with Suzanne—’
‘I didn’t sleep with her.’
She stared at him, stunned. ‘What?’
‘I said, I didn’t sleep with her.’
Shock robbed her of breath.
‘I don’t believe you. You’re lying!’
‘No, I’m not, Liv. I didn’t touch her. Honestly.’
She took a step back, struggling for air, for sense, for understanding, but they all eluded her.
‘That’s not true. It can’t be true. Why would you suddenly come out with this now?’
‘Because it is true, and I should have told you at the time.’
How did he do that with his eyes? Make them appear utterly unguarded and shining with sincerity?
‘But—you admitted it!’
‘No. No, I didn’t Liv, I just confirmed that she’d spent the night with me in my room,’ he told her. ‘That was what you asked me, and I said yes because it was the truth. She did spend the night in there with me. You didn’t ask why, though, or what for, because by the time I came home you’d spoken to Beth, you’d found the note Suze had left in my luggage and you had me hung, drawn and quartered and hung out to dry before I even stepped over the threshold, so you wouldn’t have believed me anyway.
‘You just assumed I’d slept with her,’ he went on, his voice heavy and tinged with sadness, ‘and I let you, because in that split second I felt that you’d thrown me a lifeline, a way out of a marriage that was tearing us both apart, so I just grabbed it and ran. And I’m sorry. I should never have done that to you. I should have told you the truth there and then, and made you listen.’
His words stunned her, the shockwaves rolling through her, bringing a sob to her throat.
‘How could you do that?’ she asked, her voice a strangled whisper. ‘How could you let me believe that for all this time? I’ve spent a whole, agonising year believing that you slept with her, that I wasn’t enough for you, that you didn’t truly love me any more—you’re right, you should have told me the truth then, Nick, instead of letting me think that you’d spent the night making love to—’
She broke off, unable to say her name. ‘You let me end our marriage, on the grounds that you’d slept with that whore—’
His eyes hardened. ‘She’s not a whore, she’s a friend, a damn good friend, who told me to pull myself together and go home and sort out my marriage.’
A sob rose in her throat, threatening to choke her, but she crushed it down and pulled herself together. ‘Well, you did a great job of that—’
Her voice cracked and she pushed past him, shaking his hand off as he tried to stop her. She went back inside, cutting through the café to the main hospital corridor, then out on the other side bordering the car park, deliberately going the wrong way to throw him off the scent and lose him because if she had to spend another moment in his company she was going to cry, and she wasn’t prepared to give him the satisfaction.
So she kept on going, and she didn’t stop until she was back on the ward.
* * *
She’d gone.
The corridor was empty and he stood there, kicking himself for letting the conversation stray into such dangerous territory—especially in a public place and right in the middle of the working day.
Idiot!
He had to talk to her, to explain why he’d let her believe what she had, how he’d felt, why he hadn’t stood his ground and told her the truth at the time. The real reason.
But not now. This afternoon he had a—mercifully short—elective list, so his first port of call was the wards, to make sure Judy Richards was settled in, and to meet the patients he was going to operate on and read through their notes before he was due in Theatre. And if he was lucky, Liv’s shift would be well and truly over by the time he’d finished.
He’d go and see her at home later, to apologise, to explain, to try and help her understand.
If he could get her to listen, and judging by the way she’d just reacted, that was by no means a foregone conclusion.
* * *
Liv was tied up in a delivery for the afternoon, the nice straightforward labour of a woman having her sixth baby. She’d haemorrhaged after the last so she’d been admitted directly to the consultant-led unit with this one just in case, but so far everything was going fine.
Just as well, because Liv’s concentration was totally shot.
How could he have done that to her? Let her believe he’d betrayed her like that if he hadn’t? And why then, when she’d just found out that yet again she wasn’t pregnant, so she’d been at her most vulnerable? She’d spent over a year living with the bone-deep certainty that he’d been unfaithful to her, and now she didn’t know what to believe—
‘I need to push.’
‘OK, Karen. Nice and steady. That’s good.’
But Karen’s baby wasn’t going for nice and steady, and three minutes later, half an hour before the end of Liv’s shift, a lusty, squalling baby was delivered into her father’s waiting hands.
‘It’s a girl,’ he said, laughing and crying as he lay their daughter in his wife Karen’s outstretched arms. ‘Finally, it’s a girl!’
Liv’s eyes filled, and she had to blink away the tears as she gave Karen the oxytocin injection to help her uterus to contract down.
If this had been them, if she’d been able to give him a child, then maybe that would have been enough to keep him...
Liv checked the baby quickly as she lay in her mother’s arms, making sure that all was well, but the baby was lovely and pink, her pulse steady and strong, her skinny little arms and legs moving beautifully. She’d stopped crying now and was staring up at her mother, riveted by the first face she’d ever seen.
It was a beautiful moment, one Liv never tired of seeing, and she watched the two of them staring into each other’s eyes and falling in love and felt a familiar lump in her throat.
‘Apgar score ten at one minute,’ she said, her voice miraculously steady. ‘Congratulations. She’s lovely.’
She checked her again four minutes later, by which time the cord had stopped pulsating, so Liv clamped and cut it and handed the baby back to her mother.
‘I take it this is your first girl?’
Her father’s grin was wry. ‘Yes, so hopefully we can stop now. Six is getting a little crazy, but we did want a girl so we thought we’d have one last try.’
‘We may live to regret it when she hits puberty,’ Karen said with a laugh, her hands cradling the naked baby tenderly at her breast.
Liv
