Page 91 of The Lost Husband

They both go quiet as we enter the room and the soldier drops Noah on the cot before leaving without a flash of remorse in his deadly eyes.

Avi stumbles away from the bed and moves to the other side of the room along with Elias. “What—what’s going on?” Avi asks.

“Noah,” I utter in a breathless moan.

“Your Noah? Your husband?” Elias asks.

“This is him?” Avi follows.

I press my palm against Noah’s chest, his skin…it feels like glass beneath my touch, unnatural, inhuman, and the hollow inside is like an icebox that won’t allow in any warmth.

His chest shudders, finally, just a small hitch, not a full breath, but an attempt. I press my ear against his chest, hearing a thin, wet gurgle that comes then disappears just as fast. It isn’t constant. I keep my head still, waiting for the next breath. Too many seconds grow between them.

“He’s freezing,” Elias says, pulling me upright so he can lean over Noah. He presses his palm against his neck. “He’s ice-cold. I’ve seen this before.” Elias is looking around the room as if something is here that could save Noah’s life. “People in transport…left in the cold too long. You can’t let them sleep. You can’t stop warming them.”

“We need to wake him—something. I don’t know how to help someone freezing to death,” I squawk through a cry.

“He’s not going to wake up like this,” Elias says. “He needs heat.”

I pull the coat tighter, overlapping the flaps, holding it as tightly as I can but the wool is wet and it’s taking whatever warmth he does have left. I didn’t realize I’d lost feeling in my fingertips. Another quivering breath wheezes from his lips.

“Celina,” Elias says, his voice calm and quiet, “if we don’t find a way to warm him up, he’s going to go into hypothermia. His body will shut down. He won’t last.”

His words hit me hard, but more as a reminder of how many bodies frozen to the ground and covered in snow I’ve seen in the past year. Each death was a result of a decision made by men in this very uniform.

Noah is not one of them. I know in my heart he is not.

I can barely make out even a single feature with the amount of dirt and bruises covering his face, except the freckles on his nose, the one untouched part on his face.

“Stay with me,” I whisper as I struggle to remove his wet coat.

“Let’s wrap him up in whatever you collected,” Elias says. I cover him with the layers piled in my arms while Elias removes his pants and shirt from beneath to separate the cold and damp from the dry and warm.

His breaths come and go with pauses far too long in between. “Body heat,” Elias says. “That’s what he needs.”

My gaze falls to the German coat on the ground. My stomach aches as I step in closer to the bed and lift my leg to slide in. Avi lifts the blankets closest to me and tucks them around my body. “I’m sealing in the heat,” she says.

The mattress sinks with my added weight, Noah’s head lolling onto my shoulder. The cold from his body seeps through my clothes, the temperature difference intense enough to steal the air from my lungs. I grit my teeth, clench my eyes, and wrap my arm around him to transfer whatever heat I can offer.

A succession of gunshots pop and rattle the room, one after another for a minute straight.

“What’s that?” Elias chokes out. “What are they doing?”

“They’re killing the rest of the German prisoners, so they can leave.” Leave behind the evidence of their mistake. A life that means less than a piece of paper to them.

“Where’s—where’s Christoph?” I keep my attention on Noah rather than Elias’s question.

Noah’s breaths find a weak pattern, something more than before, but still not enough. I press my hand to the top of his chest near his neck as if I can force the heat out of my hand and into him. His heart is beating slowly, weakly. Still. Body heat isn’t enough.

I shift to my side and take his wrist, feeling for his pulse, wondering if I’ll find a stronger beat, but it flutters just as weakly as his heart, as if it’s contemplating how much farther to go. I wrap my arm around him and tighten my grip so much my forehead presses into the crook between his chin and shoulder.

The horror reel from within my mind returns—Noah in a German uniform saying he knows who I am as he shoves me into the fire-breathing stove. I clench my eyes harder, pushing it away. I don’t let myself believe my nightmares. I won’t survive this if I do.

“Stay alive,” I murmur, my voice just a rasp. “You can pull through.”

His hand twitches against my side, not a purposeful move. Weak. But a movement, nonetheless.

His knuckles touch my stomach in a tentative, inquisitive brush, and everything inside of me shatters.