“Josephine!”
Henry’s voice fell in her ear as he knelt in front of her, stopping her from pitching fully forward onto the ground.
“I need a doctor!” Henry shouted. “A constable!”
His hands were impossibly gentle as he swept her off her knees, pulling her into his arms as her eyes fluttered to a close, and a welcome darkness blotted out the whole horrid scene.
Chapter 23
The whisky tasted almost stale on Henry’s tongue. Flat and flavourless in a way that had nothing to do with the whisky itself and everything to do with the emotions coursing through him as he drank another long, hard draught of it straight from the bottle.
His head spun as he paced, his heart thumping unevenly in his chest.
He wanted to go back to Josephine, but his feet felt rooted to the floor beneath them, as if he were trapped in the room despite the constable already having left. They’d had to practically drag him away from her when they’d said they needed a statement. In fact, there might have actually been some physical dragging. He couldn’t much remember. He’d been so loathe to leave her side before the doctor said anything.
So terrified that when he came back next, it would be to find her in worse condition or …
He couldn’t do this again.
He didn’t know how he’d survived it the first time.
He wasn’t sure that he had. If he walked back up those stairs and found that Josephine was gone?
The whisky he’d only pulled out for the constable felt heavy in his hand.
Surely, if something had happened, they would have come and told him.
But then also surely, if there was good news, they would have done the same.
He needed to be with her.
He needed to know that she was okay.
But the alternative … He couldn’t go back to the man he had been before he met her.
“I was a ghost,” he muttered, his eyes lifting hollowly from where he had been staring at the floor to stare at the portrait of Martha that he’d come to stand in front of. “I was half a man at best.”
Or less than that, even.
She’d taken every vestige of his humanity with him, he’d thought. Taken all the love and warmth out of the world.
And then Josephine had shown up …
She’d entered his life and breathed sunshine back into it. She’d shown him the promise of a life more than half-lived.
And now she might have been taken from him, too.
“I can’t apologize for loving her,” Henry whispered, his voice ragged. He stared into the painted eyes of his late wife and felt his heart constrict. The guilt he had felt had faded with the realization that he might lose Josephine.
Just like the denial and confusion over what he’d felt had faded.
It wasn’t that he could fall in love with her. Not even that he might have started to.
That time had come and passed.
He loved her.
He loved her just as much as he had Martha, though it was different.
