Chapter 19
Eve had planned to tell Annie about Felix the next time they got together, but Annie had been even more highly strung than normal.
The verdict was due in from the Court of Appeal about Brandon Moorcroft’s sentencing.
It had taken over a year for the case to come to court in the first place, so that reports could be compiled on the extent of Max’s injuries, and the doctors had needed to be certain that they’d reached a finite point in his recovery.
Annie had appealed to the Attorney General’s Office against the leniency of the sentence straightaway, her job meaning she was well aware of the twenty-eight day window open to the family to do so.
She’d pinned all her hopes on the case being referred to the Court of Appeal and while they were waiting for the outcome she’d made herself ill again, barely sleeping and not eating at all.
Now that the Court of Appeal were about to give their decision, Annie was back to being like a cat on a hot tin roof, displaying some of the same behaviours she had just after Brandon Moorcroft was sentenced and Lily moved away.
Eve couldn’t bear the thought of her spiralling down to rock bottom again, so she was doing everything she could to prevent it.
‘Have you eaten anything today?’ she’d found herself asking Annie as the two of them crossed the car park together on their way in to see Max.
‘I can’t seem to face anything, my stomach’s like a washing machine.’ Annie had thrummed with nervous energy, tapping her fingers against her thighs almost as if she had an involuntary twitch.
‘You’ve got to eat something, otherwise you’re going to make yourself poorly again.’
‘I’ll be okay once this week’s over and we get the verdict.
’ She’d looked at Eve, then, her eyes like two dark pools, contrasting sharply with the pallor of her face.
‘I might even manage to make it through the night without waking up in a cold sweat thinking about the prospect of Moorcroft being released from prison.’
Eve had wanted to ask her what would happen if the sentence was upheld, but she’d already known the answer.
Annie would go into the kind of apocalyptic meltdown that would almost certainly lead to another crisis.
But it wouldn’t matter what Eve said or what she did, she wouldn’t be able to prevent that because Annie was pinning all her hopes on the sentence being extended.
All any of them could do was hope that the Court of Appeal revised the sentence sufficiently to avoid triggering a complete breakdown in Annie’s mental health, although in truth no sentence they could impose would ever be enough for her.
Eve was almost as worried about what might happen when Annie’s energies were no longer being poured into trying to get Moorcroft’s sentence increased; when she no longer had that as a focus, she might finally have to face up to the reality of never getting the old Max back and, when she did, Eve had a horrible feeling that it would trigger an even bigger crisis.
Whatever the next week brought, she knew one thing for sure, now wasn’t the time to tell Annie about Felix. She was glad to have work to focus on, even on days like today, when it seemed to be one high-octane emergency after another.
‘There’s an RTA on the way in. The patient has bullseye’d the windscreen and there’s a suspected spinal injury.
ETA five minutes.’ Aidan summarised the outcome of the call that had just come through on the red phone and the team swung into action to prepare resus for the latest patient’s arrival.
The first priority would be to stabilise them and then get a CT scan to check the extent of the injuries, before deciding which specialist teams to involve.
Eve just hoped that stabilisation would turn out to be possible, whatever injuries the patient might have.
RTAs were one of the biggest causes of fatalities coming into the emergency department, and Eve had seen far more deaths than she wanted to remember.
She’d also seen life-changing injuries, sometimes ones so catastrophic that patients had told her they wished they’d died.
When Eve and Max had got together, they’d talked about all kinds of scenarios; hardly surprising given their occupation.
He’d told her that if he ever got an injury that left him too disabled to do his job, or live the life he wanted, he’d rather not survive.
She’d challenged him back then, about all the people who’d adjusted to their new normal after a serious injury, sometimes achieving the most amazing things.
He’d accepted that was true, but had still insisted that if he couldn’t be a surgeon he would never be truly happy.
She’d wondered in the early days after the assault, when they hadn’t been certain whether he’d live or die, what she should pray for.
But the thought had only ever been fleeting, and she’d begged every deity that might exist to save him, no matter what the cost. Max had been saved, but it had quickly become clear that his life would never be the same again and she’d found herself wondering something else; whether he still wished he hadn’t survived.
He’d never said so, but after the assault he’d been a different person, with different views about almost everything to those the old Max had held.
Now, whenever Eve got a call to say a seriously injured patient was on the way in, she found herself praying that they’d be able to take the first steps to ensuring the person made a full recovery, but if they couldn’t, the patient would get the outcome they would have wanted, even if that meant not making it.
She’d never admitted that to anyone, and had never done less than everything possible to save a life.
She just had to hope that the cost of that was never more than that person would have been willing to pay.
Right now though, she had a job to do and as Jeff and Julia, two of the paramedics, rushed the patient into resus, Eve caught her breath at the amount of blood caking the woman’s face. Her hair looked blonde, but it was so matted with dried blood that it was impossible to know for sure.
Jeff gave a rundown of the painkillers administered at the scene and the checks on her vital signs that had been carried out en route to the hospital.
The patient had regained consciousness at the scene, but had been hysterical and incoherent, resisting attempts to move her from the vehicle, and they’d been forced to sedate her for her own safety and theirs.
The outcome of the checks suggested the injuries weren’t life threatening, but there was no way of knowing yet whether they might be life-changing.
Jeff turned to look at Eve. ‘Unfortunately, we haven’t got a name, because there was no ID in the car, no handbag and not even a phone. ’
‘The sedation should wear off soon and hopefully she’ll be able to tell us who she is.
’ Eve turned to look at Meg as she spoke.
‘But I’m worried about the extent of her facial injuries and whether that might affect her ability to talk, as well as what else might be going on internally.
Given her agitation on scene, I think it might be best to maintain sedation until the scan, bearing in mind that she’s stable. What do you think?’
Before Meg could even answer, the doors to resus burst open and Eve caught her breath. Nigel was suddenly framed in the doorway. Aidan right behind him, urging him to stop.
‘I’ve told you, you can’t go in there. You need to wait outside and I promise to find out if your wife has been admitted.’
Nigel lurched forward, pushing Aidan out of the way as he tried to block his path. Eve blinked hard. This couldn’t be happening. It had to be a nightmare, one she’d wake up from at any moment.
‘Eve, it’s her, isn’t it? It’s Annie.’ The fear in his eyes made her shiver and she tried to speak, to tell him that he was wrong and it wasn’t his wife lying on the bed in front of her, covered in so much blood that she was unrecognisable, but the words wouldn’t come out.
Instead she turned back towards the patient and glanced down at her hand, spotting the distinctive sapphire engagement ring, circled by petal-shaped diamonds, like an exotic flower.
Eve had only ever seen one like that before and it had been on Annie’s hand.
* * *
Felix had been looking forward to finishing work all day.
It wasn’t because he didn’t love his job or because he was the sort of person who watched the clock from the moment he arrived, waiting for it to be time to leave.
The reason he hadn’t been able to wait on this particular Tuesday, was because he had a date to go to the cinema with Eve.
It might have sounded pretty dull to anyone else.
But it was the routine nature of it that appealed to him most. He really liked her, more than he probably should this early in their relationship, but then Felix had never been one to play games, and he wasn’t really the sort of person to date for the sake of it – at least not now he was in his mid-thirties.
He was dating with a view to the long term and the hope that this might have the potential to go the distance.
He wanted someone he could do the ordinary things with, as well as embark on big adventures.