his head bent, clearly focused on the paperwork in front of him. And it had been just too hard to know what it would be like to meet his eyes. To explain what was in the sealed envelope in her hands. To have the conversation that might have suggested they were both adults and surely they could continue working together. To be friends, even?
Nope. She didn’t think she could do that. Okay, maybe it was cowardly to leave a letter and run away. She was going to have to work out her notice and that meant that they would be working in the same space for the next couple of weeks but she would cope with that the same way she was going to cope today. By immersing herself in her work to the exclusion of absolutely everything else.
And fate seemed set to help her do exactly that, by providing an endless stream of patients that needed her complete focus.
Like the guy this morning. A victim of assault but it was highly likely he’d started the fight himself. The huge and very aggressive man had presented a danger to all staff involved with his care, despite the presence of the police escort who’d brought him in. Security had had to be called and it had been a real challenge to sedate this patient and get him on a ventilator. Due to his size, the drugs needed to keep him sedated were at a high level and Grace had needed to monitor their effects very closely. Knowing what could happen if his levels dropped meant that she’d had to stay with him while he went to CT and then to Theatre so the case had taken up a good part of her morning.
Charles was nowhere to be seen when she was back in the ER but, even if he had been there, she could have kept herself almost invisible behind the curtains of various cubicles or the resuscitation areas. Patient after patient came under her care. A man with a broken finger who’d needed a nerve block before it could be realigned and splinted. A stroke victim. Two heart attacks. A woman who’d slipped on the snow that was apparently starting to fall outside and had a compound tib and fib fracture and no circulation in her foot.
And now she was in a side room with a very elderly woman called Mary who had been brought in a couple of hours ago in severe respiratory distress from an advanced case of pneumonia. Mary was eighty-six years old and had adamantly refused to have any treatment other than something to make her more comfortable.
‘It’s my time,’ she’d told Grace quietly. ‘I don’t want to fight any more.’
Grace had called up her patient’s notes. Mary had had a double mastectomy for breast cancer more than thirty years ago and only a few weeks back she had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer. She had refused treatment then as well. While it was difficult, as a doctor, to stand by and not provide treatment that could help, like antibiotics, it was Mary’s right to make this decision and her reasoning was understandable. Very much of sound mind, she had smiled very sweetly at Grace and squeezed her hand.
‘You’re a darling to be so concerned but please don’t worry. I’m not afraid.’
‘Do you have any family we can call? Or close friends?’
‘There was only ever my Billy. And he’s waiting for me. He’s been waiting a long time now...’
Helena had been concerned that Grace was caring for this patient.
‘I can take her,’ she said. ‘I know how hard this must be for you. Your mum died of ovarian cancer, didn’t she?’
Grace nodded, swallowing past the constriction in her throat. ‘I sat with her at the end, too. Right now it feels like it was yesterday.’
‘Which is why you should step back, maybe. We’ll make her as comfortable as possible in one of the private rooms out the back. It could take a while, you know. I’ll find a nurse to sit with her so she won’t be alone.’
‘She knows me now. And I don’t care how long it takes, as long as you can cope without me in here?’
‘Of course. But—’
‘It’s because of my mum that I’m the right person to do this,’ Grace said softly. ‘Because of how real it feels for me. I want to do this for Mary. I want her to know that she’s with someone who really cares.’
So, here they were. In one of the rooms she had noticed on her very first day here when she had wondered what they might be used for. It might even be the room next door to the one that she had stayed in with the twins and fixed Max’s fire truck but this one had a bed with a comfortable air mattress. It was warm and softly lit. There was an oxygen port that was providing a little comfort to ease how difficult it was for Mary to breathe and there was a trolley that contained the drugs Grace might need to keep her from any undue distress. The morphine had taken away her pain and made her drowsy but they had talked off and on for the last hour and Grace knew that her husband Billy had died suddenly ten years ago.
‘I’m so glad he didn’t know about this new cancer,’ Mary whispered. ‘He would have been so upset. He was so good to me the first time...’
She knew that they had met seventy years ago at a summer event in Central Park.
‘People say that there’s no such thing as true love at first sight. But we knew different, Billy and me...’
She knew that they’d never had children.
‘We never got blessed like that. It wasn’t so hard...we had each other and that was enough...’
In the last half an hour Mary had stopped talking and her breathing had become shallow and rapid. Grace knew that she was still aware of her surroundings, however, because every so often she would feel a gentle squeeze from the hand her own fingers were curled around.
And finally that laboured breathing hitched and then stopped and Mary slipped away so quietly and peacefully that Grace simply sat there, still holding her hand, for the longest time.
It didn’t matter now that she had tears rolling down her cheeks. She wasn’t sad, exactly. Mary had believed that she was about to be reunited with her love and she had welcomed the release from any more suffering. She hadn’t died alone, either. She had been grateful for Grace’s company. For a hand to hold.
And she’d been lucky, hadn’t she?
She had known true love. Had loved and been loved in equal measure.
Or maybe she was sad.
Not for Mary, but for herself.
Grace had come so close to finding that sort of love for herself—or she’d thought she had. But now, it seemed as far away as ever. As if she was standing on the other side of a plate-glass window, looking in at a scene that she couldn’t be a part of.
A perfect scene.
A Christmas one, perhaps. With pretty lights on a tree and parcels tied up with bows underneath. A fire in a grate beneath a mantelpiece that had colourful stockings hanging from it. There were people in that scene, too. A tall man with dark hair and piercing blue eyes. Two little mop-topped, happy boys. And a big, curly, adorable dog.
It took a while to get those overwhelming emotions under control but the company of this brave old woman who had unexpectedly appeared in her life helped, so by the time Grace alerted others of Mary’s death, nobody would have guessed how much it had affected her. They probably just thought she looked very tired and who wouldn’t, after such a long day?
It took a while after that to do what was necessary after a death of a patient and it
