Prologue
Wednesday 20 October 2010
She lies beneath rugged cliffs that glow ochre and orange in the photos on the postcards the tourists buy in summer.Tonight they are an inky blue.A full moon is suspended overhead like a fortune-teller’s ball, casting a glow over her delicate face, illuminating her profile with a fine silver thread.
Every twenty seconds, a beam of light sweeps across the vast ocean, a warning to sailors to avoid this treacherous stretch of coastline that has already claimed too many lives.Waves rise up and crash onto jagged rocks.Frigid water seeps into the denim of her jeans, the thin cotton of her shirt.The tide is coming in.
She is slipping away.She feels cold.
There’s a presence above her.
Breathing.Fast and heavy.Hot on her face.
And everything fades to black.
Chapter 1
The most significant days of our lives, the pivotal ones that change our trajectory, start just like any other day.Nel Foley would have that thought—once everything had unfolded and she could see it in retrospect—and she would trace the start of it all back to this wet Sunday when her mother called as she was suturing a deep gash in the knee of a sobbing preschooler.
Despite the anaesthetic, Billy was struggling, so his mum sat behind him holding his arms by his sides.Nel’s phone vibrated loudly on the desk as she knotted the stitch and trimmed the thread.She stole a glance at the screen, then looked back at the tear-stained face of little Billy.
‘Just one more t o go, mate,’ she said.‘You’re being very brave.Another jelly bean?’
He nodded and took a shaky breath as his mum fished an orange one out of the jar with tongs.He popped it into his mouth and gripped the arm of the chair again, his little knuckles white.As Nel pulled the next stitch through, the phone vibrated again.
‘All done!’she said a minute later when she trimmed the last thread.‘High five, buddy.’He raised a weak hand to meet hers.‘Now you can tell all your friends you got six stitches.’
He gave her a slight smile.She ran through the wound care with his mum, then closed the door behind them.Nel didn’t have the time or the energy for a conversation with her own mother right now, so she put the phone in the top drawer and went to call her next patient.
Nicole the receptionist tapped her watch and looked pointedly around the crowded waiting room.They were meant to close at one o’clock on a Sunday.Nel sighed and glanced at the wall clock above the desk, trying to calculate how far behind she was running.
‘Alice Partridge?’she said.
A tiny elderly lady looked up from where she sat sandwiched between two mothers in active wear jiggling oversized prams.
‘Goodness,’ she said as she shuffled down the corridor behind Nel.‘You doctors are getting younger and younger!’
After Mrs Partridge left, Nel saw a rugby player with a dislocated shoulder, who was furious she was running late, followed by a teary new mum and a corporate lawyer with an anxiety disorder.By eleven thirty, she’d decided not to work Sundays anymore.They were always a nightmare.She’d only picked up the extra shift in the first place so she wouldn’t need a flatmate to help with the rent, but she wasn’t sure her solitude was worth it.
It was almost two o’clock when Nel farewelled her last patient.She sighed as she shut down the computer and reached for her bag.Remembering her phone, she opened the drawer.She frowned.Her mum had called again.Just as she was about to call back, Nicole buzzed on the intercom.
‘Mrs Partridge just rang.’She sounded exasperated.‘She’s lost the script you wrote her.Said she must have dropped it somewhere in the shopping centre.Can you, I don’t know, maybe send her an electronic one?’
Nel sighed.Mrs Partridge was pushing ninety, so an e-script didn’t seem like a good solution.Besides, the weather was miserable and she would have to go out again to get the medication.
‘I’ll get the antibiotics from the chemist now and drop them over to her,’ Nel said, looking up her patient file to find the address.
‘You sure?I’d offer to do it myself but I’m meeting a friend.I’m already late.’
‘It’s fine, honestly.It’s not far out of my way.’All Nel had waiting for her at home was Netflix and her cat Winston.
It was almost an hour later by the time Nel had delivered the medication to Mrs Partridge, who answered the door in her quilted dressing-gown, called her ‘a dear girl’ and thanked her profusely.Now Nel sat in traffic on Victoria Road listening to the repetitive drone of her windscreen wipers.She hadn’t moved in five minutes.There must be an accident up ahead.She contemplated an illegal U-turn to go down a side street, but there was no break in the endless procession of cars coming the other way.
There was a long beep from the car behind and she realised the traffic had started moving.She lifted her hand in a wave as the rain came down heavier, drumming on the roof and making a blur of the outside world.She turned the wipers up faster.
Her mobile vibrated on the passenger seat and she looked over at it.Lauren.Her chest tightened.Three missed calls from her mum and now her sister was ringing.A sick feeling took hold in Nel’s stomach as she looked around quickly, checking for police—cursing her broken Bluetooth—and answered the call.She put the phone on speaker mode in her lap.
‘Hello?’
