PROLOGUE
Eve massaged her temples with small, circular movements, trying to stave off the headache that had been threatening for the last hour. Paracetamol wouldn’t cut it; she needed sleep. It had been a long shift and this was the first chance she’d had to catch her breath and stop in the last three hours. All she wanted to do was to go home, get into her nice warm bed, sink into the memory foam mattress, and rest her head against Max’s shoulder. Except that wasn’t going to be an option.
‘You look like I feel, Evie B, absolutely bloody knackered.’ Vick Stanhope, the Lead Nurse in A&E, always said it like it was, in a broad Leeds accent and with a smile that very rarely slipped off her face no matter how tough a shift they were having. ‘We’ve got half an hour left and then you can get yourself off home.’
‘I wish I could, but I’ve got to pick Max up from his stag do.’ Eve rolled her eyes, but even that was painful.
‘Let him get a cab, the silly sod. What is this anyway, his fourteenth stag do?’
‘Third. I realise it seems ridiculous, but you know Max. He’s got so many friends and he makes more wherever he goes. He’dhave needed to hire Elland Road to catch up with all of his mates in one go.’
It was an exaggeration, of course, to claim that Max could have filled Leeds United’s football stadium with his friends, but there were a lot of them and they came from all walks of life, spanning two or three generations, the different hospitals he’d worked in and a wide range of interests. Tonight’s third and final stag do – at least that’s what Eve hoped it would be – was with a group of guys all more or less the same age as Max, and it was an old-school kind of night out. There’d have been plenty of drinking, a bit of dancing at one of the clubs once their inhibitions had been loosened, and right about now they’d probably be queuing for a kebab somewhere, refuelling before they went on to the next club. It was a stark contrast to his second stag do, which had involved watching Formula One racing in Monaco, with a group of friends and relatives who had more money than sense in Eve’s opinion. Some of the friends stretched right back to Max’s days at a prestigious private school in Berkshire, four counties away from his family home in Cornwall, but he got on with everybody and he didn’t care what their background was. If Max liked you then you’d made a friend for life, and everybody loved him. There’d been times when Eve had felt a bit resentful. Everyone wanted a piece of Max and it ate into their time together.
They’d met on their first day at medical school and the magnetism that drew everyone to him had also worked its spell on Eve. She hadn’t thought for a moment that her feelings for him would be reciprocated, but he’d made it clear almost straightaway that they were and they’d been together ever since. It was perfect; they shared so many of the same goals and values, and his family had welcomed her with open arms, something she valued more than she could have put into words. She’d lost her mother to cancer when she was just fourteen, and had movedin with her father and more-than-slightly resentful stepmother, whose plans to move to Spain had been scuppered by Eve’s arrival. As soon as she’d started university, the plans were back on, and her father and stepmother now lived in southern Spain, running a bar and raising their beautiful twin sons, who probably thought of Eve as more of a distant cousin than a sister. Max’s family, by contrast, had folded her into the centre of their lives and had made her feel welcome from the very first time he’d taken her home with him. She adored them and it was just one more reason she felt incredibly lucky to be marrying Max and taking another step towards the life they wanted.
Their careers were going just the way they’d wanted too. Eve had specialised in emergency medicine, having found her passion early on in the foundation stage of her training, and Max was two thirds of the way through his training to become a surgeon. They’d both worked at St James’s Hospital, but for the second phase of his training, he’d moved to the nearby Leeds Children’s Hospital to specialise in paediatrics. They were the type of couple who had five-, ten- and even twenty-year plans, because Eve needed the security of being able to picture their future. Her mother’s diagnosis and subsequent death had made it feel as if the world had been ripped out from under her feet. Max brought the spontaneity and the fun, thinking nothing of booking them a holiday based on the toss of a coin, or something as simple as turning off the road when they travelled down to Cornwall, to check out a town or village he’d never been to before, just because he liked the sound of the name on the road sign. She knew without a shadow of a doubt that he was the person she was supposed to share her life with – and she wouldn’t have minded if he wanted thirty-three stag dos, and she had to pick him up from every single one of them at the end of a long shift – as long as he felt the same way about her. And she knew he did.
‘Oh yeah, I know what Max is like all right and to be honest, if he’d let me come, I’d have tagged along on one of his stag dos, instead of coming to your hen.’ Vick gave a throaty laugh, throwing back her head and making the wooden beads at the end of her long braided hair knock together like wind chimes.
‘Well, thanks a lot.’ Despite her words, Eve was already laughing.
‘You know I’m only joking, chick. I wouldn’t have missed that for the world.’ Vick gave her shoulders a squeeze. ‘And I still think there’s time for us to cram another one in, maybe even two. You can’t let Max have all the fun and it’s still nearly three weeks until the wedding.’
‘One was enough for me and I’ve discovered that shift work and hangovers do not mix. It would probably take me the full three weeks to get over it, especially if you’re in charge of the drinking games again.’ It had been a brilliant weekend, hiring an Airbnb in the Peak District, which was a more-or-less halfway point between her life in Leeds and Max’s family in Cornwall. His mother, sister and aunt had all joined Eve and her friends for the celebration and there was no way it could be topped. All the women who meant the most to her were there and she felt absolutely no need to repeat it.
‘Spoilsport!’ Vick laughed again. ‘Still, I could always pretend I’m on a stag do, the amount of drunks we get here on a Friday night. Although, the usually endless stream does seem to have dried up in the last half an hour.’
‘Vick, don’t, that’s almost as bad as saying that it’s… well, you know, the word we never,eversay.’ Eve widened her eyes in mock horror. They both knew better than to ever say it wasquiet, because then the floodgates were guaranteed to open and they’d be back to being run off their feet for the rest of the shift.
‘I’m not that daft, as soon as I opened my mouth they’d be—’ She didn’t even get a chance to finish the sentence before thered phone behind them started to ring. It meant a patient with a serious trauma was on the way in. Turning like a ballerina performing a flawless pirouette, Vick snatched up the phone, taking down the details of the call from the paramedics, before relaying them to the rest of the team.
‘Male, early thirties with a serious head injury resulting from an assault and subsequent blow to the head from hitting the pavement. The paramedics suspect a skull fracture and possible serious frontal lobe bleed. He has a GCS score of four. Estimated time of arrival – five minutes.’
‘Oh God, that doesn’t sound good.’ Eve hated these kinds of calls, someone so young whose life was now hanging in the balance, a life which would almost certainly be irrevocably changed even if he did survive. She couldn’t allow herself to think too much about the tragedies she encountered every single day at work, they had a job to do. ‘Right, let’s get ready.’
Within minutes, Eve was standing by the doors to the emergency department with Vick by her side. She hadn’t even realised it had been raining until now. Despite the fact that the sky was jet-black, it was still humid outside, summer in the city at its peak and steam rose off the ground as the rain hit the warm Tarmac. The wail of the siren heralded the approach of the ambulance, and the reflection of the flashing blue lights bounced off the wet road. This was their patient. She recognised Allie, the paramedic who was driving, who both she and Max had known since their early days at the hospital. Allie leapt out of the front of the ambulance, heading straight round to the back to open the doors. But then, as Eve and Vick moved towards the back of the ambulance too, Allie turned, her face draining of colour, and looking deathly white in the eerie light.
‘Eve I don’t know…’ Allie shook her head and turned to look at Vick. ‘She shouldn’t be here, not for this.’
‘What do you mean I shouldn’t be here?’ Even as she said the words, Eve knew what they meant, but she couldn’t acknowledge them, because she couldn’t allow it to be true. Then, any last semblance of hope she had that she might have misunderstood was taken from her. The world as she knew it, was being ripped away for the second time in her life, as Allie mumbled the words she so desperately didn’t want her to say.
‘It’s Max.’
1
TWO YEARS LATER
Eve woke with a start, all four of her limbs flinching violently, almost as if she’d been electrocuted. She’d been back in that room again; standing by the side of Max’s bed as one of her colleagues delivered the devastating news about his test results.
‘The bleed in Max’s brain has caused irrevocable damage. It’s going to be life-changing. For both of you.’ It was a moment she never wanted to relive, but every time she closed her eyes, she knew there was a good chance of that happening. Even when she didn’t close her eyes, it could happen. Working in an emergency department, there were far too many triggers and reminders of that terrible night, meaning the possibility of being forced to relive it was always present. All it took was for another patient to be rushed in whose circumstances or injuries were an echo of Max’s. Or a relative who was forced to hear the same fateful words and be told that their loved one would never be the same again.
The cases that Eve found especially hard were the ones that came out of nowhere, where the patient and their family had just been getting on with their lives, not expecting anything out of the ordinary to happen and then, bam, out of the blue they’dbeen hit by a sucker punch that changed everything. That’s what had happened to Max, in every sense. A complete idiot, who Max and his friends had walked past, on their night out, had for some unknown reason taken offence to the group of thirty-somethings, laughing and having fun. Brandon Moorcroft was the name of the man who changed everything with a single punch directed to the back of Max’s head, sending him sprawling forward, making him lose his footing and smack his head against the pavement.
Moorcroft had been half out of his mind on a combination of drugs and alcohol, having got wasted after splitting up with his partner. He hadn’t been able to justify to the police why he’d attacked Max, except for the fact that he was wearing a T-shirt clearly marking him out as the stag. Moorcroft claimed that white-hot rage had washed over him because Max was getting married and he’d just been dumped. The attack was completely unprovoked, and Moorcroft had eventually sobbed in court, saying how desperately he wished he could take it back. But there was no rewind button. That decision, that single blow to the back of Max’s head had ruined so many lives and Eve wasn’t sure she’d ever be able to shut her eyes and know for certain that she wouldn’t be back in that moment, one she’d have given anything not to have happened.
Less than half an hour after waking up, Eve was on her way to work. She ran to St Piran’s whenever the timing of her shifts allowed. There were staff changing rooms, lockers and a couple of showers available. It meant she could try and run off some of the tension in her body before she started her day and change into her uniform once she was ready. The rucksack on her backcontained everything else she needed and the meandering route she took to work allowed her to take in some of the scenery that made Cornwall so beautiful. She lived on the top floor of a converted former grain store, with far-reaching views of the countryside, but too far from the coast to get even a glimpse of the sea. If she’d run directly to the hospital, via the quickest route, it would have been less than a mile and a half. As it was, she always took a route of at least three miles, sometimes more than double that, depending on how much time she had to spare. She loved the rough terrain of the coastal path, not just for the beautiful views of aquamarine water and the dramatic cliffs jutting out of the waves, but because it required concentration, to avoid tripping or falling. It meant her mind was less busy with all the other things that usually dominated her thoughts; the worries and the fears, and sometimes even the regret. Not tripping and falling to her death, while running on the coastal path, was a form of mindfulness that Eve was pretty sure she’d invented. Maybe she should market it to others, because sometimes it felt like the only thing keeping her sane.
‘Did you run here again?’ Meg, one of the other A&E doctors widened her eyes when Eve nodded, as she emerged from the changing room, after showering and drying her hair. ‘My God, you put us all to shame.’
