‘If you can tell me as much as you know, I can put a call into the team at Domusamare. I’m sure there’s something they can do to help.’ He smiled and, as Eve began to outline the situation, he willed his words to be true. He couldn’t bear the thought of letting one more person down and he wanted to lift some of the sadness that Eve seemed to carry around off her shoulders. Whatever it took.
The team at Domusamare had swung into action and found Sophie a bed, as well as a key worker, assigning a staff member to oversee her stay and support her in accessing the services she would need, in order to take the steps she’d claimed she wanted to take towards getting clean. Felix knew only too well how easy it was for addicts to ‘talk the talk’, and Sophie was far more convincing than Meredith had been when she’d called him. Once upon a time, Meredith had made the same kind of promises that Sophie was currently making, but she couldn’t even do that any more. He’d heard them far too many times to be fooled, and she seemed to know that. Instead she’d used the threat of something happening to her as leverage, but something was going to happen to her either way if she didn’t get help. It was a vicious cycle and the only way to break it was for Meredith to decideshewanted to change, even more than she wanted the drugs. She clearly wasn’t there yet and the real tragedy was that he didn’t think she ever would be again. There was still hope for Sophie. She seemed to have the motivation to help herself, in the shape of her little boy, and as Felix and Eve crossed the car park, outside the Domusamare hostel where they’d left Sophie in the care of the staff, Eve voiced the same thought that was going through his head.
‘Do you think she’ll take the help they’re offering?’
‘I hope so.’ He wished he could give Eve more than that, but he wasn’t going to paint this as an easy fix, or promise her that there were any guarantees for Sophie, even though Domusamare had agreed to support her.
‘Me too. Her little boy…’ Eve shook her head. ‘He could so easily have died and I think it shocked her to the core, but she’s tried to beat this before and it hasn’t worked.’
‘It often doesn’t.’ There he was again, being far more downbeat than he wanted to be and he didn’t miss the look of disappointment that had clouded Eve’s face.
‘Sorry, I’m being a proper misery.’ He forced a smile. ‘The team at Domusamare are brilliant and she’s getting the best possible help. They’ll liaise with the mental health team at St Piran’s and all the other services she’ll need. In the meantime, they’re giving her somewhere safe to stay and three decent meals a day. She couldn’t ask for better than that and she’s really lucky you were at the hospital when her son was admitted and that you cared enough to want to help her. Not everyone would do that for her in those circumstances. A lot of people couldn’t see past the danger she’d put her little boy in.’
‘I’m not sure I could have done if she hadn’t told me about her past. I lost my mum when I was fourteen and I never really felt secure about anything after that.’ She paused for a moment, before meeting his eyes. ‘At least not until I met Max, and I came to really feel like part of a family again. I don’t think Sophie has had that for a long time and no one has ever put her first from what I can tell.’
‘I’m sorry you lost your mum.’ It was his turn to hesitate and he wanted to take the opportunity to ask her more about Max, but that had to come from Eve, if and when she was willing to share it. ‘I think it takes a degree of personal experience to really understand what could drive someone down a path of addiction and retain sympathy for their plight. Most people see it as self-inflicted, but it’s rarely as simple as that.’
‘It must have been hard for you and Eden.’ She stopped again and gave him a half smile. ‘Sorry, you probably don’t want to talk about all of that with someone you hardly know, but she’s toldme a little bit about your mum’s problems with alcohol and how that affected her, and I guess it was the same for you.’
‘Yes, it moulds who you are and it wasn’t just Mum.’ Felix was so close to telling her about Meredith that he could feel the shape of her name in his mouth, but then he shook his head, pushing all the feelings that came with talking about her, back down again. ‘We worried about Dad a lot as well and he spent so much time covering up for Mum that it felt as if neither of them were ever going to find the strength to make a change. Thank God they did, but I know the impact that addiction can have on families, and I really hope that Sophie can do this for her sake, as well as for her son.’
‘Me too.’ Eve stopped as they reached her car and she smiled, her amber-brown eyes almost sparkling, in a way he wasn’t sure he’d seen before, and he found himself wondering if she’d looked like that all the time, before Max had sustained his head injury. He felt an inexplicable and ridiculous stab of envy that Max might have been on the receiving end of that smile every single day, but Eve really was beautiful, her dark hair shining in the glow of the streetlight above their heads. ‘And, thank you, Felix. I owe you a big favour for sorting this out. I bet the last thing you wanted after a long shift was me knocking on your door and asking for help. If there’s anything I can do in return, just name it.’
He came so close to suggesting that going for a drink together would more than settle the score, he had to inhale sharply to draw the words back in before they could escape. It would be such an inappropriate suggestion, given what he knew about her relationship with Max, not to mention the fact that he was Max’s OT. He also knew from his sister that Eve could be a closed book, and it had taken her a long time to even begin to open up. But he really liked her, and if all they could ever become was friends, heknew he wanted that. He didn’t want to risk doing anything that might put a stop to that.
‘You don’t owe me anything, I’m always happy to help, but if Gwen ever brings one of her cakes into the hospital shop and you get to it while there’s still some left, then you’ll have my undying gratitude if you grab me a slice, and I promise I’ll do the same for you. Trust me, it’s not to be missed.’
‘Oh, I know, I was this close to proposing to her when I tried her lemon drizzle cake.’ Eve pinched her thumb and forefinger together, with just a tiny gap between them, the matching dimples on either side of her mouth making an appearance as she grinned.
‘You’ll have to get in the queue. I’m first if her husband Barry ever does a runner.’ Felix laughed, although he had to admit it was no joke.
It wasn’t that he genuinely wanted to be Gwen’s second husband, of course, but he did want to find the kind of relationship she had with Barry. They’d been married for fifty years, but he’d seen newlyweds with less excitement at being around one another. The first time he’d met them, he’d asked Eden if they were as mad about each other as they seemed, and his sister had told him everyone talked about their relationship being something special.
They just seemed to get each other and to find adventure in the every day. So many people strove for a big house, or to jet off on as many trips as they could, but Felix knew those things didn’t buy happiness.
They certainly hadn’t for Meredith. He’d thought they could learn to be happy with the simple things, just because they were together, but Meredith had carried this emptiness inside her that nothing seemed to fill. He’d tried so hard and he hated that he’d failed, but he knew know that she had to want something to fill the emptiness; something that wasn’t drugs. Maybe thesethings were pre-destined, wired into the DNA, and he just hoped that next time he entered into a relationship he’d be able to spot the signs if the other person was damaged so badly that they didn’t want to be helped.
Maybe it was for the best that between work and volunteering he didn’t have time to do anything about meeting someone else, at least for now. But as he looked at Eve, all he knew was that spending time with her felt good. ‘So is that a deal?’
‘Absolutely. I promise to always get you a piece of Gwen’s cake when it’s on offer.’ She shook his hand and he tried to ignore how much he wanted to know what it would feel like to kiss her. The last thing Eve needed was him hitting on her and even if she hadn’t already got a fiancé, his head was all over the place after Meredith’s call. He might have needed to leave the US for the sake of his own sanity, but that didn’t mean he could just stop caring. The day he did that, would be the day he knew he was in the wrong job. People like him and Eve had to care, even when it caused them pain. It was what made them who they were, and all they could do was hope they helped enough people to make all the hard days worth it. They were both counting on Sophie’s ability to turn her life around, more than Sophie herself would ever know.
9
‘What’s the weirdest reason you’ve had someone come into A&E?’ Aidan put his coffee down on the table as he asked the question. ‘I think mine was the girl who came in with blue hands and we all thought she had something terribly wrong with her heart… turns out she’d bought the jeans she was wearing from a market stall and the dye had come off on her hands. When she took them off, her legs were bright blue too. She looked part human, part Smurf, bless her.’
‘Oh God, I’ve had jeans like that in the past, thank goodness I’ve never mistaken the dye transfer for pulmonary heart disease.’ Isla grinned. ‘I think the weirdest one was the day Amy and I were on duty together and this woman came in with a huge purple finger. It genuinely looked like it belonged on Barney the Dinosaur.’
‘Can we guess the cause?’ Eden’s question took the words out of Eve’s mouth. She’d agreed to go for coffee at the end of the shift with Felix’s sister, as well as Isla and Aidan. They’d been on an early shift and she was planning to go to Oakwood Park after work to see Max, as she did most days, but half an hour to stop for a coffee couldn’t hurt and it might even be a reliefto him. Sometimes Max seemed happy that she was there, but lately those occasions were more and more infrequent and his mood swings were completely unpredictable. He’d always been so relentlessly upbeat before the assault, able to lift Eve if she felt down.
Mostly it had been wonderful to have a walking, talking ray of sunshine like Max in her life, but just occasionally it had been frustrating that he’d wanted to brush off all her concerns with his ‘it’ll all be okay’ mantra. Sometimes she’d just wanted him to acknowledge that things were crap. Like when her stepmother had planned a sixtieth birthday party for Eve’s father, inviting friends right back to his school days, but not even telling his daughter, let alone inviting her. When she and Max had flown out to Spain on holiday once, they hadn’t even bothered suggesting that they stay with her dad and stepmother, but they had asked if they could get together. After a lot of to-ing and fro-ing, her stepmother, Carol, had eventually suggested that Eve and Max come over to their villa for a ‘nice family dinner’. It had been a surprise and even more so when Carol had gone to the trouble of asking if there were any foods they didn’t like. Max would eat just about anything, so that had been easy, but Eve had been sure to tell her stepmother that she didn’t like mushrooms or prawns, and Carol had assured her that would be no problem. When they arrived to discover that she’d made garlic mushrooms to start, followed by a prawn curry it had felt like a personal attack to Eve. Max had laughed it off and encouraged her to see the funny side, telling her that it was just because Carol was jealous of her, and the fact that Eve represented the life her father had lived before. What she’d wanted was for Max to tell her that her upset and anger was justified, and to join in with a rant about just what a nasty piece of work her stepmother was. She’d needed him to admit that life wasn’t all sunshine and roses, and that the chances were Carolhadn’t just made a silly mistake. She’d done it on purpose, but that wasn’t who Max was.
She was sure his relentless optimism was encouraging to his patients, but she’d often wondered if there was a side to him she didn’t see; a side where he was forced to admit that sometimes things were rubbish and that sometimes no matter how hard you tried, things couldn’t be made right. He must have needed to acknowledge that in order to be able to do his job, but when he’d decided to move on from St James’s Hospital, so that he could specialise in paediatric surgery at the Leeds Children’s Hospital, it was a great fit for his personality. He even insisted the kids all called him Dr Max, instead of using his surname. He was a wonderful man and it hurt Eve’s heart that he wouldn’t even have recognised himself these days. She’d have given anything to have that relentless sunshine back, but by the time he’d been at Oakwood for six months, she’d been forced to accept it was never going to happen. It had been almost two years since the assault and Annie still hadn’t got there, maybe that’s where Max had got his eternal optimism from. Whatever the reason, Eve had needed this coffee with colleagues, on the bistro tables outside the Friends of St Piran’s Hospital shop, and she knew the old Max wouldn’t have begrudged her that for a second.
‘I don’t think it would take you long to guess the reason.’ Isla turned towards Eden and waited for her to respond.
‘Her ring was too tight?’ Eden asked.
‘Ding-ding-ding, we have a winner!’ Isla held up a hand. ‘But it’s the reason she’d put the ring on in the first place that was interesting. Her best friend, who was also her flatmate, had got engaged, but the ring needed resizing to fit her properly, so she was keeping it in a drawer in her bedroom. What the newly engaged woman didn’t know was that her so-called best friend was also sleeping with her fiancé. The girl with the massive purple finger, let’s call her Emma, had decided that it shouldhave been her he proposed to, so she’d swiped the ring and had worn it to get… well, down and dirty, I suppose, with the fiancé, as a kind of slap in the face to her friend, who was away at her parents’ place for the weekend. Emma had fallen asleep in the fiancé’s arms, only to wake up with what looked like one of those foam fingers they use at sporting events. When she told him what had happened, he tried to wrench it off her finger, but it only caused more damage. She completely freaked out when we told her we were going to have to cut it off.’
