‘Not me.’ Eden, a staff nurse in the Emergency Department, gave them a rueful grin. ‘I have a four-year-old with autism to get ready and out of the door to nursery before I get to work, so I’ve already had my workout for the day.’
‘Fair point and trust me, I fully intend to recoup the calories on my first break.’ Eve tapped the side of her nose. ‘Rumour has it that Gwen is bringing in one of her famous cakes to celebrate the fact that she’s got another grandchild on the way.’ Eve turned her palms towards the ceiling, indicating the futility of trying to resist the offer of cake. Gwen was the volunteer coordinator whoran the Friends of St Piran’s Hospital shop and was like a stand-in mother come agony aunt to all the staff, and people rarely turned down any offer she might make.
‘Has she? That’s great news.’ Aidan, the most senior nurse on duty beamed, before lowering his voice and exchanging a glance with Eve. ‘Although I’m really glad Esther isn’t in today. If she hears one more bit of a baby news, I think it might break her.’
‘I think you might be right.’ Eve sighed, thinking about Esther’s reaction to one of their recent admissions; a young girl who’d taken two entire packets of birth control pills in a misguided and extremely dangerous attempt to end an unwanted pregnancy. Esther, who was the department’s Lead Nurse, had gone about her duties as diligently as ever, caring for the young girl and staying by her side when her stomach was pumped, monitoring her condition in the hours that followed, while they waited for space on a ward, and even supporting her when she spoke to her parents. Afterwards though, when the girl had been taken up to the ward, Esther had broken down at the injustice of it all. She’d been trying for a baby with her husband, Joe, for over a year, she’d said; her own birth control pills having been consigned to the bin and replaced with multi-vitamins, folic acid and even a supplement that claimed to be a birth control detox. None of them had made any difference so far and she and Joe, a consultant psychiatrist at the hospital, had just been referred for fertility treatment.
‘I’m sorry, my hormones are haywire.’ Esther had taken a shuddering breath, as Eve had passed her a tissue, and Aidan had wrapped his arms around her shoulders, offering the hug she clearly so badly needed. Eve had been grateful he was there, because as much as she’d wanted to hug Esther, somehow she couldn’t bring herself to do it. She’d been at the hospital for well over a year now and she was gradually getting to know them all better, but a stretch of personal leave in the middle of that hadmeant she still felt like the new girl in lots of ways, even though Meg and Eden had both joined after her. She was probably closest to the two of them, and had been out for drinks with the entire team a couple of times, but none of them knew the full story about why she’d left Leeds and ended up in Cornwall. In fact, they barely knew anything about her personal life at all. She kept herself so closed-up these days that she hadn’t wanted to open the floodgates of her own emotions, by letting herself connect too closely with any grief her colleague was feeling.
All those unfulfilled plans, all the hopes and dreams that might never be realised had felt too close to home, even if their circumstances were completely different. Instead, Eve had offered to make tea. She could cope with that and had lost count of the number of times it had been offered to her in the wake of Max’s accident. Before the night of his third stag do, she’d believed that Yorkshire Tea, the signature drink of her adopted county, really could work miracles. But she’d found out the hard way that sometimes the best it could do was to provide a brief distraction, or a reason for someone who had no idea how to offer meaningful comfort to take a break from trying to, just for a little while.
‘I guess we better start this shift then.’ Eve tightened the hair band that was tying back her long, dark brown ponytail. She’d grown her hair for the wedding, having chosen a half up, half down sort of beachy boho look that had felt perfectly in keeping with the venue, just ten miles from the hospital where she now stood. The hairdresser had never arrived to style her hair, her dress still hung in a wardrobe at Max’s parents’ house, unworn, and all the plans they’d made for their wedding had come to nothing in the end. Yet somehow, she couldn’t bring herself to cut her hair, despite the fact that it would be so much more practical.
‘Oh God, sorry to do this to you at handover.’ Isla, one of the other nurses on the team, pushed open the door to the staffroom, cutting off any response that Eve’s colleagues might have been about to make. ‘But we’ve just had a call on the red phone. A tourist in a hire car lost control coming down the hill into the harbour in Port Agnes and ended up pinning two pedestrians against the wall and hitting another. ETA is ten minutes.’
‘Here we go again.’ Meg grimaced, as they all moved to follow Isla, and all Eve could do was nod mutely. Here they went again, indeed, facing another incident when someone’s life might have been changed forever, even destroyed. It never got any easier facing up to these moments, but Eve had to do it if she was going to be able to carry on doing her job. And sometimes, just lately, it felt as if being a doctor in A&E was the only part of her old self that Eve had left.
Oakwood Park, as the name suggested, was a twelve-acre site dominated by the mature oak trees dotted around the grounds and the beautiful Victorian former manor house, which now housed a charitable foundation providing twenty-four-hour nursing, neuro-rehabilitation, educational services, respite, and supported living accommodation for people with a range of head injuries from those needing minor care to maintain their independence, to those with complex disabilities. It had been Max’s home since his discharge from hospital fourteen months ago, and it was somewhere Eve felt she could have negotiated the journey to with her eyes shut. It had been too late to visit Max the day before, after a shift that had started with three badly injured pedestrians and a driver who it turned out hadn’tsimply lost control of his car, but had suffered a heart attack at the wheel. That had set the tone for the day and the shift had been non-stop. Eve had ended up staying on later than planned, because of the backlog of patients still waiting when the nightshift team had arrived, already short-staffed due to a sickness bug that was going around. She hadn’t admitted, even to herself, that the idea of staying on at work was preferable to heading home and then driving over to see Max. Just the thought made her feel horribly guilty, but his moods seemed to have darkened over the past couple of weeks and Eve increasingly felt like she’d become his whipping boy of choice.
Today, there was no option to stay on late, and she couldn’t come up with a justifiable excuse to Max’s mother, because she was off work and Annie knew it. Annabel, or Annie as she was known to her nearest and dearest, had begun asking Eve for copies of her work schedule as soon as she had started at St Piran’s, and now it was a habit it seemed impossible to break, no matter how much she might want to.
‘Oh, Eve, thank goodness.’ Annie folded her into a highly perfumed hug, the moment she entered the lounge that Max shared with three other residents. They all had their own bedrooms, but this communal area was viewed as a stepping stone to Max being able to move to one of the supported living bungalows in the grounds of Oakwood Park. ‘We were beginning to wonder if you’d decided not to come again.’
Annie’s voice was falsely bright, so the tone didn’t sound accusatory, even if the words were. Part of Eve wanted to tell her not-quite-mother-in-law that it wasn’t an option she could choose, because no one could withstand the guilt trip that decision would result in. Instead, she painted on a smile and swallowed back the words that were trying to escape. Coming to see Max was hard, because he still looked a lot likeherMax, the man she had loved with every fibre of her being, but it wasn’therMax. He’d died on the night of his third stag do, and no amount of rehabilitation or outright denial on his mother’s part was ever going to bring him back. She almost wished he’d changed as much physically as he had in personality, then maybe it would be easier to accept this new person, but she wasn’t sure that would have made any real difference, because a lot of the time Max seemed to resent Eve’s very existence. It was almost as if she was the reason he’d ended up at Oakwood Park, and in a way she supposed that was true. If they’d never met and fallen in love, he wouldn’t have proposed and he wouldn’t have been out on that stag night, on the very evening that Brandon Moorcroft was. If Max had made one different decision anywhere along the line he wouldn’t have been in that precise place at that precise time, connecting with the blow that had floored him and ended all the plans they had for the future. Then there was the fact that she had been the one to help his mother choose Oakwood Park.
‘He’ll need to be near to us and close to a hospital, not just for his treatment but for when you relocate for work.’ Annie had made it sound like afait accompli,and the truth was it had been. The relocation had never been in question as far as Max’s mother was concerned. Eve had wanted to follow Max, of course she had, but her medical training meant she couldn’t wear the same blinkers as his mother, burying her head in the sand and pretending that ‘one day soon’ they’d get the old Max back. She knew he was gone for good and that the changes to his personality that had turned him into an entirely different person would not be reversed. She’d already lost the person she loved most in the world, and relocating to Cornwall meant leaving behind her closest friends.
Oakwood Park was less than ten minutes’ drive from his parents’ house in Carrick Water, a tiny hamlet between Port Agnes and Port Kara. It meant that Eve could also visit every day after workif she wanted to. Those last four words were loaded.If she’d admitted to anyone else, even herself, that she didn’t always want to, she would have sounded like the worst person in the world. She knew that, because she already felt like the worst person in the world. If Max had still beenherMax, and as happy to see her as he used to be, of course she’d have wanted to go every single day. But when someone made you feel about as welcome as a case of athlete’s foot it was much harder to feel inclined to visit at the end of a long day.
‘Have you heard anything from Lily?’ Annie fired the question at Eve, after she’d kissed her on both cheeks in a way that sometimes felt more like aggression than affection. It wasn’t because Annie didn’t love Eve, she knew Max’s mother adored her. It was because ever since the assault, Annie had been in a state of high alert, that made it slightly unnerving – and very far from relaxing – to be around her.
‘She’s sent me a few photos and I’ve seen some updates on her Instagram stories, but if you’re asking me whether she’s mentioned anything about coming home, then no, she hasn’t.’ Eve gave Annie a sympathetic smile. She knew how desperately Max’s mother wanted her daughter, Lily, to come home from California. She also knew why Lily didn’t want to, but that wasn’t something she was willing to share with Annie. She was already hanging by a thread and Eve wasn’t going to be the one to cut it. Annie’s behaviour, and the expectations she’d put on her daughter in the wake of Max’s assault, had pushed Lily to a point where she’d admitted to Eve that she wasn’t sure she wanted to go on. She’d been exhausted physically and mentally trying to live up to her mother’s demands, and by the time Max was moved to Oakwood Park she was already at breaking point. When her American boyfriend, Scott, had been offered a job back home and had asked Lily to go with him, it had been the life raft she’d needed. Annie hadn’t taken it well at all and it had led to her own mental health spiralling even further which, in turn,had necessitated Eve taking time off work. Now that Annie was finally back to just about holding it all together, Eve wasn’t about to shatter her hopes by telling her she wasn’t sure Lily would ever come home.
‘She FaceTimes me on a Sunday, but the rest of the time it’s just WhatsApps, because of the time difference.’ Annie’s mouth was downturned at the corners, but then it veered between that and false brightness far too much these days. It was just one more thing that broke Eve’s heart, because Annie had been the definition ofjoie de vivrebefore all of this. She could create a party out of nowhere and her infectious laughter had rung around the Pascoe family home. Having more or less retired from Carew’s, her maternal family’s law firm, in the wake of Max’s assault, Annie now had three obsessions; bringing about her son’s complete recovery, getting Brandon Moorcroft’s case reviewed to ensure he was assigned with a sentence she considered ‘just’, and persuading her daughter to move back home. Only the last of those had a possibility of happening, and based on the messages Eve had received from Lily, even that was very remote.
Brandon Moorcroft had been sentenced to three years. Eve had to agree with Annie and Max’s father, Nigel, that it wasn’t nearly long enough. But Brandon had been high on methamphetamine after the breakdown of his relationship, and seemingly not just repentant but distraught at the damage he had caused. His barrister had offered up a defence centring around his difficult childhood as mitigation for his behaviour, and his former partner as the one solid presence in his life. When she’d left, he’d unravelled, and Max had just been in the wrong place at the wrong time. It couldn’t excuse what Moorcroft had done, but it did impact on the sentencing, and they’d all been distraught when his prison term was handed out.In the early days it had felt as if the injustice of it all would eat Eve alive, and she could see it doing the same thing to Annie.
For Eve, the turning point had come in learning more about Brandon Moorcroft’s background and the counselling she’d undertaken in the months following his sentencing. Her therapist had told her that holding onto the anger would harm her more than it would ever hurt Moorcroft, and she’d known from how twisted up she felt inside that he was right. She’d needed to find a way to let go of the sense of making things right by punishing Brandon Moorcroft, because no sentence would ever be enough. Her therapist had suggested that she look into restorative justice, which would give her the opportunity to sit across the table from Brandon – if he agreed to be part of it – and talk to him about the impact his actions had had on her life, and try to understand how he could have got to the point he’d reached on that fateful night. Eve had felt more and more lately that it was something she wanted to do, and she wanted to suggest it to Annie, to stop the bitterness from continuing to eat Max’s mother from the inside out. But that was something Annie was nowhere near ready to hear, and Eve had a feeling she never would be.
‘I’m sure Lily will come home for a visit soon.’ Eve squeezed Annie’s hand, hoping her words would offer some reassurance, despite the fact she knew they were a lie.
‘Thank goodness I’ve got my bonus daughter.’ Max’s mother gave her a wobbly smile and Eve forced herself to return it. She loved Annie and Nigel as if they really were her parents, but they didn’t know what was in her heart and she was terrified that if they ever found out, they wouldn’t just stop loving her, they’d never want to see her again.
‘Where’s Max?’
‘He’s with the occupational therapist, they’re working on the targets they’ve set him to achieve before he’ll be allowed tomove into one of the bungalows. But he should be back any minute.’ Annie smiled again and Eve nodded. There were five shared bungalows for semi-independent living on the Oakwood Park estate, where the residents could move to as a step towards possibly moving into supported lodgings in the community, and sometimes even to full independence at some point in the future. The thought of that outcome made Eve shiver. What would everyone expect of her if Max was allowed to leave Oakwood Park? Whatever it was, she had a feeling she was destined to fall short.
‘How’s he getting on with?—’
‘Oh, here he is, talk of the devil!’ Annie cut Eve off, clapping her hands in delight as Max came back into the room.
‘I’m not the devil, you silly old woman.’ It was a term Max had teased his mother with in the past, but back then it had come with so much love and affection, off the back of her struggling to download a new app on her phone, or losing her glasses when they were perched on the top of her head. Now it sounded like he meant it.
‘I was just teasing, sweetheart.’ Annie hugged him tightly. If his words cut her, she wasn’t showing it. ‘Look who’s here, darling. It’s Eve.’
‘Hi.’ Max sounded like a truculent teen and, as Eve took a step closer, he wrinkled his nose. ‘You stink.’
‘Don’t be silly, of course she doesn’t.’ The laugh that accompanied Annie’s words sounded forced and Max clearly wasn’t going to be put off his stride.
