A Fresh Start at the Cornish Country Hospital (The Cornish Country Hospital #7)

Prologue

Eve massaged her temples with small, circular movements, trying to stave off the headache that had been threatening for the last hour.

Paracetamol wouldn’t cut it; she needed sleep.

It had been a long shift and this was the first chance she’d had to catch her breath and stop in the last three hours.

All she wanted to do was to go home, get into her nice warm bed, sink into the memory foam mattress, and rest her head against Max’s shoulder.

Except that wasn’t going to be an option.

‘You look like I feel, Evie B, absolutely bloody knackered.’ Vick Stanhope, the Lead Nurse in A they shared so many of the same goals and values, and his family had welcomed her with open arms, something she valued more than she could have put into words.

She’d lost her mother to cancer when she was just fourteen, and had moved in with her father and more-than-slightly resentful stepmother, whose plans to move to Spain had been scuppered by Eve’s arrival.

As soon as she’d started university, the plans were back on, and her father and stepmother now lived in southern Spain, running a bar and raising their beautiful twin sons, who probably thought of Eve as more of a distant cousin than a sister.

Max’s family, by contrast, had folded her into the centre of their lives and had made her feel welcome from the very first time he’d taken her home with him.

She adored them and it was just one more reason she felt incredibly lucky to be marrying Max and taking another step towards the life they wanted.

Their careers were going just the way they’d wanted too.

Eve had specialised in emergency medicine, having found her passion early on in the foundation stage of her training, and Max was two thirds of the way through his training to become a surgeon.

They’d both worked at St James’s Hospital, but for the second phase of his training, he’d moved to the nearby Leeds Children’s Hospital to specialise in paediatrics.

They were the type of couple who had five-, ten- and even twenty-year plans, because Eve needed the security of being able to picture their future.

Her mother’s diagnosis and subsequent death had made it feel as if the world had been ripped out from under her feet.

Max brought the spontaneity and the fun, thinking nothing of booking them a holiday based on the toss of a coin, or something as simple as turning off the road when they travelled down to Cornwall, to check out a town or village he’d never been to before, just because he liked the sound of the name on the road sign.

She knew without a shadow of a doubt that he was the person she was supposed to share her life with – and she wouldn’t have minded if he wanted thirty-three stag dos, and she had to pick him up from every single one of them at the end of a long shift – as long as he felt the same way about her. And she knew he did.

‘Oh yeah, I know what Max is like all right and to be honest, if he’d let me come, I’d have tagged along on one of his stag dos, instead of coming to your hen.

’ Vick gave a throaty laugh, throwing back her head and making the wooden beads at the end of her long braided hair knock together like wind chimes.

‘Well, thanks a lot.’ Despite her words, Eve was already laughing.

‘You know I’m only joking, chick. I wouldn’t have missed that for the world.’ Vick gave her shoulders a squeeze. ‘And I still think there’s time for us to cram another one in, maybe even two. You can’t let Max have all the fun and it’s still nearly three weeks until the wedding.’

‘One was enough for me and I’ve discovered that shift work and hangovers do not mix.

It would probably take me the full three weeks to get over it, especially if you’re in charge of the drinking games again.

’ It had been a brilliant weekend, hiring an Airbnb in the Peak District, which was a more-or-less halfway point between her life in Leeds and Max’s family in Cornwall.

His mother, sister and aunt had all joined Eve and her friends for the celebration and there was no way it could be topped.

All the women who meant the most to her were there and she felt absolutely no need to repeat it.

‘Spoilsport!’ Vick laughed again. ‘Still, I could always pretend I’m on a stag do, the amount of drunks we get here on a Friday night. Although, the usually endless stream does seem to have dried up in the last half an hour.’

‘Vick, don’t, that’s almost as bad as saying that it’s…

well, you know, the word we never, ever say.

’ Eve widened her eyes in mock horror. They both knew better than to ever say it was quiet, because then the floodgates were guaranteed to open and they’d be back to being run off their feet for the rest of the shift.

‘I’m not that daft, as soon as I opened my mouth they’d be—’ She didn’t even get a chance to finish the sentence before the red phone behind them started to ring.

It meant a patient with a serious trauma was on the way in.

Turning like a ballerina performing a flawless pirouette, Vick snatched up the phone, taking down the details of the call from the paramedics, before relaying them to the rest of the team.

‘Male, early thirties with a serious head injury resulting from an assault and subsequent blow to the head from hitting the pavement. The paramedics suspect a skull fracture and possible serious frontal lobe bleed. He has a GCS score of four. Estimated time of arrival – five minutes.’

‘Oh God, that doesn’t sound good.’ Eve hated these kinds of calls, someone so young whose life was now hanging in the balance, a life which would almost certainly be irrevocably changed even if he did survive.

She couldn’t allow herself to think too much about the tragedies she encountered every single day at work, they had a job to do. ‘Right, let’s get ready.’

Within minutes, Eve was standing by the doors to the emergency department with Vick by her side.

She hadn’t even realised it had been raining until now.

Despite the fact that the sky was jet-black, it was still humid outside, summer in the city at its peak and steam rose off the ground as the rain hit the warm Tarmac.

The wail of the siren heralded the approach of the ambulance, and the reflection of the flashing blue lights bounced off the wet road.

This was their patient. She recognised Allie, the paramedic who was driving, who both she and Max had known since their early days at the hospital.

Allie leapt out of the front of the ambulance, heading straight round to the back to open the doors.

But then, as Eve and Vick moved towards the back of the ambulance too, Allie turned, her face draining of colour, and looking deathly white in the eerie light.

‘Eve I don’t know…’ Allie shook her head and turned to look at Vick. ‘She shouldn’t be here, not for this.’

‘What do you mean I shouldn’t be here?’ Even as she said the words, Eve knew what they meant, but she couldn’t acknowledge them, because she couldn’t allow it to be true.

Then, any last semblance of hope she had that she might have misunderstood was taken from her.

The world as she knew it, was being ripped away for the second time in her life, as Allie mumbled the words she so desperately didn’t want her to say.

‘It’s Max.’