Saved By The Greek Doctor (Greek Gods #3) - Holly Rayner Page 0,11
said. “I didn’t know where I was, and I was trying to find my way through the dark when that coffee table grabbed me and I fell and—”
“Shh,” he interrupted, putting the picture back on the table and adjusting it carefully until it stood up again. He looked up at me, a shadow in his eyes but a smile on his lips. “You’re feverish, and you need sleep. Come on.”
He ushered me back to bed, murmuring about how he shouldn’t have let me drink so much wine and how this was entirely his fault, but that he’d forgotten to pay attention, and before I knew it I was back in those cool, soft sheets and sinking into sleep again, the feel of the picture shattering next to me fading into the darkness.
Chapter 7
Nikos
I stared at the picture on the coffee table, my heart feeling like cement that had cracked right through the middle—in a place where it had cracked so many times before. A place that I’d been trying for years to patch. A crack that I still hadn’t managed to fix.
The truth was, I wasn’t even sure I’d ever be able to truly repair it, no matter how much I tried.
You know how when something breaks and you glue it back together, chances are good that it will break again in exactly the same spot? Like a plate or something? It’s cracked right down the center and you use the strongest glue you can find to put it back together because you just can’t bear to lose it. But then the next time you’re washing dishes and you wash that plate… it comes apart again in your hands. Right there where you thought you’d repaired it.
Because the sad but irrevocable truth was that no matter how strong that glue might be, it wasn’t as strong as the stuff that made up the plate. Or maybe it just wasn’t strong enough to keep the two halves of the plate together if they wanted to fall apart.
That was how my heart felt. How it had been feeling, in fact, for five years now. And the spot where Lia had lived was the spot where it kept cracking open and bleeding out all over the place.
I ran my gaze over the image in that broken picture frame—Lia as a toddler, laughing at something her mother had said—and shook my head.
My little girl had certainly known how to laugh. She’d never stopped. It was the first sound she’d made—despite the fact that the doctors had told us she would have to learn to do it—and it was one of the last memories I had of her. The laugh she’d given me when I told her I was going to have ice cream waiting for her when she woke up from the surgery that was meant to repair her heart.
She’d had plenty of joy, right from the start, and she hadn’t been at all shy about sharing it with those around her. But her body hadn’t been built quite right. Her heart, which had felt so much and been so big, had come with a flaw.
I’d been so sure that I could fix her, so sure that I could patch up that small hole in her right ventricle to keep her laughing for the rest of her life…
I yanked myself out of the dark spiral I was entering and looked up and away from the picture. Maybe it was a good thing Trish had broken that picture, if it was going to make me so morose.
Trish.
At the thought, I remembered what I’d been doing when I passed the picture and got back to it, rebalancing the tray in my hand and forcing my feet to move once again toward the guest suite where I hoped she was still sleeping.
That episode last night had been worrisome. She’d been feverish and potentially hallucinating, and certainly hadn’t known where she was.
God, I realized, she must have been terrified. Waking up alone in a strange house, the madness of the fever licking at her and making her forget how she’d gotten here. She must have been so confused. So frightened.
It was no wonder she’d gone wandering out into the house—she’d probably been trying to figure out how to get out.
Thank God she hadn’t found a door. I didn’t want to think about what might have happened to her if she’d found her way out into the wilderness. I might never have found her.