicate the results with a synthetic version. Not yet. I’ve made a portable cream that combines the leftover plasma and serum, but it doesn’t work nearly as well as Eden’s blood. If I don’t find Eden soon . . .” She lifts a hand, lets it fall. Hearing the words aloud, what she’s done, makes her sound like a monster to her own ears, as if she’s sacrificed one child for the health of the other. It wasn’t like that, she wants to say. I did everything I could for both of them! But she won’t defend her choices, won’t waste time or energy that could go toward finding her daughter and keeping her son safe.
“If Jack gets hurt or sick, I can’t fix it,” she says instead.
Jane puts her glasses back on, looks at Holly over their rims. “I imagine that’s true for most parents,” she says quietly.
She leaves Holly sitting in front of her cooling tea.
Chapter Twenty-One
After her dustup with Nan, Holly had planned to drive to the lacrosse field to retrieve Jack. But her mother’s words keep ringing in her head. She can’t protect Jack, not really. If it’s not lacrosse, not drinking, it will be something else. He’s pushing the envelope of the perfectly safe world she’s created, testing all the time for gaps. And someday soon he’s going to discover one.
Still, she can’t do nothing. Maybe she can reason with him. At the least, she can watch the game and be there if he needs her. But as she grabs her keys from the nursery bureau, she finds herself captivated by the crib in the corner of the room. She can see the twins in sleep, pink and plump and so curled about each other it was impossible to see where Isaac ended and Jack began. She sees Eden too, but never sleeping. In those days, Eden was like a chrysalis on fast-forward. Every morning when Holly walked into the room and saw Eden’s toothy grin, she knew there’d be some new miracle, some new skill her daughter had impossibly mastered. Back then, Holly could barely bring herself to close her own eyes, she was so afraid she’d miss something.