“Are you family?” the paramedic asked me in a rush.

“Yes.”

“What relation?”

“I’m his…” I paused, grabbing hold of the ambulance door, before lifting my dress up at the knee and climbing on board without his permission. I wasn’t going anywhere. “Daughter-in-law.”

“Okay, miss, just take a seat and we’ll get you both to the hospital in no time at all.”

“Is he going to be okay?” I asked, watching as they slid his still, pale body into the back of the vehicle. His eyes flickered wildly, and his skin was yellow with every vein dancing around proudly on his forehead while his limbs remained lifeless. “I need him to be okay.”

“The sooner we get him to the hospital, the better.”

“That’s not what I asked,” I muttered quietly.

“We’re doing everything we can.”

The doors slammed shut in a second and while we tore through the streets of Leeds with the air filled with sirens, and the daylight being interrupted with neon blue lights, all I could do was stare at Nicholas Law…

And pray for him.

“Can I use your phone?”

“There’s a payphone out in the waiting area,” the snooty receptionist answered without looking away from her computer screen.

“I don’t have any money on me. I came here in a rush and left my purse and my mobile at work.”

“Bad planning,” she muttered under her breath.

“Excuse me?”

Tearing her eyes away from what had held her attention, she slowly rolled her head in my direction, the annoyance on her face obvious as she brushed back her thick, curly red hair and sighed. “Who is it you need to call?”

I didn’t know what her problem was, but I knew I didn't deserve her derision. “I need to call my place of work and ask someone to call my… ummm… husband to tell him his father is here.”

“Your ummm husband?” she asked, raising a brow.

“Yes,” I croaked, swallowing down the taste of the lie like that made me all the more convincing. “My father-in-law was brought in about an hour ago. I need my husband to know where he is.”

She glared at me a while, eventually blowing out all the frustrated air she had in her cheeks before she reached for the phone. “Do you have the number?”

“I do. It’s zero, one, one, three–”

I was so busy focusing on the way she punched the numbers into the phone that the new hand on my shoulder didn't seem to register until it was a second too late, but when his fingers curled into the fabric of my dress, I hitched in a breath and froze on the spot. I knew who that hand belonged to. I knew who was holding me the second his familiar scent washed under my nose.

“I’m here,” was all he said softly.

The woman in front of me locked eyes with mine, no doubt watching the surprise on my face as I struggled to find some strength to turn around. When her attention rose to Alex, her face brightened considerably, like she’d just seen the sun for the first time all day. He had that effect on everyone, it seemed.

Before I could move of my own accord, Alex was turning me in his grip, and I was once again looking up at him, wondering how he always seemed to look more amazing than the time before, even during such horrendous circumstances.

“Alex,” I said through a dry mouth.

“Hey,” he whispered.

“Hey.”

“You okay?”

“I don’t know.” My forehead creased together as I tried to focus on staying strong. While my face got tighter, Alex’s only softened, his eyes full of sympathy as he watched me try, and fail, to keep myself together. “You’re here. How did you…?”

“Come here, Natalie,” he breathed out, wasting no time in pulling me closer, and even though I hated looking away from his eyes, I was instantly grateful to have my cheek pressed against his chest as I threw my arms around his back and held on to him.

“I’m so sorry. I should have called you before I got in the ambulance. How did you know?”

I didn't even think about the regret I'd feel later for holding him. I didn't think of the anger I had for him. There were no thoughts of the injustice, the cruelty, the hatred, the years of unsaid words and unshared thoughts. All I saw and felt was the old Alex.

“Your friend Barbara phoned me. I came here as soon as I could.”

Curling my fingers into the back of his shirt, I closed my eyes and held on tight. All the pent-up emotions and worry of the last five years seemed to rise like an incoming tide, threatening to pour out of me like a waterfall, but I somehow held it back, keeping the tears behind my eyelids, inhaling as much of him as I could.

He was here in my arms. I was holding him again, and I couldn’t hide from either of us how much that very fact seemed to settle me.

His hand ran down the length of my hair as his chin came to rest on my head.

“It’s okay. I’m here now.”

“You’re here,” I mouthed.

“You’re shaking,” he told me, and I had no idea what he was talking about. In my mind, I was calming. Everything was going quiet and falling into place. I was breathing again, in and out, in and out, in and out. I was doing well, until I opened my eyes and focused on my arm, watching how it trembled subtly against his shirt.

He was right. I was shaking.

“I don’t know why.”

Alex’s grip on me tightened, his arms pulling me impossibly close until it felt like I was about to crawl into his skin. “You’re going into shock. It’s normal.”

“Normal?” I mumbled against him. “How is any of this normal? Your father–”

“Does this all the time. Don’t worry about it.”

I frowned instantly, peeling my face away from him even though I had no desire to, before looking up into his unusually calm eyes and searching them for some sign of distress. Was it true? Was this how Nicholas lived now that Beatrice was gone?

What the hell had Alex been going through since I went away?

“Your mum?” It wasn’t a question, even though I made it sound like one.

Alex’s hand smoothed my hair once again, his eyes flickering to the woman on the reception behind us before he eventually looked back down at me and whispered. “Let’s go and sit down.”

I didn’t argue. Instead, I let him guide me to the seats in the waiting area like I was the one who was in mourning and he was just the man by my side. The roles were the opposite of what they should have been, but it felt natural to the pair of us. He’d always seemed at his strongest when he was taking care of me, and I’d always felt like the world made sense beneath his wing. He was being the eagle again.

Once we’d settled, our knees automatically swung towards each other, our positions almost identical as we rested our elbows on our thighs and clasped our hands together. With him no longer wrapped around me, I suddenly became aware of how inappropriately I’d just touched him. I’d held him like he was mine when he wasn’t, and that shouldn’t have stung as much as it did.

While I kept my eyes trained on his hands, I could feel his stare against my cheeks. It was so powerful that I was convinced it would have knocked me over had I been on my feet. I didn’t speak, though. It wasn’t my time. I was there for him and him only.

It took Alex a while to talk, but when he did, the weight of his worries fell heavily from his lips in a sigh. “She’s been gone for two years now.”

“Two years?” I whispered.

“Longer, actually. Two years, seven months, thirteen days and probably around ten hours.”

“Alex, I’m so sorry.”

“So am I. I miss her.” His hand reached up to my hair, pushing a few stray strands back behind my ear, forcing me to lean into his touch a little too much, like we'd never been apart at all, and he hadn't broken my heart. “How did you know?”

Flickering my eyes up to his, I tried to hide the obvious sadness that lingered there. “Your dad told me when he came into the centre. Right before he passed out. He was in such a state and I didn’t know what to do. I tried everything to calm him down, but he wanted to see Dr. Cleveland and… I wouldn’t let him.”

“You did the right thing. Cleveland is doing me a favour. He doesn’t need the hassle that goes with my father. Nobody does.”

“You and Cleveland know each other well enough to do favours for one another?”

Alex sighed softly. “Something like that. It’s a long story, Nat.”

“I want to know,” I whispered. I suddenly wanted to know everything about him. The walls I’d built to protect myself were crumbling down around me. I wanted to know about all the things he’d done since he’d been away from me. I wanted to know about all the places he had been and all the things he had seen, but I couldn’t tell him that.

Alex stared into my eyes for a moment before he eventually spoke again. He shuffled awkwardly, clearing his throat as though embarrassed while I just stared back at him in wonder. “Cleveland’s sister was a substance abuser.”

My mouth fell open a little bit more as I waited for him to finish.

“She didn’t want her brother to know, so she booked herself in at St. Anne’s, where my dad used to go. Her name was Pippa and we got talking one day. St. Anne’s was shit and nothing else had ever worked out for her before. She was close to the edge, just wanting to end it all. So I spent some time with her. I helped her. It kept me busy for a while. As long as I was busy, I could get by. Mum had made sure I was taken care of when she died – financially, I mean – and I’ve been volunteering for a while, going into people’s homes to help them when they or their loved ones have addictions. I try to be someone I wish had been there for me when I was growing up. I took what I learned from my time doing that, plus my own experiences, and I poured it into making Pippa better. When she got clean and finally told her brother everything, Cleveland tracked me down. He made a few calls, told me he wanted to do for my father what I had done for his sister.”

“You saved her?”

“I think she saved me as much as I saved her,” he said quietly. “She gave me a purpose. One I hadn’t had in a while.”

“That’s incredible,” I mouthed.

“Don’t be fooled by one good deed. Before Mum died, I did a lot of things wrong.”

I had no idea what he was talking about, and I had so many questions whizzing through my mind. I needed to find some kind of order, and the obvious order was to find out what had happened to Beatrice. “Can I ask what happened? I mean… to Beatrice?”

A small smile tugged unexpectedly at the corner of his mouth. It was a sad smile – one filled with longing and maybe regret. It was a smile that was there to hide the quiver of his bottom lip and the tremble of his chin. A mask. A shield. A way to hide the anger that he refused to let the rest of the world see.

“She turned to drink to deal with the pain of living with my dad. Things got bad and she hit the bottle hard to cope. I think she thought if she could turn the music up loud so she couldn’t hear, sink enough drink to numb her pain and smoke enough cigarettes to keep her hands busy, she’d be able to keep on living her life. The tragedy of it all is that her death was a complete accident. She passed out in the bath one night while she had the house to herself, and she drowned. They tell us she wouldn't have felt much pain, but I can't bring myself to think about that for too long. If I did, I’d start thinking she left me on purpose.”

I gasped in surprise, unable to hide the sorrow I felt for him. He'd lost someone he'd loved and needed too soon. No one understood that feeling more than I did, but I couldn't find the right words to comfort him.

“After we moved again, things got worse for all of us. What we’d been living through before had been a walk in the park compared to what we were about to become.”

“Your dad got worse?”

Alex smiled brighter, but it didn’t meet his eyes. The tips of his fingers traced my cheekbone over and over again until he eventually whispered, “No, I did.”

“I don’t understand,” I told him with a small shake of the head.

“My mother had to live with two bears who had sore heads once we moved. It wasn’t just him being the arsehole anymore, Nat. It was me, too. I was a nightmare. I became him to try and beat him at his own game.”

“I don't believe you. You loved your mum. You wouldn’t have been that way with her.”

“I loved her more than anything, but I turned into someone I’m not meant to be, someone I hated. I turned into the monster – my dad. She had two of us making her life hell.”

“You hurt Beatrice?” I asked, unable to hide the way I flinched in surprise.

“Not physically. Never. I couldn’t ever lay my hands on a woman that way.” Alex brushed his thumb over my skin softly then, as if to remind me how he’d always handled me in the past. Gently. Calmly. Like he was in control. It made my shoulders sag with relief. “But I blamed them. I blamed her and I blamed my father. I withdrew and became numb, like I wasn’t really living. I drank a lot, got into a bit of trouble. I refused to talk to them unless I had to. I went out of my way to make it obvious that I blamed them.”

“What were you blaming them for?”

Alex opened his mouth to speak, his words hanging on the tip of his tongue as those magical eyes of his penetrated mine so deeply I could almost read his thoughts. But just as soon as they’d arrived to greet me, they were swallowed back down again, our attention turning to the side as the nurse came to interrupt us all at once.

“Mrs. Law?” he asked quickly.

Mrs. Law was dead, I wanted to say as I stared into her son’s eyes, but on the second time of him calling what was supposed to be my name, I remembered my lie and quickly turned to face the male nurse stood in front of us.

“Y-yes?” My eyes flickered wildly as I tried to process everything that was happening.

“Mrs. Law, your father-in-law is stable enough for you to see him now. He's sleeping, and he may stay that way for a while. His body is weak and tired, which is only natural. If you want to make your way to his room, the doctor will come and see you to tell you more about his condition once he’s finished his rounds.”

“He’s okay?”

“He’s not exactly fighting fit, but his pain will ease if he listens to what Dr. Watson is going to advise him.”

“Thank you,” I rushed out in a sigh of relief. “Thank you so much.”

The nurse faced Alex then, his eyes turned down with sadness, the same way his sympathetic smile was. “You must be his son?”

“Yes,” Alex answered flatly, his voice robbed of life. It was only when I turned back to face him that I saw his eyes were wide and his skin was pale as he stared at me.

“Your wife took good care of him until we got to him, Mr. Law. Your father is lucky to have such a good woman in his life who refused to give up on him or leave his side.”

“My wife,” he repeated, rolling the words around on his tongue as he continued to look right into my soul.

“She did good.”

“I only did what anyone else would have done,” I said, wringing my hands together as I watched Alex watching me, the two of us pretending to be man and wife when all we really were was two strangers who had once connected so deeply, we could still feel the roots of each other’s hearts mingled in with our own.

“She always does good,” Alex muttered.

“I have no doubt that she does.” I didn’t have to look at the nurse to know he was grinning brightly – I could hear it in his voice. “When you guys are ready, he’s on the ward. The receptionist will point you in the right direction. Your father has been lucky enough to get his own room for now.”

“Thank you,” we mumbled in unison. Without saying goodbye, the nurse turned and disappeared, leaving the two of us staring at one another as though we were in a world of our own all over again – him doing what he did best by sucking me in, and me, completely unable to stop myself from imagining how things might have ended up between us had we given ourselves a chance.

The pretence was over in that waiting room, and every thought of Alex that I’d tried to push away came flooding back to destroy my temporary peace with a vengeance.

“You pretended to be my wife?” he eventually asked.

“I thought they were going to say I couldn’t ride to the hospital with him if I wasn’t a part of your family.”

“Thank you.”

“For what?”

His smile broke free once again as his hands found mine and began to pull me to a stand. “For being you, Natalie. I was scared that your heart had turned cold over the years, too.”

“Too?” I raised both brows. “Are you trying to tell me that yours has, Alex?”

“It doesn’t feel too bad today,” he answered through a sad smile, and before I could question him, Alex had my hand in his grip and was guiding me down the corridors of the hospital with ease.

And for just one moment, when the people we walked past looked at us with interest, I allowed myself to imagine that we were man and wife.

That I was the woman who stood by his side in every crisis.

That I was the woman who would always walk these corridors with him if that’s what I had to do.

I allowed myself to slip into a daydream, unaware of how dangerous that really was, and how much reality was actually going to hurt when I woke up the next morning.

It was what Alex Law always did to me.

He temporarily made me unafraid to fall.