happens now with regard to my position at the hospital.’ Gabriel said, bypassing small talk in order to get to the news he hoped Laura wanted to hear. ‘He says there will be a meeting shortly to discuss it, and that in view of my stay in HMP he won’t be able to guarantee them agreeing to me taking up where I left off.
‘All of which is no surprise, and until I hear more about it from him I will be returning to Swallowbrook some time tomorrow if that is all right with you.’
‘Yes, of course,’ she told him unsteadily, after trying to take in what he’d been saying. They’d both known that the sentence Gabriel had served could affect his career, but he was in much demand medically, and James would not want to lose him as one of the hospital’s top consultants.
When he’d rung off she spent the rest of the evening in a state of acute anxiety. His career was Gabriel’s life, she thought desperately.
If he couldn’t treat the sick he would be devastated, yet he’d sounded calm enough at the prospect. But she wasn’t. His job might cost them their marriage if he was allowed to go back to it, yet she couldn’t bear the thought of him being separated from it. And what did he mean by announcing his intention to join her and the children here? It was as if their earlier conversation had never happened; he still hadn’t responded to her request for a divorce.
The night that followed was not one of peaceful sleep. She tossed and turned and eventually went into the kitchen to make a drink at four o’clock as a midsummer dawn was beginning to lighten the sky, and as she gazed unseeingly to where the lake shimmered on the skyline the thought came that if Gabriel was given the chance to go back to his life’s work, a divorce might be the only answer. It would leave him free to follow his calling without his responsibilities to her and the children weighing him down.
She’d told him it was what she wanted in the middle of a hurtful moment, not really meaning it, but maybe in the long run it would be the best thing for all of them if she could endure the agony of a permanent separation. The one that she’d just lived through, if living was the right word to describe it, had been hard enough to cope with, and that had been only for a matter of months.
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