My Dearest Darling

Chapter 39

"Breathe. Robert, breathe," said a familiar voice. "Come on, Robert."

Slowly, he opened his eyes again to find himself looking straight into Rosamund's concentrated and quite concerned face. She had been trying to gain his attention again for at least a minute by gently slapping his cheek repeatedly, to no avail until now.

"Welcome back, brother dear. It is over, she made it. You just need to focus on your breathing now," she said when she saw that he came back into consciousness.

Everything was so bright. The walls were painfully white, the lamps were glaring garishly, and the windows let in far too much natural light for his liking; he felt as though simply looking ahead was scorching his eyes. With a tight grimace, he squinted at Rosamund and sat up straighter in the chair he had sunk into before losing consciousness.

Rosamund's brow was still furrowed in worry. She had never seen her brother faint before and they had more than enough on their plates already with Cora's surgery and recovery. But maybe that was the reason for Robert's collapse, she then thought. Maybe this was just all the stress and tension of the last few months falling away. She had heard that things like this could happen after withstanding too much pressure for too long, and her brother had really endured a lot in the last year.

His breathing was still shallow and quick, no doubt his pulse must have been racing, too. Reaching for a glass of water from a tray nearby, Rosamund said: "Here, take a sip and try to breathe deeper or you might faint again from lack of oxygen."

Her elder brother complied with her instructions and took the glass from her with trembling hands, drinking it all down in two big sips. Once his breathing started to slow again and his violent trembling stopped, he handed her the glass back. "Did the doctor truly say that? That she made it?" he asked, looking up at her with disbelieving, pleading eyes.

"Oh brother, dear. Don't be so surprised! You can't have been that pessimistic about it all, can you?"

Upon seeing his breathing getting more even, Rosamund sighed in relief and got back up from her crouching position on the floor in front of him. Pulling another chair closer, she sat down next to Robert and took his hand in hers.

Robert avoided looking at her and drew in a shuddering, shaky breath before he began to talk quietly into the open space that was the waiting area. "Would it stretch belief if I told you that I had more than twenty different scenarios made up in my head on how today would go and every single one of them ended with us at the graveyard again, standing in between Mama's and Sybil's graves where a new one had already been prepared?" he replied slowly, barely audible in the waiting room.

Rosamund inhaled sharply at that, resisting the strong urge to clutch at her heart in shock at how dark her brother's thoughts had been. However, she could not resist the sudden urge to hug him close. She had known that this was all very hard on him, of course it was. Cora had been by his side for so long, had been his loyal and steadfast companion through everything life threw their way; and to have to fear for her life like that was simply horrible. She remembered vividly when Marmaduke died. She would have given anything for more time with him. She would have given anything to be granted more than just the few years they had together, and to have him taken from her without warning almost broke her irreparably almost thirty years ago. She'd have given anything for even the slightest chance back then, for hope that things might actually turn out alright, instead of having the certainty and finality of death to deal with.

Seeing Robert like this, however, changed her view slightly. Maybe knowing there was hope wasn't all everyone made it out to be. Because in the end, hope was just that: hope. It wasn't knowing with certainty, it couldn't guarantee anything. Maybe hope was not a good thing to have at all because, for every possibility that things might work out, there were at least a hundred different ways for things to go wrong, too.