I hadn’t noticed him standing next to Catherine, looking smaller than I’d ever seen him, his eyes full of sympathy. ‘He’s stable, Ivy. They’ve taken him straight into surgery, but he’s alive, that’s the main thing,’ he spoke in soft tones. I looked at him through my tears. Surgery? What was he saying? Through the fog of emotion, my brain zeroed in on the other word. Alive. I clung to that word, like I’d never clung to anything in my life. Even as I wondered how it could be... How just an hour ago we were dancing under a canopy of twinkly lights and now... now he’d been in an accident and he was going into surgery. My brain refused to process it. I blinked while trying to breathe – through the tears that threatened to consume me – painful, wrenching breaths. ‘W-w-what happened?’ I stuttered, gasping. My lungs felt like they’d been injected with lead. Like I’d suffocate from my fear.
