train had pulled out of the Gare de Blois, leaving her standing motionless on a deserted platform, staring after his carriage. In his mind’s eye, she’d been there ever since—until he’d spotted her at St Pancras. A little curvier, her face less gaunt, her hair longer. Perhaps grief had started to release its stranglehold.
In that week they’d spent together, unwrapping her had become a game—one he’d taken too far too fast, and paid the price. Every now and then he’d succeeded in drawing out a piece of the real Samira. Like a rat in a lab, he’d learned to steer the conversation to subjects that would engage or amuse her or—when that didn’t work—enrage her. When he’d played it right and lit her up, he’d lit up, too—and not much accomplished that these days. Boy, had she lit up. Her eyes sparked, her spine straightened, breath quickened, voice sharpened. Even her skin seemed to change, turning mahogany like a flame was warming it from beneath. Watching that was the reward for his persistence. He’d like to see that side of her again. Maybe he should have sucked up his pride and tried harder to convince her to let him stay. A year together in hiding. Nothing to do but—
Stop. Nothing to do but hit on a grieving woman under the pretense of protecting her? Nothing to do but give her a chance to get to know and loathe the real him? To give in to his impulses and let them control him? She’d made the right call, for both of them.
The best he could do for her now was help to complete her whistle-blower fiancé’s mission. Seeing her find peace would be his only reward.
At the cardiology reception desk, a nurse was handing a form to a bear of a man clutching a brown paper bag. “Do you not have anyone who could pick you up?” she said. Her lilac scrubs marked her as an agency nurse, not a permanent employee.
“The ferry’s fine,” the bear replied. “Pretty much door to door. And no bloody traffic.”
“You’ve just had a heart attack. You really should have someone to—”
“Will the NHS pay for a black cab?”
“No, that’s not in—”
“Thought not.”
Another security door loomed, into neurology. Would Harriet have access there?
“Yes, that was the fascinating thing,” Jamie said to Samira in an imperious public-school English accent. He gave the nurse a cursory nod as they passed, and hovered Harriet’s card over the sensor. “The MRI clearly showed an isodense intramedullary spinal cord tumor at C3 but it’d been misdiagnosed as a glioma, would you believe?” Red light on the sensor. Damn.
“Excuse me,” he said to the nurse in his best impatient-yet-condescendingly-polite consultant tone. “Terribly sorry, but would you mind...?” He gestured to the card reader, shrugging in a would-you-believe-it’s-still-not-working way, and turned back to Samira. “Bloody thing. I did ask Charlie to order me a new card. What was I saying...?”
“The glioma...” Samira said, her head bowed as if deep in concentration. Or prayer. Heck, he’d take any help they could get.
In his peripheral vision, he registered the nurse scrambling to the door, still arguing over her shoulder with the patient. With a bomber jacket and rucksack, Jamie didn’t look doctorish, but perhaps he could pull off aging consultant trying to pass for cool young hipster. “Ah, yes, so naturally I recommended we use immunostaining to rule out a neuronal tumor, and you can imagine Caroline’s reaction...”
He kept up the monologue as the nurse scanned her card and opened the door. He walked through with a distracted nod of thanks, Samira murmuring in sympathy with his fictitious neurological predicament. The door clunked shut. He trailed off a few meters down the corridor.
“Nearly there,” he said to Samira. “You holding up?”
“Awo,” she said, looking at him with more respect than he deserved—the way people used to look at him back when he wore scrubs and a stethoscope. He’d got off on that look a little too much. But, hey, if his bullshit made Samira confident, he wasn’t about to burst her bubble.
Ahead, at a nurse’s station, a woman in pale blue scrubs leaned over a clipboard. From a patient bay to his left a TV droned. Few patients would be unlucky enough to remain under observation over the weekend. His chest tightened in the same cocktail of nerves and adrenaline he’d felt the first time he’d walked in here as a senior house officer on his first rotation, knowing that people were relying on him to get out of here alive. He, Jamie Armstrong, who’d been playing schoolboy rugby not that long before.
Really, he should be living that Irish numbskull’s life by now. Wife and little kids. Heavily mortgaged semidetached Victorian villa in Ealing. Sweaty-palmed first-year doctors gazing at him with fear and adoration. He could send money to his sister and her kids, rather than emptying his military pay packet into the crevasse of his mother’s private nursing-home upkeep. His dad might still be alive if he’d been there to recognize the danger signs instead of ankle-deep in mud or dust in Mali or Afghanistan or Guyana. Or maybe the old man’s heart wouldn’t have given out in the first place.
Not now, Dad.
They strode silently through the east and north wings, the circuitous route zapping his nerves. Finally, he pushed open the doors into the west wing. A curvy blonde in red scrubs looked up from the reception desk, her green eyes widening.
He nodded. “Mariya.”
“Doctor Armstr... I mean—”
“James,” he said, quickly.
“What are you doing h—?”
“Give this to Harriet, would you?” He slapped the pass on the counter. “And only Harriet. You didn’t see me.”
Mariya screwed up her face. “Does...this mean we’re square?”
“You’re returning an ID pass. As favors go, it’s not a biggie.”
“I’ll have to walk to the other side of the building.”
He pointed to a fitness monitor on her wrist. “It’ll keep up your steps. Besides, that hardly makes up for...” In his peripheral vision he caught Samira tipping her head, assessing the conversation. “Whatever. We’re square.”
“And I won’t ever have to see—?”
“No, you won’t,” he snapped.
Did she have to look so relieved?
He opened an unassuming side door onto the smoker’s porch, ignoring the ALARM WILL SOUND sign. He’d been gone only five years—it probably hadn’t been fixed. By the smell of it, the staff still weren’t respecting the smoke-free rules. Same broken brick to hold the door open while they sucked in the very poison they lectured patients about. He shoved it into position, in case their exit was compromised. Drizzle tapped on the mildewed corrugated plastic awning.
“Where next?” Samira said.
“See that wee gate in the wall, across the car park? It leads to the Thames Path. Easily the most obscure of the hospital’s exits.” Over the solid stone, the broad gray river rolled south. Across it, the houses of parliament and Big Ben were coated in a hazy gold film. Once on the Thames Path they could cross to Westminster. Or, better still, follow the current south
