Luca fell asleep at noon.
Eleanor watched his chest rise and fall for a moment and then picked up her bag and walked out of the room quietly and went downstairs to the small garden at the side of the hospital building where nobody ever seemed to sit.
She needed air. she needed to think fast before things go wrong.
She sat on a bench and looked at the flowerbeds and thought about her grandson lying in that bed with two years of his life simply gone and felt the particular satisfaction of a woman whose problem had been solved by circumstances rather than effort.
Whatever had happened in those two years, whatever that woman had been to him, Luca remembered none of it. He had woken up clean. Fresh. The version of himself that Eleanor understood and could work with.
She was not going to wa
