The first paramedic took Daniel's wrist and asked him to sit.
He tried to explain there was another man upstairs. She said her colleague was going up. He tried to explain Ada was there too. She said she knew. Then she put a chair beneath him, and his legs gave up the argument.
His right hand lay in her gloved hands, the towel being lifted away. Daniel looked at the red-beaked bird because she had told him he could look somewhere else.
“Can you feel me touching here?”
“Yes.”
“Here?”
“I don't know.”
He tried to move the finger she asked him to move. It hardly shifted. He said it might be because he was frightened. She said they needed someone at the hospital to look properly.
A police officer stood in the doorway. Not Cole; a younger man with rain on his shoulders, though Daniel hadn't noticed it begin. He asked who else was in the house. Daniel gave the names. Saying husband twice made the officer glance up, but he wrote them down.
“He went for her,” Daniel said.
“What happened before that?”
The paramedic was wrapping something clean around his hand. He watched her thumb hold the dressing steady.
“I locked him in the bedroom.”
The officer looked at him.
“For how long?”
“I don't know. A minute. Longer. Not long.”
The qualification tasted ugly.
“Why?”
“I wanted him to tell me something.”
“What did you want him to tell you?”
Daniel looked towards the stairs. There was a sound of feet, equipment moved carefully, Julian protesting against something that hurt.
“There are recordings. In his bag. A laptop. A card.”
He told the officer where the bag was, where the broken camera had fallen. He didn't try to explain the whole history standing in front of his own work. He said there were things Ada needed to tell them herself.
“Did you let him out?”
“Yes.”
“And then?”
Daniel described the wrist, the bag strap, Julian's elbow. When he reached the mirror breaking, the paramedic put a hand against his shoulder because he'd begun to rise from the chair.
“Stay with me.”
He sat again.
Ada came downstairs with blood on the front of Ruth's sweatshirt. She had left her bag upstairs. Someone had put a dressing on a little cut at her knee. She looked at Daniel's hand and stopped.
“Is it—”
“We're taking him in,” the paramedic said.
Ada nodded. Her eyes were bright and vacant in the way they had been after an exhausting print run. Daniel had seen her make herself continue on that face.
The officer asked her to come outside with him. She said there were things she'd done before today that they needed to know. He asked her to tell him separately.
Daniel wanted her to stay. He wanted to go with her. He wanted an officer to make them stop being alone with the same history.
She turned at the doorway.
“I hit him,” she said to Daniel.
“I saw.”
“I thought he was going to—”
“I saw.”
She looked at his hand again. This time he wanted her not to.
They brought Julian down on a stretcher. Daniel couldn't see his leg, but he saw his face. The fresh wound beside the old bruise made him look unfamiliar until his eyes found Daniel.
“Dan.”
Daniel stood, and the paramedic helped him because she thought he was ready to go.
Julian tried to lift his hand. One of the people with him said something quiet and lowered it.
Daniel wanted the hand to stay down.
He looked away before Julian could ask anything.
Outside, Ruth was standing beside Ada. She'd arrived after Ada had managed to call her. She had a coat around Ada's shoulders and a small ordinary supermarket bag in her hand. The rain had made the shaved strip beneath her hair shine.
Ada came towards Daniel as he was led to the other ambulance.
“Do you want someone with you?”
He could have said yes. It would have put her in a chair beside him for hours, holding his good hand while people examined the bad one. He wanted it enough to feel sick.
“No.”
She nodded. She didn't ask again.
She went back into the workshop, took off her mother’s ring—the one she’d worn for their vows—and set it on the bench. “Put it with my things,” she said. Daniel watched through the open door. When she came out again, a stub of pencil showed between her fingers.
“Ruth's taking me,” she said.
“Good.”
It wasn't generous. He had no room for generosity. He meant only that she would go somewhere which wasn't his house or Julian's flat.
She glanced back at the open workshop door.
“My shoes.”
“I'll get them to you.”
“They can wait.”
He nodded.
In the ambulance he looked down at the dressing. A red spot had begun to show through. The paramedic adjusted his hand and asked how he was feeling.
He said he restored glass for a living.
She said, “I understand.”
He didn't think she did. Then he understood she wasn't claiming anything about the glass.
At the hospital they asked him the same questions in a different order. He told them what he could. When he closed his eyes, he felt the key turning and the mirror falling. He could not make one happen without the other.
His phone lay in his left hand. He rang Calla and said he was at the hospital. Before she could ask, he said Ada was alive, and nobody had died.
“Are you all right?”
“No.”
“All right,” she said. “Tell me where.”