She fixes me with her steely gaze, and I immediately see where Honor gets her flintiness from.
‘I don’t like that word. Comfortable. It suggests you’re intending to drug me up to the eyeballs.’
‘I wouldn’t dream of it.’ This is all par for the course.
‘I hope you allow alcohol, though.’
I pretend to look horrified. ‘Of course. God, what kind of hell-hole do you think I run?’
‘Excellent.’ There’s a twist of amusement at her mouth. ‘My poison is a very dry vodka martini.’
‘Great choice. I may join you on occasion, if you’re partial.’
She twinkles at me, and I can see how beautiful she must have been a couple of decades ago. Honor has her bone structure.
‘He’s a keeper,’ she announces, keeping her eyes on me. ‘You were right, girls. He’s delectable.’
My splutter comes at the same time as Honor’s look of abject horror and Ally’s hiss ofJesus Christ.Delectable. Interesting. I go to take the wheelchair off Will.
‘I look after the feisty ones myself,’ I tell her, as I wheel her up the ramp.
Half an hour later,we have her settled into her room, though she’s refused to get into bed yet. Honor fusses around with what are apparently her own silk-covered pillows and puts a pale pink quilt on the bed. This is good. Things like this are important.
When Stephanie (as she’s commanded me to call her) is tucked up in an armchair by the window, I call on Elena to come in. I’ve already explained that I won’t be the doctor assigned to Stephanie because I’m in a supervisory capacity at the hospice and don’t take on my own patients. It’s true, but it’s also so I can retain an arms-length relationship with Stephanie and her daughters.
I’m well aware that Honor’s not only married, but that she shares her marital bed with one of the finest male specimens on the planet. So I’d be smoking crack to think that anything could ever happen between us. Still, the combination of my years of pining over her when she was on Sunrise and the strength of my reaction to her these past few occasions we’ve met is enough to trigger serious alarm bells. I cannot ethically care for her mother if I have feelings for her.
Elena will be a good match for Stephanie. She’s warm and empathetic and has a steely core that she may need with this trouble-maker. I’ve known Elena for years, since we were residents together on a palliative care ward—a residency that prompted us both to pursue a lifetime career of end-of-life care.
We may or may not have history, in the shape of the occasional night together when we were both lonely and frustrated and privy to the unspoken codes of junior doctors that dictated you shag each other because you all understand the difficulties of the job, and because none of you has any time to actually go out on the pull.
Elena’s made it clear in the past that she’d like to takethings up a notch between us. Like me, she’s in her thirties and unattached. But I’ve made it equally clear that my feelings for her aren’t sufficient to take that leap. She seems to have accepted my stance and, most importantly, we’re a great team at work, with a common vision for how we want to mould the future of palliative care.
I leave Elena to it and head down to my office at the back of the ground floor. About half an hour later, there’s a tap at the door. It’s Honor standing in the doorway.
‘Am I interrupting?’
‘Of course not.’Never.
She takes a tentative step in, hovering just inside the door frame as I jump up and usher her to the free chair. The office is tiny; she’s less than a metre away from me when she’s sitting down beside my desk, one bare arm resting on the desktop, two bare legs crossed right next to me. I swallow. She’s brought the most incredible floral scent with her into this little room, which would be stuffy if I didn’t have the sash window wide open.
‘I just wanted to say thank you before I go.’ She leans forward and drops her phone in her bag. Straightens up and looks at me. ‘I need to head into the office. Ally’s going to stay here and keep Mum company for a bit.’
‘Is your mother doing okay?’
‘She seems to be handling it pretty well. I think having you greet us helped. You’ve got her hot under the collar. She’s been behaving more like a One Direction fan than a woman who’s arrived at the place where she’ll die.’
‘Excellent. Do I get to be Harry?’
She raises her eyebrows. ‘If he’s the one who floats your boat.’
‘His success rate floats my boat. Unfortunately, my success rate with older women is much better than with women my own age.’
I grin self-deprecatingly and she smiles back. Narrows her eyes. Assessing me.
‘Not unlike Mr Styles. But something tells me you do just fine for yourself.’
‘If you’re generous enough to assume that, I won’t dissuade you. At least, thanks to Stephanie, I have a martini date for this evening.’
