* * *
Harry
I helped my last client of the day to his feet—a client who had, over the eighteen months we’d been working together, become my student and eventually my friend. “You did great today. Those legs loosened up in the end, eh?”
Angelo shrugged. “Didn’t feel like it. Thought my calves were going to snap.”
“That’s because you’re still looking at yourself and expecting to see your body from three years ago.”
He didn’t deny it. Just sloped off to get his clothes. I watched him move, analysing the slight limp he’d developed in recent months. Angelo had been a world-class ballet dancer before chronic fatigue syndrome had ravaged his muscles and joints, and the longer we worked together, the more it hurt to see him on his bad days. “Come back.”
“What?” Angelo glanced over his shoulder.
“Come back,” I repeated. “I want to try something.”
Angelo groaned. “Don’t make me do more lunges. I’ll puke on you this time, I swear.”
It wouldn’t be the first time a client had puked on me, but I was pretty sure Angelo could handle what I had in mind. Despite all his condition threw at him, his pain threshold was far higher than mine. And when he left the clinic a little while later, his hip moving better than it had in months, his smile wide and warm, I knew I’d miss him if I took my newly signed agent up on her offer of a summer writing retreat.
And it was a bigif. For me, at least. Rhys—my brother—who met me at the juice bar across the road after work, couldn’t see the problem.
“It’s a few weeks, li’l bro. And it’s not like it’s a holiday. Your publisher gave you a deadline.”
The mention of deadlines made my stomach clench before I forced myself to think positive. Eighty-thousand words exploring the value of mind over matter. Of what benefits positive thinking and mindfulness brought to recovery. By September. I could do that, right? Twenty-thousand words a month. Five-thousand words a week. How hard could it be?
Well, pretty damn hard, actually, I’d discovered when I hadn’t factored in time for self-editing and rewrites. At my current pace, I’d be done by Christmas. Maybe. Which meant I needed a plan B.
“You should take a sabbatical,” Rhys said. “You’ve barely had a week off from that clinic in five years.”
“It’s not the clinic I’m worried about. It’s my patients. I can’t just abandon them.”
“You wouldn’t be gone forever. Besides, you’re not what makes their recovery viable—it’s what’s going on inside them, and that’s what your book’s all about, right? That we have more power over our minds and bodies than we realise?”
Damn my big brother and the stubborn paramedic logic he applied to the whole world except himself. He was the only person I could never reason with. “I don’t even know where they want to send me. If it’s the backside of nowhere, I’m definitely not going. I’ve got my private clients to consider too, and there’s no one to pick up slack there.”
“Of course there is. Farm them out to another clinic.”
“I can’t do that—”
“Yes, you can. It’s not slacking off to take some time out to do other things. If you weren’t planning on giving yourself a chance to actually write this book, then you shouldn’t have signed the deal.”
I shot him a half-hearted glare and toyed with the straw in my glass. The book deal had come out of the blue, and I’d let my immediate excitement get the better of me, assuming the fact that an agent had scouted me online meant that I could cobble the book together from stuff I’d already written and posted. But no such luck. The eighty-thousand words due by winter had to be original, and since I’d learned that tough reality, my muse had jumped ship, taking any and all of my inspiration with it.
“Show me the email they sent you,” Rhys demanded. “They must’ve said something about where they’re sending you.”
I couldn’t actually remember. I got thousands of emails a week and reserved my concentration for my patients. Wednesday was my busiest day, and I’d had a full list. Still, resistance was futile. I dug my iPad out of my bag and handed it over.
Rhys swiped at it until he found the right email. “They haven’t got a particular place in mind. They’re saying you can find your own and send them the bill.”
“Really? Where on earth would I find a writing retreat?”
“That’s not a positive mental attitude,” Rhys chided. “And it’s pretty short-sighted. Where do we find everything these days?”
I looked at him blankly.
He sighed and rolled his eyes. “You’re impossible. I don’t know how you run three successful enterprises when you’re so bloody dense.”
“I don’t run three enterprises,” I retorted mildly. “I work for the NHS. My blog and a handful of private clients are side projects.”
