style="font-size:15px;"> ‘My son,’ Nick said softly, voicing the words in public for the first time, and beside him he felt Kate squeeze his hand. His words hung in the air between them for a moment, and Jack’s face was suddenly expressionless.
‘Well, we’d better roll our sleeves up, then, hadn’t we?’ he said after a long pause, and Nick let out his breath on a shuddering little sigh.
‘Thanks,’ he said, but Jack turned to him, his blue eyes like chips of ice.
‘Don’t thank me,’ he said, his voice deadly quiet. ‘I’m not doing it for you.’ He turned back to Ben. ‘Give me five minutes. I just want to make a couple of calls.’
‘That’s fine, we’re using O-neg for now. You’ve got a little while. We’ll save cross-matched blood until he’s stable.’
He nodded curtly and walked out, slapping the door out of the way with his hand, and Nick closed his eyes and swallowed. He’d known it would come out at some time, he’d known it would be hard, but like this, with Jeremiah’s life hanging in the balance—
‘OK, what have we got?’ a new voice asked, and a man strode in, a man they’d never seen before, with a soft, lilting Irish brogue and that dangerous blend of rakish charm and lethal good looks that would leave trouble in his wake.
Nick knew all about that. He’d been like that in his youth; it had gone to his head, and look where it had got him. He almost felt sorry for Josh O’Hara, the new A and E consultant, but maybe this man wouldn’t make the same mistakes he had. He’d have to try hard to do worse.
He was bending over Jeremiah now, smiling at him. ‘Hello, Jem, I’m Josh. I’m just going to have a quick look at your X-rays, and then we’re going to send you to sleep and fix you, OK? That’ll take away a lot of the pain for when you wake up.’
Jem made a feeble sound of assent, and beside him Nick heard Kate give a little sob.
Nick tightened his grip on her fingers. ‘It’s all right,’ he said, reassuring himself as much as her. ‘He’ll be all right,’ he repeated, and hoped to God it wasn’t a lie.
Josh looked up and met their eyes. ‘Are you the parents?’
They nodded, the irony of it striking Nick like a hammer blow. Of all the ways—
‘OK. You need to sign a consent form, and then I think someone needs to take you to the relatives’ room and give you a cup of tea.’
‘I don’t want a cup of tea, I want to be here with my son!’ Kate said adamantly. ‘I’m a midwife, you don’t need to mollycoddle me.’
‘We don’t need to scrape you off the floor, either, and it’s a sterile procedure. You can stay till he’s out, then you go.’
Nick put an arm round her rigid shoulders, squeezing them gently. ‘He’s right,’ he said, fighting his instinct to argue, to stay. ‘You shouldn’t be here. Not for that. And someone needs to take a look at you.’
‘I’m fine.’
‘We don’t know that. Nick’s right, you need your neck checked, Kate,’ Ben said gently, lifting his head to meet her eyes. ‘And your feet. I gather they were trapped. Let us sort Jem out, and then while he’s in Theatre I’ll come and have a look at you, hmm? And in the meantime, go and have something hot to drink, and some biscuits or something. You’re in shock.’
She’d signed the form by the time the anaesthetist arrived a minute later, and Kate clung to her son’s hand, pressing it to her heart and murmuring softly to him as he drifted off, then Nick ushered her away, leading her out of the room and down the corridor to the relatives’ room, his reluctant feet tracing the familiar path.
‘You can wait in here—I’ll bring you both some tea,’ a nurse said with a kind smile. ‘How do you take it?’
‘Hot and sweet, isn’t it?’ Kate said shakily, trying to smile back, but Nick couldn’t say anything, because the last time he’d been in this room had been in the horrendous minutes after Annabel had died, almost exactly five years ago.
It came flooding back the shock, the horror, the guilt. He should have realised she was ill, should have done something, but he’d been so tied up in the practice he’d scarcely noticed she was alive. And then, suddenly, she wasn’t. She’d had a ruptured appendix, and Ben hadn’t been able to save her.
And yet again the guilt and the senseless futility of it threatened to swamp him.
Chapter Two
KATE cradled the tea in her hands and tried to force herself to drink it.
‘I hate sugar in tea,’ she said, and looked up at Nick, trying to smile, trying to be brave, but his face was shut down, expressionless, devoid of colour and emotion, and she felt the fear escalate.
‘Nick? He’ll be OK.’ He had to be, she thought desperately, his stark expression clawing at her control and threatening to destroy it, but Ben had seemed confident, Josh also, and there was no talk of ifs or buts or maybes, so he would be OK. Wouldn’t he?
‘Nick?’
He sucked in a breath, almost as if he’d forgotten to breathe for a while, and turned his head to meet her eyes. ‘Sorry, I was miles away.’
Miles away? When his son was under anaesthetic, having his pelvis stabilised with an external frame so they could try and stop the bleeding that was draining the life out of him? Where on earth had he been, miles away? And with that look in his eyes…
He scanned the room, his face bleak. ‘I haven’t been in here for years. It hasn’t changed. Still got the same awful curtains.’
And then she realised. Realised what he was seeing, what this must cost him, to be here with her, and her heart went out to him.
‘Oh, Nick, I’m sorry,’ she murmured, and he tried to smile.
‘Don’t be, I’m all right. It was five years ago.’ And then he frowned. ‘More to the point, how are you? Were you hurt? What was Ben saying about your feet? I didn’t realise you’d been trapped in the car.’
‘It was nothing—just a pedal. I’m fine.’ Her smile was no more successful than his, she supposed, because he came over and sat beside her, searching her eyes with his.
‘So what happened?’ he asked.
She shrugged. ‘I was picking him up from outside the high school. It was my fault—I parked on the right, hitched up on the kerb and rang him, and he ran up and got in, and I pulled back out onto the road. I couldn’t see a thing—the rain was sheeting down, but there were no lights coming, and I remember thinking only a fool would be out in this without lights, so it must be clear, and I pulled out, and there was an almighty thump and the car slammed sideways into the car I was pulling out around, and the airbags went off and—’
She broke off.
It had been over in an instant.
There had been nothing she could have
