“It will take some time to assess the full damage,” Mr. Greaves said carefully. “She’ll be in the hospital for several weeks, undergoing tests and beginning rehabilitation. When we feel she can be released, she’ll be able to go home, but she’ll have to attend a rehabilitation clinic several times a week.”
And how on earth was that going to happen? Rachel would have to drive her. She took a steadying breath. “Okay.”
Mr. Greaves looked back down at his notes. “I understand your mother’s mobility was already limited, due to her back injury.”
“Yes . . .”
“We’ll do our best to work within the limitations of her condition. But...” He hesitated, and Rachel felt all four of them go tense as they waited for what felt like a verdict. “You should be prepared for the probability that she will not make a full or even partial recovery.”
“Even partial?” Rachel repeated, her voice hoarse. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, considering your mother’s prestroke condition, it seems unlikely she will recover much mobility.”
“She didn’t have much mobility in the first place,” Rachel said. “What about her speech and... cognitive function?”
“That remains to be determined.”
Half an hour later they were back outside in the car park, all of them dazed and unspeaking. Rachel yanked the parking ticket stuck beneath the windshield. “Seventy pounds for parking on the grass, when there were no bloody parking spaces.” She ripped up the ticket and let the pieces flutter to the ground while Lily and Meghan watched, mouths open.
“Won’t you get in trouble for that?” Lily asked.
“I don’t care.” She unlocked the car and got in, staring straight ahead as Meghan buckled Nathan into his car seat and Lily got in the back.
“Are you going to start the car?” Meghan asked after a moment. Rachel realized she’d just been sitting there, her hands clenched on the steering wheel, for several minutes.
Wordlessly, she jammed the key into the ignition and reversed off the verge, scraping the muffler with a screeching sound as she came off the curb. Meghan winced. Rachel cursed. And kept driving.
Chapter eighteen
Claire
“Are you deaf?”
Claire jerked around from where she’d been stacking milk bottles, wiping her hands, cold and damp from the condensation, on her jeans. “Pardon?”
Dan stared at her from behind the counter, his arms folded. “I said, are you deaf?”
She thought he was being rude, but as he stood there expectantly she realized he meant the question, and he was waiting for her to answer it. “No, not... not exactly. Why do you ask?”
“Because I’ve noticed you have trouble hearing me when there are people around, and you always tilt your head to one side when someone is talking. So I wondered. Are you deaf? Partially, I mean?”
She blinked, discomfited by his perception. “Yes, actually, I am. But you’re the first person who has noticed.” She never talked about her hearing problems. Her mother had insisted it didn’t matter, people didn’t want to know, and Claire shouldn’t limit herself by acting as if she had some sort of disability.Claire didn’t think her mother was ashamed of her, not precisely, but Claire’s ear troubles, the endless operations and illnesses, weren’t something she bandied about. Even Hugh hadn’t known about it; Claire hadn’t meant to keep it a secret, but he hadn’t seemed like someone who would be interested in any kind of weaknesses or deficiencies, and disability or not, she knew instinctively that’s how it would be viewed.
“I knew some blokes in the army,” Dan said. “Blew out their eardrums when they were too close to an explosion. Went deaf in one ear.”
“Oh. Right.”
“What happened to you?”
“I had loads of ear infections as a child. Eventually one became bad enough that it developed into a cholesteatoma.”
“A what?”
“A tumor sort of thing. Anyway, it dissolved the bones in my ear and made me deaf. In one ear.” Just in case he thought she was really deaf.
Dan nodded slowly, his expression unchanging. “That’s tough.”
The last thing she expected was Dan’s sympathy. “It’s not too bad. I’m kind of used to it now. But I suppose when I was younger...” She shrugged, not used to going into the details. The endless doctor’s appointments and medical procedures she’d had in an attempt to rebuild the bones in her ear and restore her hearing; none had been successful. The bouts of pneumonia and flu, the suffocating concern of her mother. The feeling that she had to be wrapped in cotton wool, and she was still fighting her way out.
