Now she was being escorted to the hospital. As she approached the entrance, she saw reporters clotted out front. Someone in the crowd must have recognized her, because they turned in unison, like some suddenly roused beast, and pushed forward.

“Mrs. Ryan, what word do you have on his condition?”

“Is it a head injury?”

“Has he spoken—”

“—or opened his eyes?”

She didn’t slow down. If there was one thing a producer’s wife knew, it was how to move through the press. They were being as respectful as they knew how to be, given their profession. Although Johnny was one of them and they knew that it could have happened to any of them, a story was a story.

“No comment.” She pushed through the crowd and entered the hospital. It was like all such institutions—blank walls, utilitarian flooring, crisply uniformed people bustling down wide corridors.

They’d clearly been alerted to her arrival, because a heavyset woman in a white uniform and starched nurse’s cap strode toward her, smiling sympathetically.

“You must be Mrs. Ryan,” she said in heavily accented English.

“I am.”

“I will take you to your husband’s room. The doctor will arrive shortly to speak at you.”

Kate nodded.

Thankfully, the woman didn’t make small talk as they rode up the elevator. On the third floor, they strode past the nurses’ station and turned into his room.

He looked frail and broken, like a child in his parents’ bed. She stopped, realizing a second too late that she’d spent too much time imagining a reunion and not enough anticipating this reality. This man bore only the shallowest resemblance to her vibrant, handsome husband.

His head was sheathed in white bandages. The entire left side of his face was swollen and discolored; both his eyes were bandaged. Machines and lines and IVs were clustered around him.

The nurse patted her shoulder and gave her a gentle push toward the bed. “He is alive,” she said. “This is what you should see when you look at him.”

Kate took the most difficult step of her life. Until that moment, she hadn’t even realized that she’d stopped moving. “He’s usually so strong.”

“He needs you to be strong now.”

They were the words Kate needed to hear. She had a job here; the time for feeling too much and falling apart would come later when she was alone. “Thank you,” she said to the nurse, and walked toward the bed.

Behind her, the door shut quietly, and she knew they were alone now, she and this man who was and wasn’t her Johnny.