“You all right?” Declan asked me with a questioning look on his face and I nodded without making a sound.
“So what’s next?”
He pulled the papers back to the side of the desk where he sat. He stacked everything neatly together then pressed a button on the very complicated-looking phone positioned nearby.
“Alison, I have the signed plenary summons. Can you come and get it?” He turned his attention back to me. “Now we file it at the courts. I’ll get a registered letter out to the Coopers outlining the action, which they’ll have by the end of the week. At the absolute latest.”
I swallowed hard. I couldn’t believe I was really doing this, but I was.
Declan and I had talked again at length after our first meeting, whereupon I reiterated that I didn’t care so much about victory, or even getting as far as any court, so much as I wanted to send the Coopers a message.
Thankfully, he seemed happy to go along with that, rather than suggest any sort of gung-ho approach. Right from the beginning Declan Roe had struck me as the kind of guy who would be happy to be in my corner whatever I decided, and I appreciated that.
Unlike his cousin, who I think was secretly hoping I would march down Knockroe Main Street with a megaphone announcing that I planned to take the Coopers for everything they had.
But this wasn’t about money.
“OK, then we’ll go through the usual legal motions to start the process and take it from there.”
I spent all my days and nights at the hospital now, while the doctors monitored Rosie’s brain activity, waiting for her to show even the slightest sign of improvement.
But she didn’t. And with each passing day, I became more and more despondent, knowing that the longer she stayed under, the greater the chance she would suffer permanent brain damage. But there was nothing else the medical team could do.
If this didn’t work and the seizures returned, the doctors were out of options.
As was Rosie.
I think if there had been even the slightest change for the better in her condition since that awful episode, I wouldn’t be in Declan’s office now.
But I was, because there hadn’t.
Now I supposed all I could do was wait for the Coopers to get the letter detailing my suit, or as Declan referred to it in legal terms, the plenary summons, and see how they reacted.
Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t feel good about this. But I knew Ineededto do it—had to do something to hit back at the wave of misery and misfortune I’d been drowning in.
I was tired of bad things “just happening” to me.
It was time to fight back.
21
“This is complete and utter bullshit!”
Tom Cooper was way past the point of being angry. He was irate. He was incensed. He was ready to explode.
Shaking the letter that had arrived at their house by registered post the previous morning, he raised his voice even louder and yelled, “I’m fighting this. The whole way, and I’m countersuing that b—thatwoman. There’s no way she is pinning the blame on us for this. No way in HELL.”
He slammed the offending piece of paper on their family solicitor Matt Townsend’s desk and looked to those assembled around the office—including Madeleine—as if to say,Go ahead, I dare you to disagree with me.
Madeleine still felt sick to her stomach. The high that she had been riding since learning of her publishing deal had evaporated the moment she’d opened the letter.
At first she’d thought that there had been some sort of mistake. A clerical error or administrative oversight of sorts. It was only when she’d scanned the words on the paper that she realized this was actually happening...
Kate O’Hara was issuing legal proceedings against their family, looking to hold them accountable for little Rosie’s condition.
She’d phoned Tom at once, but he’d immediately dismissed the very idea.
“Complete nonsense. How can we possibly be blamed for the other girl’s illness, just because Clara wasn’t vaccinated?”
