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he’ll be OK now. He’s in the safest place he could be, and it’s been nearly twenty-four hours since it happened. That’s the most dangerous time, right?’
    Actually, it had only been fifteen hours, but neither one of them made the correction. They both wanted to believe . . .
    Henry groaned as she worked on a particularly hard knot in one of the muscles.
    â€˜You’re exhausted,’ she said quietly, reaching over and kissing the side of his neck. ‘Lie down. You’re no good to anyone without sleep, and Suzy’s going to need us to keep the wheels on for her tomorrow.’
    Without resistance or complaint, but guilt still written all over his face, Henry rolled down onto his side. Cassie covered him with the blanket. He was still wearing his suit trousers with the trainers, his meeting with the Explorers Club completely forgotten in the aftermath of Archie’s collapse. Cassie pulled his trainers off for him, the laces still tied.
    The slow rise and fall of his ribs told her he was already almost asleep and she spooned herself around him, her hand resting on his hip, his tight body slackening with incipient sleep. But there was no crab apple tree outside this bedroom window, no birds singing, and she wondered how she could have felt so safe and bulletproof in her world yesterday when today it felt made of glass.
    The blue hulk of the Chelsea & Westminster Hospital towered over them and Cassie held Velvet closer to her as she walked through the doors, half a step behind Henry. It was the hospital where Velvet was supposed to have been born, had she not come early, and Cassie’s only visits here had been happy ones – accompanying Suzy on some of her antenatal appointments and laughing at Suzy’s lively facial expressions as she jumped on the scales or had blood taken, before linking arms and splurging on coffees and cake in the Starbucks outside. They, neither one of them, could have foreseen that two years later they’d be back here in such terrible circumstances.
    Henry, after only an hour and a half of utter oblivion, had slept badly and he jabbed the lift button impatiently, his jaw thrust forward, hands on his hips. They hadn’t showered or had breakfast, and Cassie watched his foot tap before she broke her gaze to stroke Velvet’s hair as the child asked for Mummy and Daddy again.
    â€˜Just one more minute, darling,’ Cassie whispered, kissing her head, before repositioning her on her hip. ‘We’re on our way to see her right now.’
    The lift opened and Henry tutted as he stepped out of the way of a porter pushing a man in a wheelchair. He pressed the button too hard again to the right floor, shaking his head irritably as the doors closed at a sedate pace.
    â€˜It’ll be OK. They would have rung us if there’d been any change,’ Cassie said, touching his shirtsleeve lightly.
    Henry glanced down at her with ashen skin and bloodshot eyes, and she swallowed at the sight of him so cut up. She’d never seen him like this before. Henry was always the fixer, the calm eye at the centre of every storm, the beating heart of every party. He knew everyone and everything (the temperature of the sun? The velocity of a speeding bullet shot in a vacuum? The speed of sound when measured at sea level? Cassie had flung all these questions at him and he’d known the answers off the top of his head), and his happy-go-lucky smile and energy for life saw him make friends, contacts and alliances wherever he went.
    She
was the weak link in the relationship – the flapper, the panicker, the worrier, the hider, the one who couldn’t change a wheel, mix a Martini or cope in a crisis. But he needed her now. Archie wasn’t just a brother-in-law; he wasn’t just a friend. He was the guy who had hopped into his beaten-up Golf and driven 800 miles when seventeen-year-old Henry got lost on the wilds of Rannoch Moor and had only