I truly hadn’t thought it was possible to love Josh any more than I already did.
But I was wrong.
Chapter Forty One
Josh’s footsteps were heavy as he retraced his route down the hospital corridor. He’d been awake for thirty hours straight and couldn’t remember ever feeling this exhausted. He gave himself a shake, managing to spill a sizeable amount of the vending machine coffee he’d just gone to fetch. He was only carrying a single beaker as Lily was currently nil by mouth. He didn’t count the tiny slivers of ice chips that he’d been gently sliding between her lips, like a parent bird feeding its fledgling.
He fixed a smile on his face as he approached the door to the room she’d been allocated. He didn’t want her to see the concern that was etched like wrinkles on to his face. Today was so much harder than he could ever have imagined.
For about the thousandth time, he wished there was a way that he could magically swap places with her. He was strong, ridiculously sturdy. He could take it. What he couldn’t take was seeing the woman he loved in pain like this.
There was probably a whole range of powerful analgesics Lily could have taken to make this whole thing easier, but she’d refused them with a vehemence that had surprised him.
‘I don’t want to be drugged up to the eyeballs or spaced out,’ she’d said with an odd expression on her face, as though she was hearing an echo from her past.
Josh considered pointing out that the doctors weren’t trying to get her hooked on hard drugs, but decided he’d be better advised to let Lily decide how she wanted to handle everything. She was the one going through it, and it didn’t really matter how many books Josh had read in anticipation of today – and he’d read a lot. Nothing could ever really prepare you.
One of the nurses slid into the room in his slipstream, giving him a quick smile before going over to check on her patient. Mercifully, Lily had drifted into a much-needed light sleep in his absence. Josh looked down at her with the same gut-wrenching pull of love that had tugged at his heart for almost all his life.
He was still staring down at her when the nurse plucked a tissue from the box beside the bed and pressed it into his hand. Josh studied it as though he had no idea what it might be or why he’d been given it, until the nurse lightly touched her own dry cheek with a forefinger. He shook his head. How had he not realised he was crying?
‘How are you doing, Mr Metcalf?’
It didn’t seem to matter how many times he’d told them to call him Josh, they never did.
‘I’m fine.’
‘You’re looking a bit tired,’ the nurse said sympathetically.
Josh shrugged, and every muscle in his neck protested at the movement.That’s what happens when you spend an entire night in an uncomfortable hospital chair beside your wife’s bed,he thought.
‘It’s taking so long ... is that normal?’ he asked, hearing the question in his own head and feeling vaguely horrified in case the nurse thought there was somewhere else he needed to be. Josh had no intention of leaving Lily’s side for a second longer thanhe had to. It would probably take a SWAT team to get him out of her room.
‘It can be quite protracted,’ the nurse said, biting her lip as though apologising for Nature, who had her own agenda as far as these things were concerned.
The young woman left, with a promise to bring Josh some toast, which he already knew he wouldn’t be able to eat. He eased himself slowly on to the chair, trying very hard not to wake the woman sleeping in the bed. Even though he knew he should probably let her rest, Josh couldn’t resist reaching out for the hand he’d held a thousand times before.
The fear that he wouldn’t be able to do that anymore shuddered through him like a bomb blast.
Lily’s hands were still beautiful, long fingered, with perfectly shaped oval nails, but the skin was thin now, marked with the passage of time. It was no longer smooth, and beige splodges marked the space across her knuckles, as though she’d been carelessly painting something in a particularly ugly shade of brown.
His own hands bore similar age spots.
Josh threaded his fingers through Lily’s, annoyed with himself when it caused her eyelids to flutter open, and yet also pleased because the time left to look into her eyes was slipping away faster than sand in an hourglass.
‘Hello, you.’ Her voice sounded the same, or at least it did to his ears. Like musical notes of a favourite song, the cadence was a balm on his soul.
‘Hello, beautiful.’
Lily smiled gently at the endearment, which he still used even though her seventieth birthday had been and gone several years ago.
‘How are you feeling?’ he asked, almost too scared to hear her answer.
‘Better. I think I’ve turned a corner,’ she said, and from God only knows where, she managed a wicked twinkle in her eyes.
She was lying, obviously. They both knew that. But shewasstronger than him ... and was handling this awful situation so much better than he was. And perhaps with good reason.‘It’s not my first rodeo,’she’d told him sadly ages ago, when they’d both realised how this was going to end.
Behind him, Josh heard the sound of the door being gently eased open, and assumed it was yet another member of the hospital staff, until a strong hand was laid on his shoulder. It squeezed gently, somehow imbuing a hundred different emotions into the flexing of the digits. The one Josh felt most powerfully was love.
