lights envelop her too, silhouetting her against the white metalwork which will throw her high into the air when it hits her, crumpling her body into a broken, huddled mass.
I reach her a split second before the van does, my momentum carrying me on as, with all my strength, I push her out of the way.
I hear a scream and a noise like a whip cracking.
And then all the lights go out at once and there is darkness.
My father is reading me a bedtime story. It’s Little Women, I realise, one of my all-time favourite books. I listen to the rise and fall of his voice, chapter after chapter, telling the story of Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy. I’m dreaming, of course, but it’s such a comforting dream that I don’t want to open my eyes and make it come to an end. And so I keep them closed, so that I can stay just like this, resting in a time of innocence from years gone by.
Something keeps trying to pull me out of the dream, though. A nagging thought that I can’t quite grasp, just out of reach. It’s telling me to open my eyes, saying that, while that part of my past was filled with kindness and love, I have a present and a future that are filled with even more love. Another voice – not my father’s – tells me that it’s time to wake up and live.
When I open my eyes at last, the soft light of an autumn afternoon turns tumbling brown leaves into spun gold outside the windows of an unfamiliar room. My head feels strangely heavy and constricted, as if my scalp is too tight. Very carefully, I turn it a fraction, first one way and then the other. To the left, my father sits in a chair at my bedside, intent on the book he holds in his hands as he continues to recite the March family’s story. To my right is Thierry. His head is bowed, as if he’s praying as he listens to the words my father is reading. He is holding my hand, carefully avoiding the tube which runs from my arm to a drip stand beside the bed.
Experimentally – because everything seems very far away and disconnected and I’m not sure I can feel my fingers – I give Thierry’s hand a gentle squeeze. He doesn’t respond. So I try again.
This time he lifts his head. And when his eyes meet mine, a smile like a sunrise spreads slowly across his face, as if all his prayers just came true.
My hospital room is filled with flowers. A vase of bright sunflowers from Simone sits on the windowsill, alongside roses from Florence and my colleagues at the Agence Guillemet and a bunch of sweet-smelling white freesias from Sophie Rousseau at the Palais Galliera.
The biggest bouquet of all is from my stepmother and sisters and it was delivered with a card sending their love and urging me to come home. ‘They’re longing to see you,’ Dad says. ‘As soon as half term arrives, they’re coming over. We’re all so proud of you, Harriet. And the girls never stop talking about how cool it is having a big sister who’s made a career for herself in French fashion.’
‘It’ll be fun showing them round the museum,’ I say – and I find that I mean it. I actually quite miss them.
I’ve been asleep for five days, apparently, in a medically induced coma. And my father has sat at my bedside on every single one of those days and read from the book my stepmother put into his hastily packed suitcase. ‘Take this to her,’ he tells me she said. ‘It was always Harriet’s favourite.’
Thierry visits often and the nurses have all fallen in love with him, they tell me. ‘Not that he ever notices us. When you were in the coma, he wouldn’t leave your side,’ they say. ‘Such a romantic!’
My mind is a blank when it comes to remembering the accident, so Thierry fills in the missing parts of the jigsaw for me. ‘The police were chasing a suspect. And the tip-off they’d been given was right – they found bomb-making materials in the back of the van. The driver was part of a terrorist cell. There’ve been several arrests.’
He takes my hand, and strokes it, carefully avoiding the tape covering the needle which connects me to the drip at my bedside. ‘You pushed Simone to safety – without a doubt,