Then she heard it. The silence. The dreadful, agonising, empty silence. She spun around to look at the monitor. The screen was blank.
The screen was blank. ‘No,’ she breathed shakily. ‘No.’ Then she sank in a deep faint to the ground.
Hassan could not believe that any of this was really happening. He looked blankly at his father, then at his wife, then at the sea of frozen faces, and for a moment he actually thought he was going to join Leona and sink into a faint.
‘Look after my son’s wife.’ A frail voice woke everyone up from their surprise. ‘I think she has earned some attention.’
Before Hassan could move a team of experts had gone down over Leona and he was left standing there staring down at the bit of white plastic she had placed in his hand.
She was pregnant. She had just told him that this red mark in the window meant that she was pregnant. In the bed a mere step away his father was no longer fading away before his eyes.
Leona had done it. She’d brought him back from the brink, had put herself through the trauma of facing the answer on this small contraption, and she’d done both without his support.
‘Courage,’ he murmured. He had always known she possessed courage. ‘And where was I when she needed my courage?’
‘Here,’ a level voice said. ‘Sit down.’ It was Rafiq, offering him a chair to sit upon. The room was beginning to look like a war zone.
He declined the chair. Leave me with some semblance of dignity, he thought. ‘Excuse me,’ he said, and stepped through the kneeling shapes round Leona, and bent and picked her up in his arms. ‘But, sir, we should check she is…’
‘Leave him be,’ the old sheikh instructed. ‘He is all she needs and he knows it.’
He did not take her far, only to his father’s divan, where he laid her down, then sat beside her. She looked pale and delicate, and just too lovely for him to think straight. So he did what she had done with his father and took hold of her hand, then told her, ‘Don’t you dare bail out on us now, you little tyrant, even if you believe we deserve it.’
‘We?’ she mumbled.
‘Okay, me,’ he conceded. ‘My father is alive and well, by the way. I thought it best to tell you this before you begin to recall exactly why you fainted.’
‘He’s all right?’ Her gold-tipped lashes flickered upwards, revealing eyes the colour of a sleepy lagoon.
I feel very poetic, Hassan thought whimsically. ‘Whether due to the drugs or your bullying, no one is entirely certain. But he opened his eyes and asked me what you were talking about just a second after you flew out of the room.’
‘He’s all right.’ Relief shivered through her, sending her eyes closed again. Feeling the shiver, Hassan reached out to draw one of his father’s rugs over her reclining frame.
‘Where am I?’ she asked after a moment.
‘You are lying on my father’s divan, ‘ he informed her. ‘With me, in all but effect, at your feet.’
She opened her eyes again, looked directly at him, and sent those major parts that kept him functioning into a steep decline.
‘What made you do it?’
She frowned at the question, but only for a short moment, then she sighed, tried to sit up but was still too dizzy and had to relax back again. ‘I didn’t want him to go,’ she explained simply. ‘Or, if he had to go, I wanted him to do it knowing that he was leaving everything as he always wanted to leave it.’
‘So you lied.’
It was a truth she merely grimaced at.
‘If he had survived this latest attack, and you had been wrong about what you told him, would that have been a fair way to tug a man back from his destiny?’
‘I’m pregnant,’ she announced. ‘Don’t upset me with lectures.’
He laughed. What else was he supposed to do? ‘I apologise for shouting at you,’ he said soberly.
She was playing with his fingers where they pleated firmly with hers. ‘You were in trauma enough without having a demented woman throwing a fit of hysterics.’
‘You were right, though. He did hear you.’
She nodded. ‘I know.’