Chapter 25

Dominic

I haven’t slept properly since Christmas Eve.

Every time I close my eyes, I feel her going limp in my arms again, see the moon in the window over her shoulder and the scars across her ribs under the clinic’s white lights. So I’ve stopped trying. I sit in my office until the small hours, or walk the dark halls of the packhouse, and more than once I’ve found myself standing outside the clinic door at three in the morning, listening to her breathe.

On the morning after Christmas, Mercy calls me in.

Through the half-open door to the next room, I can hear Ellie chattering about nail polish, and every so often, very faintly, Neve answering her. I can’t make out the words. Only that her voice sounds tired, and that it isn’t afraid.

Mercy puts a sheet of lab results on the desk between us, half the numbers circled in red, and turns it so I can read it.

“No drugs,” she says. “Nothing she’s been taking to get high, whatever Blake thought he s