And then Holly looks at Jack in the photo and her heart squeezes tight. The whiteness of his face, the pain-dulled eyes. The smile that looks more like a grimace. She lived those days with him once, and she won’t let him go back.
But perhaps that smile, pained though it is, is why Peter has never come for her son, why he will never come. Why Jack could sleep in the nursery every night and be perfectly safe. Maybe, Holly decides, her mother was wrong. It’s not emotions Peter is drawn to after all.
Jack might have lost his innocence with the car wreck, but he still has one thing to protect him from Peter, that usurper of childhood. One thing that Holly lacks.
He still has hope.
Even so, Holly checks to make sure his windows are closed tight and locked. Tomorrow, no matter what Jane might say, she’ll nail them shut.
Chapter Twenty-Three
In the morning, the rain is sheeting down. In her time away, Holly’s forgotten how gray London can be. It matches her mood.
She’s not hungry, and she’s not interested in sparring with Jane at this hour, so she delays going downstairs. She does some work on her laptop, takes her time showering, secure in the knowledge that there will be no lacrosse today. When she finally descends to the kitchen, she expects to be greeted by a mopey Jack, so she’s surprised when Nan says she hasn’t seen him.
“He hasn’t been downstairs, at least not since I’ve been here,” Nan says. “But it’s a good day for a bit of a lie-in.”
“It is,” Holly agrees. They’re both practicing diplomacy with each other, being perfectly polite, as if yesterday never happened. But Jack’s absence makes Holly uneasy. It’s not like him to sleep this late, especially when there’s food to be had. “I think I’ll go and check on him. It’s getting close to lunch.”
She heads upstairs, knocks at the door. “Jack?”
No answer. She pushes it open. Inside, the room is still dark. She crosses to the window, pulls back the shades. The dim light filters in to show Jack curled in a ball under the covers. His face is a pasty white, paler than it was last evening.
“Jack!” She shakes his shoulder, gently at first, then with increasing urgency. He doesn’t respond for a heart-stopping length of time. At last he mutters something and pushes her hand away.
“Jack. I want you to get up,” she says. She tugs him into a seated position. “Do you feel all right?”
“Tired,” he mumbles. But she’s seen him tired. This is something else.
She touches his forehead. It’s cool, almost clammy. “Why don’t you try and eat something,” she says, forcing herself to sound calm. “Your blood sugar is probably low.”
She calls downstairs and tells Nan to put the kettle on. As soon as she hears it shriek, she hurries to the kitchen and makes him a cup of tea laced with milk and sugar. In the time it takes her to run back up the stairs with it, he’s fallen asleep again. She pulls at him, trying to wake him and get him upright.
“Jack,” she says. “You need to drink this. Now.”
She presses the mug into his hands. After he’s taken a few sips, she opens the curtains more widely so she can get a better look at him. He’s far too pale.
“Maybe you overdid it yesterday,” she says. “Why don’t you take it easy for a bit.” She keeps her voice calm, phrases it less like an order and more like a suggestion.
“Yeah,” he mutters. “But I don’t understand. I was in decent shape before we left. It hasn’t been that long.”
“It could be the weather. Or maybe you have allergies or a touch of the flu,” she offers. Right now isn’t the time to point out the truth, that she’d warned him about this exact reaction. She needs to keep him as relaxed as possible—if he’s agitated, it could make him even worse. She counts backward in her head. It’s been almost three weeks to the day since his last injection. “Just rest.”
He doesn’t argue, which is the biggest tip-off that he isn’t well. She leaves him to hurry to the nursery, where she’s hidden the jar of cream made from the byproducts of Eden’s blood in her top dresser drawer.
When she returns, Jane is standing by his bed.
“Is he well?” she asks. Her long silver hair is piled loosely atop her head, and she brushes aside a stray strand as she peers in concern at her grandson.
“I think he overdid it yesterday,” Holly answers. She tries to keep any note of I told you so out of her voice. Even if it is true, it won’t help Jack.
Instead she rubs the cream sparingly along his temples and then his chest as Jane looks on with interest.
“What’s that?”
“The cream I’ve been working on,” Holly says. “The one I told you about. It can’t hurt.” That’s true, but she’s not certain it will help. Jack has no visible injuries or actual pain. But she has nothing else to try. And after a few moments he does appear better. His cheeks, although still pale, have lost that sickly whiteness, his forehead isn’t as clammy, and he’s sitting up unaided. Holly tells him to stay in bed, then runs back downstairs and asks Nan to make up a plate of toast and eggs.
It’s Jane herself who takes the plate from Holly at the door and sits with Jack while he eats, who regales him with stories of how Holly once spent an entire week in the nursery with chicken pox, refusing to eat anything but strawberry-lemonade sorbet, which her then-housekeeper normally made once a year, on St. Swithin’s Day, and how Jane had to pay her extra to get her to stay. By the time she’s finished the tale, Jack has recovered enough to talk about calling some of the kids he met during dinner the other night and going out. Holly suspects a good part of it is bravado.
“Well, I’ll let you two decide the wisdom of that,” Jane says, standing up from the bed and taking the plate. “But if you stay home, I’ll see if we can find the recipe and let Nan try her hand at it. No promises though. And now I really must finish my calls for the charity auction.” She looks at Holly. “Perhaps you’ll consider donating a collection of skin care products.”
And with that she glides from the room before Holly can even mouth a silent Thank you. She shakes her head. Only her mother. She turns her attention back to Jack.
“I think you should chill today,” she tells him. “Maybe tomorrow, okay?”
He bunches the sheet through his fingers. Looks down at his hands, avoids her eye.
“Do you ever wonder why we’re alive?” he asks quietly.
After the lightness of the last few moments, Holly wasn’t expecting this. Not now. She sits down on the bed.
“What do you mean?” she says, buying time. She knows exactly what he means.
“After the crash. Why we lived and Dad and Isaac didn’t. You never wonder?”
“No,” Holly lies. “I don’t. You can’t think like that.”
“I see him sometimes. I’ll be passing by a window or turning a corner and I’ll catch a glimpse of him. And then I realize it’s just me.”
“You never told me that.”
He ignores her. “And then the accident with Eden. I fell too. But she’s the one who died. And I look at that picture of me in the wheelchair and I try to remember . . .” He trails off. “It’s like I’m bad luck to everyone around me.”
“Jack. There is nothing bad luck about you. If I hadn’t had you after the car crash . . .” She can’t tell him her real thoughts in those days, so she amends it. “I don’t know what I would have done without you.”
And it’s true.
The only thing Holly had in her life besides her family before the crash was her work at the lab, and she doubts that alone would have been enough to sustain her after losing them, to get her out of bed in the mornings the way her drive to care for Jack did. She imagines a version of that self living with Jane in London postcrash and shudders.
“But Dad and Isaac,” Jack says. “And Eden.”
Holly takes his hands, starts again. “Jack, look at me,” she tells him, forcing his eyes up from the comforter. “Cars crash. Accidents happen. It’s not your fault. None of it is your fault.”