Author's comment: Just one thing to say, really: FINALLY!! Jesus Christ, I have spent both blood, sweat and tears on this chapter, but I also think it's one of the better I've ever written, at least if one looks at the writing, the content is another thing =)
And, since this is up now I have worked through my problems with ff.net… when I'm writing this I haven't… :(

Before I let you read I'd like to give my beta reader Trisse some, no, a lot, of credit – it's thanks to her that I added the last part, for example. Thanks to her very through-thought or whatever-to-call-it-in-English-comments I got the chapter better! Even though I was deadly nervous, as some people at FF might have seen ;)
Well, thanks again, both to Trisse and the reviewers and please keep reading and reviewing!!

CHAPTER SEVEN : HOMECOMING [part two]

9 p.m. 7th December, Zagreb/Croatia

The plane landed softly at the landing pad outside the international airport. Dubravko turned away his attention from the pretty stewardess.
"Welcome home," he said with a wide smile.
Luka was dragged away from the half-asleep state he had been in the whole flight thanks to the pills he somehow had managed to convince Dubravko to give him. This flight had also been a more pleasant one – the plane hadn't been as full as the one from Chicago had been and therefore the air inside the cabin had been better and he had had more room for his legs.
"What…?" he asked as he struggled to wake up completely.
"We landed," Dubravko said, slightly laughing at how Luka didn't seem to be awake at all.
"What were you dreaming about?" he added teasingly.
"A life without Valium and vodka," Luka muttered sarcastically, not planning to tell Dubravko that he had been thinking – not dreaming – just thinking back at his and Susan's moment outside County. Susie… He could hear her laughter inside his head if he wanted to.
Dubravko sighed.
"Are you always that ironic nowadays? What happened to my laughing brother?"
"He died," Luka said coldly as the people at the first seats started to leave the plane.
"He died."

10.01 a.m. - County, Chicago

Susan gasped and stared at the man in front of her. Everybody else looked too, but they were surprised and smiling, not shocked and almost nauseous as she was.
"Aren't you going to say hello to me, Susie?"
Ritchie's voice filled her head, his voice just as arrogant and self absorbed as always. The sound of him talking to her, that wide grin… - everything made her remember.

The sound of the storage closet door slamming shut, his hands suddenly everywhere.
"What the hell are you doing?!"
He whispered her name huskily, taking a tighter grip of her, her suddenly realizing what he was doing. Him trying to kiss her as she pushed him away, screaming on top of her lungs. The door to the closet being opened, her feeling relieved through the panic. Somebody was coming - he couldn't hurt her.
The Chief of ER opening the door, stepping inside. She thought he'd start yelling at Ritchie or fire him right that instant, but that didn't happen.
Her boss gave her, her panic stricken expression and messy clothes a cold look and turned to Ritchie.
"Do you have the labs on Mr. Perez in exam 4, Dr. Smith?"

She remembered how shocked she had been. Didn't he understand…? Was he blind?
Didn't he care?
Apparently not.

Ritchie gave her an evil smile and left two steps behind their boss, leaving her alone in the storage closet with a shocked expression on her face. She had a feeling of nothing being real – first she was attacked in a storage closet by a colleague, then looked down on as slut by her boss.

"Stay away from me, Ritchie," she hissed between her teeth, making all the others frown or jump. It wasn't like her, she heard someone whisper behind her.
"Susie…" he tried, still with that obnoxious smile.

He took a few steps up to the desk and towards her, reaching out with his hand to touch her.
"Let me be!" she yelled, slapping his fingers before they got anywhere near her.
"I thought I told you to go to hell three years ago!" she added.
"I came here, didn't I," he said with a laugh, a laugh that made her feel even more disgusted. She knew the others behind her would have laughed at his describtion of the hospital as the place for people closed out from heaven, a describtion they often used themselves – they would have agreed with him if it hadn't been for her reaction. They were standing there, practically staring at her, following every move she made in order to try to see a pattern or read some sense into her actions.

"Come on Susan," he said, now in a slightly sharper voice, though still making sure that he didn't loose his face in front of the rest. She shook her head heavily, took a few steps away from admit desk and straight up to him. The blood was pumping inside of her, the shock and terrible memories faded away, only leaving fury left. She stopped right in front of him and looked him right in the eye.
"No, no, no! I'm not your Susie, I'm not going to 'come on' and I'm never going to let you come near me, even less touch me, again!"

With that she fled. She was planning to walk away without looking back, being strong and confident.
She didn't look back, but by the time she passed him by she realized she was running.

10.05 p.m. outside Zagreb

Suddenly, as out of nowhere, the village appeared in front of him. He had forgotten how the road made that sudden but sharp turn, away from the green fields and up the hill.
How could he have forgotten that, especially considering how he had been close to crash into a tree by the field one of the first times he drove a car?
Well, maybe Dubravko's roaring laughter at the sight had been why he had managed to forget it.

The old houses, all in different sizes but in the same white brick, were showing up one after one. Those houses with the red roofs always made all the tourists he remembered from his childhood think of the Mediterranean. There had been nothing that would have made them think that the idyllic village an hours drive from the capital a decade later would suffer as it would.
So many people had lost their lives, even more people had lost dear ones. His history was in no way unique here. The cemetery on the other side of the hill was swamped. Only the thought of it and what was there under the flowers and crosses made him feel short of breath, almost nauseous.

Dubravko slowed down the car as they drove through the heart of the village where the small church and the open square were. Children playing, old men playing chess at small tables in the not at all winter-like weather, their wives chatting, and, even though they'd never admit it, gossiping about the ones that weren't there.
He knew them all, recognized them through the car window Dubravko really should clean. Some were friends of his mother who knew everybody; others had worked with his father or even grandfather before retiring. Some of them had spent weeks and months at the hospital in Zagreb because of war injuries, others were just and had always been too lazy to work, not letting their wives' or mothers' nagging get to them.
The further up the sandy road Dubravko drove, the more familiar faces Luka saw. Childhood friends mostly, some related to him in one way or another, some not.
Some of them saw him through the window despite Dubravko's bad cleaning routines. He saw his childhood best friend Viktor looking right at him, his thoughts easy to read as always.
He was wondering how things could have gone this far, this wrong and how they had gotten this dark.

Finally Dubravko made the last turn and the familiar mailbox with the big, red letters spelling out KOVAC on appeared, put up at the white wooden fence. Only seconds later the house was right there in front of them.
Dubravko stopped the car in the middle of the yard. The house looked as it always had – or, actually – the houses. First there was the farmhouse with his brother's old car outside, and then there was the smaller main house with the big veranda.
That veranda had always seemed insanely built in his eyes – somehow it jumped right at you. In the summer it worked like a second livingroom, furnished with a big table and enough chairs for the whole village, chairs and table coming into use on his mother's birthday. They had many weird looking chairs in this house – before his father had started painting and conducting trains he had been some kind of carpenter with chairs as his speciality.

The front door was opened and out on the porch rushed his mother, yelling something back inside the house. A few seconds later Natalia followed her out, shutting the door behind them and throwing a blanket over her mother-in-law's shoulders. He could hear his mother talking loudly, maybe it was because she didn't hear all that well anymore or then she just liked the sound of her own voice. Natalia, who usually minded nothing and no one and wasn't all that quiet herself either hushed her and helped Milena down the stairs, waving at them.
Natalia looked the same of course. A few lines on her forehead were the only signs of the ten years that had passed since their last meeting, the lines probably caused by chasing three daughters under five around the house all day.
Dubravko stepped out of the car, opening up his arms to Natalia who came running, being something as unusual as almost as tall as Dubravko. Luka groaned at the sight of them kissing a few hours after arguing over the phone in a way that would have made most couples throw in the towel. Susan was right; Dubravko and Natalia did have a Hollywood-worthy marriage.

His mother knocked gently on the car window and without thinking he met her gaze. He couldn't help all the emotions storming up inside of him.
No matter how hopeless she was - how loudly she spoke, how she never stopped treating him like a child just because he happened to be 26 months younger than Dubravko, how she refused to answer the simplest question unless it didn't concern exactly what she was thinking about that instant – regardless of everything she was his mother and he hadn't seen her in ten years. He closed his eyes and swallowed hard in a desperate attempt to keep all the emotions in control, and maybe he would have succeeded if she hadn't opened the door he apparently hadn't locked from the inside as he used to.
"Aren't you going to come out?" she asked gently.
"Can you get up?" Dubravko asked. When he didn't get any reply whatsoever he left Natalia on the other side of the car and walked up to Luka. He reached out with his hand.
"Come," he said.

With help from both Dubravko and Natalia he managed to get out of the car. To get his balance right he put a hand on the car roof for a minute, gathering the few pieces left of him together. His mother looked at him, he could see how the tears welled up in her eyes.
"Mama…" he said, taking her hand and forcing himself to smile. "Don't…-"
He didn't even have the time to finish "cry" before she threw her arms around his neck and started crying loudly.
"I thought I'd never get to see you in one piece again," she cried, almost strangling him and kissing his cheeks. Dubravko saw this and came up to them, gently removing their mother's arms from Luka's neck.
"Try to keep him in one piece too," he said with laughter in his voice.
"Don't tell me what to do Dubravko! I am your mother and you don't...-" she yelled, still crying. Two seconds later she threw her arms around Dubravko instead.
"I'm sorry …" she cried, "I just…-"

She kept rambling on and on about different things for several minutes – how she had been so sure that she'd never see Luka again, how she had been so worried when he left for America and how she had told him to stay but he wouldn't listen to her and…-
Luka exchanged a tired smile with Natalia who rolled her eyes behind Milena's back. She seemed, as usual, to be the only one totally unaffected by all the emotions surrounding her. She just stood there, slightly behind her husband and mother-in-law, her arms crossed over her chest and wearing the long and curly hair in a bun and the same looking cardigan and long skirt as he remembered her with. Another memory flashed up inside, a memory of how people had made fun of how similar the Kovac girls were. With that people of course meant the similarities between Natalia and Danijela.

He had never thought they were that similar, though. If Danijela never yelled, only looked at him with the disappointment in her eyes when they disagreed on something, then Natalia and Dubravko fought like cats and dogs, just as they still did. If Danijela was quiet around other people than the family, then Natalia with her acting ambitions never shut up for more than a few seconds. If Danijela's hair always was let out and free for him to play with, then Natalia only let her big and frizzy hair when she was dancing or sleeping. They were like night and day, but were still best friends.
Were?
God, he was doing it again. Once again he was thinking about Danijela in the present tense. He hadn't done it for a while, but coming back here, seeing all these familiar faces… He had seen his great uncle, his childhood friends and some cousins while driving through the village – that Danijela and the kids weren't here felt more unreal than usual. By living in Rome and Chicago he slowly had gotten used to not hearing the sound of Jasna coming running up to him as soon as he came through the door, to not smell Danijela's gastronomic specialties from the kitchen and to not have any more cosy family nights in front of the fireplace. He missed it so much… It was almost impossible to describe the feelings thinking of his family brought up. A feeling of sharp, killing pain, a pain stronger and more intense than anything he had ever treated patients for. It was killing him. Slowly but surely. He could feel it. It didn't show, but it was as if it took parts of him every day, slowly creeping in and through him. Through the hard facade he had put up, through his inner walls, through his cold appearance, right through everything. He missed everything of his old life. He missed the village, he missed his family, and he missed being able to speak his own language. He missed the hospital in Zagreb, he missed his brothers, and he even missed Natalia with whom he never got along with. For the second time in one day he wondered if he could turn back. Could he come back, start all over again? Could he move home to the village or get a place somewhere in Zagreb, could he finally have the job at the hospital he had been meant to have ever since he graduated – could everything get back to as it once had been supposed to be? Right now there was nothing else he wanted to do than to stay here. He didn't know if these sudden attitude changes towards everything were because of the abstinence or if he just was an emotional wreck right now, but it was how he felt. Being here – the familiar smells, the people… This was his home, where he was from and where he was supposed to be.
Right?

10.10 a.m. County, Chicago

"Susan…? Susan!"
Jing-Mei's voice filled the ladies room.
"She's not here," Abby's voice replied.
"She came in here."
"Maybe she went around the corner."
"To where?"
"Don't know. The roof, outside… home, maybe. She looked pretty freaked out."
"I know… Poor thing. I wonder what he's done?"
"What did it sound like to you?"
"You think he…- Maybe it was just a bad break up or something."
"He didn't exactly look like her type, did he?"
"No… you're right… But I can't believe she wouldn't have told anyone…"
"Would you have?"
"Do you think we should go up to the roof…?"
"Carter went up."
"And Pratt and Gallant are in the ambulance bay."
"Are you sure she went in here?"

She took a deep breath, touched by how much people cared.
"He didn't rape me, if that's what you think."

Running footsteps, the door to the last stall being opened, both Abby and Jing-Mei hugging her at the same time, almost making them bump their heads into each other.
"I thought you were here," Jing-Mei then said, stroking her hair where she sat next to her on the floor.
"What happened?" Abby asked, kneeling down in front of her.
"I hate him!" Susan yelled, realizing that she still was crying. Hadn't she decided not to waste anymore tears on that bloody man?! On any man, for that matter.
"Why?" Abby asked. "What happened?"
"He's such a bastard…" Susan muttered, weeping away the last of the tears, and, unfortunately also the last of her mascara with the tissue Jing-Mei gave her. Waterproof, bah.
"Sure acted like one," Chen muttered, searching for a clean tissue in her lab coat pocket.

Susan bit her lip.
"We worked together in Arizona…" she began.

"And I thought Weaver was bad! I hope Carter doesn't kill him when he hears." Abby said, sounding shocked.
"He would deserve it," Susan muttered.
"I know. It'd just be bad for Carter's career."
They all laughed, knowing this wasn't funny.
Susan could see that neither Jing-Mei could believe her ears. Who could? She still had trouble understanding the fact that a man who was supposed to be chief over a whole department and its staff didn't care when a doctor got attacked by a colleague in a storage closet. Or, maybe one should say when a female doctor was attacked by a male colleague. The problem for both Ritchie and the chief had seemed to lie within the fact that there was such a thing as female doctors.
"So he just left? Did nothing…?"
"Yeah… I couldn't believe it."
"No kidding…"
"Did you ever report him?"
"No… What was I supposed to say anyway?"
"How about what happened?"
"That I, new, young, insecure, was attacked in a closet by an attending and that the whole thing was witnessed by the chief of ER who decided not to give a damn? They wouldn't have given a damn."

2.34 a.m. outside Zagreb

The green floor tiles were getting a shade he, after having tiled the floor himself when they renovated the bathroom fifteen years ago, knew they shouldn't have. He looked up from the floor, shaking his head, trying to wake up his system and thereby give the floor tiles their right shade again. Unfortunately this physical alarm clock also woke up his digestive system.
Luka groaned and tried to reach the toilet in time. He was so tired that he barely could keep his eyes open - why did this have to come now?
He had been sitting on this floor since midnight, feeling sicker every second. Of course he should have known better than to eat anything at all, but he had never been very good at standing up against his mother when it came to food issues, and now when Natalia was involved too it was even more difficult to argue against. She probably thought that this was some kind of protest against her cooking.

As he straightened his back he managed to hit his head against the wall and let out another loud groan.
"You don't have to wake up the whole house, you know," he suddenly heard a familiar voice from the door. He turned around, seeing Natalia opening the water tap and filling the glass in her hand. He didn't bother to answer, just muttered something and leaning back against the wall, this time without giving himself more headache than he already had.
"Here. Drink slowly," Natalia said as she sat down next to him on the floor.
"I know, I'm a freaking doctor!" he snapped, his voice filled with tiredness and frustration, and took the glass.
"Drink it then," she said calmly, going through her robe pockets in hunt for something else than cigarettes. She had quit smoking when the twins were born, but hadn't been able to kick the habit of having something between her fingers all the time just yet.

He couldn't help but being a bit surprised at her lack of reaction, but then he remembered at whom he had been snapping. Natalia didn't give a damn if someone, not to mention her husband's baby brother, snapped at her. She was the most independent woman he had ever met in his whole life, and he was pretty sure that he'd never meet anyone like her either.
She was really something, that Natalia, he thought, finding himself humming on a silly song she had sung so many times that it had gotten stuck on his mind and that he still, after not hearing it for over ten years, knew by heart.
She heard his quiet humming and smiled. Knowing he'd hate it she started humming too, quietly at first but then louder and louder. He groaned.
"Talia… please, don't torture me. I do that very well myself."
She just smiled, continuing to hum on the stupid tune her mother once had taught her and that she would teach her daughters and they theirs… An old gipsy melody it was, filled with nonsensical words and lines, all involving the line "she's really something, that Natalia…", sung in different speeds. The Natalia in the song wasn't her, it was someone her grandmother had known many years ago, some old woman that had impressed the whole country with her capacity and determination. She had not been a female Einstein, but she had been able to take care of herself, her family and her dreams in a way that no one had seen before. She had been clever in the street-way, her cleverness and head not gained from heavy books in dusty libraries but from life itself and from what it had given her, good or bad experience hadn't mattered, she had learned something and had passed it down to everyone willing to take it and do something sensible with it. She hadn't been rich but she had been able to live her life with the little money she had had, she hadn't been a great writer or reader but she had been practical, and she was Natalia Kovac's role model number one.

Luka smiled slightly when he saw how Natalia got captured inside her own world as she began to utter the trite lines of the song. They were sitting here, side by side, at a cold bathroom floor in a cold house in the middle of the night, him not being able to sleep because he'd throw up when he least expected it, her not being able to sleep because of the sounds from the bathroom. Sometimes, times like this, he could see what Dubravko saw in Natalia, sometimes, or almost all the time, it was a mystery as big as the one with the Triangle of Bermuda. They had never liked each other very much, he and Natalia, but had never disliked each other either. In some way he had always admired her, admired her for her incredible strength, for her passionate but yet so down to earth way of living. For her being able to stand up against Dubravko, Dragan and his mother whenever she wanted to, something he himself not always had been very successful at doing. For her being able to raise three daughters and still keep the dream of once becoming an actress alive in both her heart and her soul, for her always being so determinded and never giving up, no matter if it was about a broken ear ring she was trying to repair without Dubravko's help, or if it was the dream to someday have enough money to move away from her mother-in-law. Seeing her captured inside her own world like he did now made it clear to anyone that she found it all, all sacrifices and all the trouble she had been through worth it, as long as she got to have this little world of song and dance for herself. She still had the same beautiful and at the same time very personal voice.

Suddenly he reminisced a day many years ago out on the yard. He had been in the middle of his education then and it had been one of his rare weekends home. They had been rehearsing one of the most crucial scenes of Hamlet there in the afternoon sun, exaggerating the drama time and time again before they suddenly became serious. He had been blown away by how ture she seemed as Ophelia that he missed his lines, driving her crazy until he finally got over his fascination over her acting abilities. She hadn't been the one to play against him in the real play of course, but he had never been able to see the girl he had been supposed to be madly in love with on stage as Ophelia – to him Natalia would always be the only Ophelia there was, no matter how many times he had seen the play since his university days or how many women he saw in the lead role.

She stopped singing, leaving him surprised. Her quiet voice had managed to get his messed up and aching head to feel a bit better for a while, had made the world seem a bit less dark and cold for a few minutes.
Now he was rudely thrown back to reality, his reality with hang overs, leg pain, nausea and Valium addiction, the last the worst. How was he going to be able to kick that habit, how was he going to get out of the squirrel wheel? He knew very well that he couldn't just stop taking the pills after such a long time – that would be a sure way to kill himself. No, he had to keep taking them, just make the doses lower and lower, hoping he'd manage to keep away from the bottles. People who were about to take a step like this should be under medical attention.
But he was the medical attention and the addict at the same time. This was his reality.
And people wondered why he had been trying to kill himself.

He took a careful sip of water. When he was done drinking she took the glass from him and put it on the edge of the bathtub, then turned back to him.
"How are you feeling?" she asked.
"What does it look like?"
"I didn't know my cooking was this bad," she said, confirming his suspicions.
"It's not that, Natalia. It's me… I haven't been able to keep anything down in days."
"You drink too much."
"Probably."
"You shouldn't."
"No, I shouldn't," he sighed. "And Dubravko, Dragan and dad shouldn't smoke two packs a day either, mum shouldn't drink as much coffee as she does and you shouldn't sing while trying to drive a car. We still do it. It's life, Natalia."
"And this is coming from a doctor," she said, shaking her head in disbelief.
"I'm not my job."
"You used to be."
"There's a lot I used to be. I used to be a father, I used to have a wife I loved, I used to go straight home from work and not hang around in obscene bars drinking vodka, I used not to treat patients when I was drunk."
She sighed deeply and looked down at her hands. She was quiet for longer than he had ever seen her, apparently fighting with herself whether or nor she should say what she had on her mind.
"Luka…" she finally began, sounding a bit unsure on if this was smart to say or not.
"What?"
She bit her lower lip.
"You're going to blow up on me if I say this," she muttered, mostly to herself.
"Well, I might throw up on you if you're not nice," he smiled.
She returned the smile, shaking her head.
"What?" he asked again, this time a bit more persistent. Sure they had had their fights over the years but right now was not a good time. Then he understood what she was going to say.
"If you're going to say that I should move on and that this is just something temporarily or that I…- Forget it. Dubravko and Susan have already given me that."
"Susan Lewis?" Natalia asked, suddenly in another kind of voice, as if she was happy to change the subject. It was the same hopeful voice he had heard his mother switch into every time a woman's name came up.
"Yes," he sighed, too tired to argue. "What about her?"
"Dubravko told us about her… She is one of your colleagues, right?"
"Yes," he said again, this time damning his dear brother for this. How much had he told them? Was it just about Susan being the one to find him, or had Dubravko, as Luka strongly suspected, also added his version of when he had walked in on them at the hospital and the long goodbye outside County?
"Well… I'm hearing…-"
So he had told them everything.
"You're hearing wrong," he snapped, wanting this discussion to end so he could forget it had ever taken place. Forget things were one of the few things he actually had managed to do lately. Unfortunately he only forgot important things, stuff like this managed to stay and mess up his mind.
"I haven't even said anything yet!"
"Well, considering that what Dubravko has told you is wrong, nothing you've heard about Susan and me is true, so you don't have to say anything."
"So there is a 'you' then, is there?" she asked, ignoring the last of what he had said.
"When did I say that?" he asked, annoyed.
"You don't need to… I have both ears and eyes," she said teasingly.
"Well, good for you! Now would you please just drop this!"
"Fine, fine…." she smiled, holding up her hands in surrender.
"Thank you."

They were quiet for a while, he trying to breathe through the new wave of nausea that hit him, she watching him closely, prepared to help him if it became necessary. When he couldn't fight it anymore and was too tired to even keep his back straight she held her hands on his shoulders and wet a towel with which she gently patted his forehead.
When he was done he breathed heavily.
"Jesus, Natalia... won't this ever stop…"
"You've already spent too much time with Dubravko, I can hear," she smiled.
"What….?"
"You don't usually say 'Jesus', he does."
"Right…" Luka said, not really listening.
"I'm sorry…" she said after a few moments of silence.
He just shook his head, as to say that there was nothing to be sorry for.
"Weren't you about to say something…?" he then asked.
"Don't think about that."
"No… Just say it… I need to hear something else than me throwing up and Dubravko snoring."
She chuckled.
"Why do you think I came in here? It has only gotten worse over the years, I can tell you."
He smiled slightly.
"Say it now."
She sighed.
"You're not gonna like it."
"Tell me."
"Fine," she sighed and dragged her hand through her hair, looking down.
"Luka," she began, "I think I knew Danijela pretty well, I might even dare to say I knew her better than you did, on some levels…"
She looked up from the floor.
"I know she would never have wanted you to live the rest of your life like this. She would never ever have wanted you to slowly kill yourself like this."
"Natalia, I…-"
"You can't punish yourself for the rest of your life! It was not your fault. There was nothing you could have done differently."
"I could have gotten Danijela to the hospital, I could have stayed home, I could have moved here with them the minute the war started, I could have done everything differently, damn!"
"No, Luka. You have to stop this 'could have, would have, should have'-crap. There was nothing you could have done differently. Nothing. Nada."
She took his hands and forced him to look at her.
"Luka, listen to me! You have to stop this! You have to allow yourself to live!"
He tried to look away, but her bright green eyes didn't allow him to do so.
"You have to let them go, Luka. They will always be with you and you will always love them, but you have to let go."
"I can't," he said in a thick voice.
"Yes you can. And you have to. You have to let go, you have to let go…"

She said those words over and over again, and finally they started to sink in. Her voice was breaking through all the walls inside of him, ruining all defence he possibly had possessed against talk like this. She was squeezing his hands, looking straight at him and repeating the words as a mantra.
"You have to let go, Luka. You have to let go…-"
The worst of the nausea was slowly fading away, and with the digestive system calm the rest of his body was starting to relax too. He leaned back against the wall, closing his eyes and letting the wonderful land of sleep come closer.
"We need to get you to bed. We wouldn't want you to fall asleep on the bathroom floor" he suddenly heard Natalia's voice.
He opened his eyes slightly.
"No, we wouldn't want that…"
"Come," she said, raising up and reaching out her hand to him. He took it and somehow managed to get up.

With his sister-in-law's hand over his back he got up, left the bathroom and slowly walked down to the bedroom in the basement.