Chapter 26
Chapter Twenty-Six
FLORENCE
It starts like any other day.
I wake up in Quinn’s bed, and we have warm, lazy morning sex that I definitely don’t have time for before I get up and get ready for work.
We’ve spent every night together since the day we went to see Albert – sometimes at my flat, sometimes at his.
He watches me through one eye as I emerge from my shower and bounce around the bedroom, throwing my uniform on as quickly as I can and wrestling my still-damp hair into a messy bun.
I barely have time to lather on my SPF before I’m planting one last kiss on his lips and running out of the door.
Everything’s the same at work. The same Wednesday staff do the same jobs in the same order, and I’m called in to help with a couple of difficult patients, like always.
Cam finds me while I’m on my break and slides a couple of full blood bags towards me with the most ridiculous eyebrow waggle I’ve ever seen.
‘Hepatitis again?’ I ask, but he shakes his head.
‘Syphilis, actually.’
I almost fall off my chair. ‘Syphilis? Have I gone back in time.’
‘Newlyweds who just came back from travelling in sub-Saharan Africa.’ Cam grins, pushing his glasses up his nose. ‘By all accounts one of them enjoyed the local delicacies more than the other. But he was only too happy to share with his new wife.’
I wince. ‘Awkward.’
‘Yeah.’ He chuckles. ‘Try being the one who had to explain the whole thing to them.’
I hold up the blood bags. ‘Do you want one of these? Sounds like you earned it.’
He shakes his head. ‘I’m good. There’s another where that came from.’
I raise an eyebrow in a question.
‘The husband’s long-time side piece is also a prolific blood donor,’ he explains, before adding, ‘and now has syphilis too.’ Like that part wasn’t obvious.
‘Wow,’ I say, sliding both bags of blood into my backpack, ‘sounds like a bad day all round.’
I won’t know, not until a little later, how right I actually am.
* * *
Everything starts to go south around lunchtime.
It’s little things to begin with, just everyday annoyances.
A patient calls me every name under the sun.
Another throws up on my shoes. I get trapped in an awkward eight-minute conversation with my least favourite colleague about her daughter’s ballet show.
Her daughter only learned to walk earlier this year, so I’m baffled as to what ballet skills she can possibly have acquired in that time that might warrant such a showcase.
I sneak five minutes’ break in the afternoon and text Quinn about it. Apparently, I’m such a lovesick fool that the mere act of telling him about my day makes the everyday annoyances vanish into nothing like a morning sea mist under the sun’s rays.
I don’t think anything of it when he doesn’t reply straight away. I just put my phone back into my bag, ram both back into my locker, and carry on with my shift.
It’s Cam’s face that tips me off.
He’s such a preternaturally upbeat character that the mere sight of his stony face makes my stomach fall. And when I catch his eye and he swallows so hard that I can see the lurch of his Adam’s apple from across the room, cold fingers dance up my spine.
‘Florence,’ he calls, nodding towards one of the consultation rooms. His lips are pressed tightly together, a grim line across his usually sunny face. I’ve known Cam for so long that not only have I seen that expression before, I’ve seen it on him before. More than once.
‘Who’s dead?’ I hiss as I pass him, panic raising the pitch of my voice.
‘Florence,’ he says again, in that tone I can’t quite decipher. It’s not a question, not a warning. It’s almost like he doesn’t know what else to say, and for a person like Cam, that’s about as bad as it gets.
I hold my breath and walk into the room.
My eyes jump to the figure who’s leaning against the back wall, his fingers twisting into knots.
I think I know it’s Bram from the start but he’s out of context in the clinic, so it takes me a while for it to fully register that he’s here.
He does that same swallow as our eyes meet, and I feel it like a fist in the face.
‘No,’ I say, reaching a hand for the wall as tears begin to blur my vision.
It can’t be Quinn. It can’t. I was in his bed less than nine hours ago. If I concentrate hard, I can still smell the fading traces of his aftershave on my skin. He can’t be…
I can’t even bear to think it.
‘Florence,’ Bram says, and then he says nothing.
I want to scream, to yell, to demand to know why suddenly no one can say anything except my name, but anxiety has tightened around my neck like a noose, so I don’t do any of those things.
‘Tell me,’ I snarl, my eyes darting between the two men. They share a look that doesn’t reassure me in the slightest.
It’s Bram who speaks first. ‘He’s not dead,’ he manages to say, one inked hand tugging so hard at the roots of his hair that I’m a little concerned he might pull it out.
Pure fear slices through me, my mind running a montage of traumatic life moments so vivid that I can almost see them. ‘Not yet?’
‘We…’ He exhales roughly. ‘They don’t know yet. He…’
He can’t finish. He can barely start.
Fuck, this is bad.
Cam lays a solid hand on Bram’s shoulder before he turns his attention to me. ‘There was an accident,’ he says, in a tone I’ve heard him use countless times before. It’s his bad-news voice.
Suddenly I’m cast back to 1873, hearing those exact words from a then-teenage Cam, his stricken face blackened with jet dust and smoke. I can still remember the pounding of my heart in my ears and the rise of bile in my throat.
Cam’s voice just about makes it through the flashback, but I don’t hear everything, just odd words here and there.
Head injury.
Swelling.
Medically induced coma.
After that, it’s all white noise. The problem with working in medicine for so long is that I’ve lost the blissful ignorance, the blind hope that he’ll be fine, that he’ll just wake up in a day or three and skip merrily out of his hospital bed.
Instead, I see a laundry list of potential complications, a worst-case prognosis, the risk of a whole host of lifelong issues.
Cam is still talking, but somewhere along the line I’ve stopped listening. I can’t stand here and listen to him tell me all the ways in which I could lose Quinn, because in my head, it’s already happened.
I’ve lost him, just like I feared I would.
‘Excuse me,’ I say, without looking either at Bram or at Cam. ‘I just need to…’
I don’t finish my sentence before I bolt out of the room and head straight into the accessible toilet in the waiting area, lurching into an unproductive heave over the sink.
My hands grip the porcelain, knuckles whitening with the pressure.
Somewhere beyond the door I hear Cam calling my name.
I already know I won’t be going back into that room.
In 1873, I ran as fast as my legs would take me to get to Josiah, to be by his side, whatever happened. This time is a little different.
I do run, and the speed my legs will take me is quite a lot faster than it was back then, but I’m not running to get to Quinn.
This time I’m running away.