‘We were seeing each other for a couple of months when I fell pregnant. We were both shocked, but we didn’t have much time to get used to it or tell anyone because I was rushed to hospitalone night with bleeding and tummy pains. The pregnancy was ectopic. We lost the baby.’
‘I’m so sorry.’
She tried to shrug it off, even though it still hurt emotionally almost as much as it had back then. ‘We were so young; I think we both felt as though nature had been trying to tell us something.’
‘Still, it was a loss.’
‘It was, and it happened again when I was married.’ She fought the tears. Two chances to have a baby and both of them snatched away just like that.
‘You were married?’
‘I was. Not for that long, and then when my marriage broke down, I came here to Whistlestop River and started over yet again.’ She smiled. ‘I warned you there was a lot to say.’
‘I’m still listening.’
‘The second time I was pregnant was worse – it was ectopic too and I was lucky to survive. I had a ruptured fallopian tube and severe bleeding.’
‘Nadia, I?—’
She shook her head. ‘Both pregnancies were a long time ago.’
‘Doesn’t mean the pain isn’t still there.’
‘When it happened with Archie, I needed him; he was my best friend more than anything else. He stayed with me at the hospital, we managed a bit of a joke that it was on-the-job training; he kept my spirits up.’
And then her mind went back to what happened in the weeks after that.
‘Archie and I broke up. I think we both realised that we were friends, nothing more. We’d been through a shitty time but it made our friendship even more solid. At least that’s what I thought.
‘Archie had a clinical placement near Basel; I had one in Geneva. After my placement finished, I went home to surprise Mum for her birthday. Nobody knew I was coming. Not even Monica, who had been swanning around Switzerland, still not working, still without direction. I got home and the rest is so cliché. Mum wasn’t there. The house was quiet but I heard giggling coming from Monica’s room. It wasn’t unusual. She’d get stoned and laugh to herself – still my mother denied she was taking drugs – but I went upstairs to dump my things. And that was when Monica came out of her bedroom wrapped in a sheet. I could tell she was naked underneath; it wasn’t hard to work out that she had someone there. I was about to leave the house, give her half an hour to sort herself out with a stern warning that Mum might be home soon and she should get rid of whoever was in her bedroom, when I caught a look on her face. It was a look of triumph, like the one she’d give me when she got away with something and Mum let her off the hook when really she shouldn’t have done.
‘The next thing I knew, I was walking towards her bedroom. I looked in and there was Archie in her bed. I didn’t want Archie, not in that way any more, but he was my best friend. With everything we’d been through, too, he was a part of my life that Monica hadn’t had a say in up until that moment. Both of them had betrayed me and I lost it. I couldn’t handle it. I took off and it was Archie, not Monica, who came running down the stairs.
‘I told him to stay the hell away from me. I told him to go back upstairs, put on his clothes and get out before he gave our mother a heart attack when she saw her eighteen-year-old in bed with a man four years older than her. I stayed with a girlfriend that night and for a week after; I didn’t want anyone to find me. When I returned to university, I refused to speak to Archie. Monica didn’t get in touch, I spoke to Mum on the phone as usual, and then I threw myself into my exams.
‘Monica took my best friend,’ she said. ‘Just like that. She took the one thing I never thought she could.’
A knock at the door was followed by Kate poking her head around the frame.
‘You okay?’ she asked Nadia. She was likely thinking that her distress was the shock of losing the patient at the scene, the fact it was almost definitely Lena’s mother.
‘Yeah, I’m good.’
‘There’s a guy in reception for you.’
Nadia didn’t have to ask who it was.
And neither did Hudson.
‘Want me to deal with Archie?’ he asked when Kate went on her way.
‘No… I’ve got this.’
But before she left, Hudson pulled her close, wrapped her in a hug it took her a while to respond to and she felt herself drift back to the night of the dinner dance, what it had felt like to be in his arms.
‘You’ve got me on your side,’ he said before he left her to go and greet her visitor.
17
