The Nurse by J. Corrigan (list of ebook readers txt) 📕

then stops abruptly. He strides quickly in her direction and without a word gathers her into his arms.

‘So good to see you,’ she says.

‘You too.’

‘We’ve got ages to wait for the flight. It’s delayed.’

‘Better to be here in plenty of time, though.’

‘You’re an early type of person, aren’t you?’ she says, pulling back to look at him.

‘I am. Like everything in its place.’

‘Shall we go and check in?’ she suggests.

Theo nods and gets up, but as he does, someone brushes past, knocking his bag off his shoulder.

‘Sorry,’ the young man says.

Theo takes him in: long hair tied in a ponytail, American. The traveller crouches down, laying the book he’s carrying on the floor so he can pick up the bag, which he hands to Theo. Then he scoops up the huge tome and places it under his right arm. Gray’s Anatomy.

Unquestionably a med student.

‘No problem.’ Theo hitches his bag back onto his shoulder and glances at Rose. She’s put on her sunglasses and is holding his hand in a vice-like grip. He pulls her nearer but says nothing, and they walk.

‘So if you’re not writing about me, what will you write?’ she asks finally, but her voice is cracked; it’s the same tone he hears in Sophie’s voice when talking about Elliot.

They are approaching the check-in desk. ‘My editor says that every big acquisition reported in The Bookseller at the moment is an epic love story,’ he says. ‘What do you think?’

‘True-life crime isn’t cutting it?’

‘Not this week, fortunately.’ He grins.

‘You’d write a beautiful love story.’

‘I’ve already written one. My editor’s read it. He says he likes it. I like to think it’s cushioned the blow about your… about my other project.’

‘That’s good news, Theo,’ she says, but there is innate sadness carved into her features, and Theo isn’t sure he’ll ever be able to eradicate it.

Simultaneously they place their passports on the desk.

‘Both travelling to San Francisco?’ the assistant asks.

It’s Theo who answers. ‘Both of us, yes. Together.’

As they walk towards Customs, he stops suddenly, opens his bag, pulls out the newspapers and puts them in the nearest bin.

Rose takes hold of his arm. ‘Theo, there’s something I have to tell you. Cathy’s story—’

He turns. ‘There isn’t anything to tell me, Rose.’ He gathers her to him and an image of Miles burns. Rose isn’t aware of his visit to see her ex-husband in prison two days before. And she will never know.

He tried to make Miles change his mind. But Miles was adamant, explaining that this was his apology to Rose for never telling her about Abigail, and for not intervening the day Abe died. I want her to know her granddaughter, Theo. Look after her.

65

Rose

Queen’s Hospital, Derbyshire, May 2015

Abigail is visiting late today. We don’t keep to formal visiting times on the high dependency unit. I turn my head to check the clock on the back wall of the nurses’ station: 9 p.m. My colleagues have just left for their coffee break; we’re not busy tonight. I turn back around and watch Abigail holding her son’s hand. They do look alike, and it bothers me that I look like Abigail; perhaps more so now than twenty-five years before. And because I look like Abigail, Abe looks like me. He could be my son. But he is not my son. I don’t have a son. Or a daughter.

Since my cancer diagnosis, my encounters with Abigail are more punishing, and seeing Daniel’s son every day I’m on duty is killing me just as slowly as the breast cancer might well do. How did I not know in Spain? I keep asking myself. Or the Christmas before Samira’s birth? All the signs were there for me to see but a twenty-two-year-old Rose chose not to identify them.

My deep and unrelenting grief and anger is eating me; it has been slow and insidious but nevertheless constant since recognizing Abigail – the same day I discovered that the cancer of Abigail and Daniel Deane was slowly growing inside me.

My wrath towards the Deanes has been building.

I am not the Rose I was. I am not the doctor I wanted to be, the mother I craved to be. Abigail has everything. I want to take something away from her, as she and Daniel have taken so many things away from me. I hate them both. Daniel’s duplicity and his wooden bed of lies. Their bed of lies. An image of the carvings on their bed mocks me. The compulsion to snatch something away from them is so strong, as if it sits outside me, outside the hatred. A detached entity.

I’ve attempted to treat Abe like any other patient, but he is not just another patient.

Finally I walk towards the bed, and Abigail turns around. She’s uncomfortable, and I know this discomfort is because of me, although occasionally I’ve sensed she’s uneasy in her son’s presence too. A week before, when Abe was still in the intensive care unit, still comatose and intubated, and the unit’s staff didn’t think he’d make it, I saw Abigail speaking to him as if she were telling him a story. I’ve often thought in my career as a nurse that some part of the brain’s frontal lobe is still active during coma. The day Abigail told her muffled story to her son, his heart rate went from 78 to 150, causing the monitor to bleep a warning. There were other times when I saw her at his bedside and she didn’t speak to him at all. But that day she was intent, her lips close to his face, almost touching his cheek.

She looks up. ‘His father will be coming in the next few days to visit him.’

‘Daniel?’

‘Yes, Nurse Marlowe, Daniel.’ She takes her Louis Vuitton handbag from the back of the chair she’s been sitting in and rearranges her snug-fitting silk blouse. ‘Can we talk somewhere private?’

I indicate that we move beyond the half-wall partition, away from Abe’s bed.

Leaning on the painted plasterboard, I take a deep