The story that made it into my hospital chart was that I’d been thrown from the embankment by a dog that had bolted off its lead during the run, a plausible enough disaster for a reserve full of excited children and off-lead terriers, and plausible enough, apparently, for whoever Damian had quietly spoken to in the two hours before the paramedics were allowed to properly examine me. I never asked how many minds that story had needed to pass through before it held. Some things I was learning not to ask. What was real: a fractured shoulder, four stitches across my forearm, three more at my cheekbone, bruising down one whole side of my body that turned, over the following days, an increasingly spectacular range of colours. What was real, too, was Damian, in the chair beside my bed for the better part of a week, arms folded, eyes closed, doing an excellent impression of a man asleep, while I understood, every time I stirred, that he hadn’t actually slept a single minute of it.
“You don’t have to keep pretending,” I told him, on the third night, my voice still thick with whatever they’d given me for the pain.
“The nurses are more comfortable with it.” He didn’t open his eyes.
“A man who never sleeps and never leaves makes people ask questions I’d rather not answer at two in the morning.” Noah stayed with Priya the whole week, an extended sleepover that had started as one awkward night and simply kept being renewed, and I understood, watching Damian’s face every time we discussed it, how much it cost him not to have his own eyes on my son every hour of every day. Priya sent photos instead, Noah and Arjun building an elaborate fort out of couch cushions, Noah’s face smeared with something involving too much golden syrup, and I made myself smile at each one and mean it, because the alternative was letting the fear in properly, and I didn’t have room for that on top of everything else.
The visitors came in waves. Fenella brought a fruit basket so enormous it required its own chair. Two of my spin regulars turned up together, flowers in one hand and gossip in the other, the whole gym apparently convinced I’d fought off the dog myself before going down, a version of events I did nothing to correct. Priya came almost daily, and on the fourth day arrived with a covered dish that filled the whole ward with the smell of cumin and ghee before she’d even gotten the lid off.
“Kichdi,” she said, setting it down like a small, sacred object.
“My mother’s recipe. It’s what you make for anyone who’s had something happen to their body, doesn’t matter what, this is what fixes it.” She spooned some onto a bowl and pressed it into my one working hand before I could argue.
“Eat. You look like a woman who hasn’t had a proper meal in a week, which, given the hospital food, you probably haven’t.” It was, genuinely, the best thing I’d eaten in longer than a week, warm and simple and entirely unlike anything I could have made for myself in that state, and I ate the whole bowl while Priya updated me on Noah’s ongoing campaign to be allowed a hamster, and for twenty minutes the room felt like nothing more sinister than a woman recovering from an ordinary accident, surrounded by people who loved her. Noah came the next afternoon, ferried in by Priya for a supervised hour, and arrived clutching a bunch of grocery-store carnations so tightly he’d half crushed the stems, his face carrying the particular seriousness of a seven-year-old determined not to cry in front of his mother.
“I picked the purple ones because you like purple,” he said, thrusting them at me like an offering.
“Arjun’s mum said flowers help you get better faster. Is that true?”
“It’s absolutely true,” I told him, and meant it more than the actual science probably warranted, pulling him carefully into my one good side and breathing in the strange, comforting smell of a small boy who’d clearly been eating too many golden syrup sandwiches.
“Thank you, baby. They’re perfect.” It was Damian who did the parts nobody else saw. He fed me when the shoulder made even a spoon too much some evenings, patient and unhurried, holding the bowl and waiting without a single flicker of impatience while I managed each mouthful on my own terms. He helped me wash on the mornings the nurses were too stretched to manage it themselves, careful of the cast, careful of the stitches, his hands moving over me with a tenderness that had nothing to do with wanting and everything to do with simply refusing to let me feel like a burden for needing help at all. Some nights, once the ward had gone quiet, he climbed carefully onto the narrow bed beside me anyway, mindful of every injury, and just held me, his chin resting against the top of my head, saying nothing, needing to say nothing.
“Kiss me,” I said, on the fifth night, tired of being careful. He did, slow and soft, barely more than a press of his mouth to mine, mindful of the stitches at my cheek, and then again at my temple, and then at the corner of my jaw, unhurried, the kind of kiss that asks nothing and simply gives.
“I keep thinking about how alone I’d be right now if you weren’t here,” I admitted, into the quiet after.
“I don’t have anyone else, Damian. Not really. Priya, the gym, that’s it. That’s my whole family, and none of them chose me the way you did.”
“Tell me,” he said, gently, the way he always did when he wanted the whole of something rather than the edges of it. So I told him. I told him about the foster homes, six of them by the time I turned sixteen, none of them cruel exactly, just temporary in the particular way that teaches a child not to unpack properly. I told him I’d never known my mother’s face, never had a single photograph, no family to trace backward toward, just a file with a birth date and no other names attached to it. And I told him about the one constant thread through all of it, impossibly, a soft-spoken older woman who’d worked as a caretaker at the first home I’d ever been placed in, and who had, somehow, against every reasonable explanation, turned up working at the second home too, and the third, following me from placement to placement like she’d simply decided, quietly and without ever being asked, that I wasn’t going to go through any of it without at least one familiar face.
“I called her Nana Flo,” I said.
“Everyone did, by the end. I never asked how she kept ending up wherever I did. I was a kid. Kids don’t question the good things, they just hold onto them.” I laughed, and it came out a little wet.
“I haven’t seen her since I aged out of the system. Almost twenty years. I used to wonder if I imagined how strange that was, a stranger following a foster kid through six different placements. I don’t wonder anymore. I think, now, that nothing about my life has ever been quite as ordinary as I told myself it was.” Damian went very still beside me, something moving behind his eyes that I didn’t have the energy that night to properly examine.
“What happened to her?”
“I don’t know. She was there for my last review, and then I turned eighteen, and then she just wasn’t anywhere I looked for her.” I closed my eyes, exhaustion finally catching up with me properly.
“I think about her more than I let myself say out loud.” I was still turning the thought over, half asleep, when a voice from the doorway made every hair on my body rise at once.
“Sarah.” I knew it before I’d even opened my eyes. Some things live in the body rather than the memory, and that voice, soft and cracked with age and entirely unmistakable, had been living in mine for thirty years.
“Nana?” She stood in the doorway looking impossibly old, older than she should have been able to get in the two decades since I’d last seen her, silver hair pinned back the exact same way it always had, and her eyes, when they found mine, were wet and fierce and entirely without surprise, as though finding me broken in a hospital bed was simply the thing she’d expected all along.
“You’ve started showing it,” she said, crossing the room faster than a woman her apparent age should have been able to move, taking my good hand in both of hers.
“The power. I felt it wake up, weeks ago now, all the way from where I was. I should have come sooner.” Her grip tightened, urgent.
“Bad people will come looking for you now, my love, the moment they understand what you are. We need to move. Tonight, if we can manage it.”
“Nana, I don’t understand, how did you—”
“There isn’t time to explain properly. There will be, I promise you there will be, but not here, not with—”
“She’s not going anywhere.” Damian’s voice came from the doorway behind her, quiet and absolutely immovable, and Nana Flo turned, and I watched her whole face change the instant she saw him, recognition and horror arriving together.
“You,” she breathed.
“You’re one of them.” Her hand came up before I could say a word, fingers curling into some old, precise shape, and she began to speak, low and fast, words I didn’t understand but recognised anyway, the same shape of sound I’d heard once before in a cellar five hundred years gone, and Damian’s hands flew to his own throat, his whole body seizing, some invisible grip closing around him that had nothing physical behind it at all.
“You will not touch her again,” Nana Flo said, mid-chant, her voice gone hard as stone, and Damian made a sound I had never once heard from him, choked and desperate, dropping to one knee.
“Nana!” I was off the bed before the pain in my shoulder had a chance to stop me, my voice tearing out raw and absolute.
“No! He is the love of my life, please stop it! He is not bad, he’s not what you think. He saved me. He’s saved me so many times I’ve lost count. I love him.” The chanting stopped.