Sarah's Gift

They were also late, and Matt was concerned about his daughter, so with a grin and a wave he left the department, striding briskly down the corridor, palming the doors out of his way and vanishing.

Sarah was thoughtful. It had been a long time since she’d been so in tune with anyone, if ever. It had been a joy and a privilege to work with Matt, and in between the trauma his wit had coincided with hers.

Ryan found her in the locker room, staring into space.

‘Sarah?’

She turned and gave an apologetic smile. ‘Sorry, Ryan, did you say something?’

He shook his head. ‘Nice guy.’

‘Matt? Mmm. Knows his stuff.’

‘He’s very highly qualified. I don’t know what he thinks he’ll learn from us, but it will be interesting having him in the department—very interesting.’ He shot her a searching look, and then snagged his jacket from his locker.

‘I’d better go—Ginny invited him round for supper tonight with Emily and I think I have to go home via a supermarket—I had a shopping list put in my hand this morning as I left home because she doesn’t get home from Norwich until six-thirty.’ He paused for a moment. ‘Don’t suppose you want to join us?’

‘What—and help you start the meal?’

He grinned. ‘Rumbled. So, do you?’

‘Want to join you?’ She hesitated. It would be nice, and she had nothing else to do tonight and precious little food. Besides, Matt would be there… ‘Thanks, Ryan, I will—if you’re sure Ginny won’t mind the extra mouth to feed.’

He chuckled. ‘When has she ever minded feeding you? It’s hardly the first time—and, anyway, you can help, like you said.’

She gave a wry grin and watched him go. ‘Six OK?’ she called after him.

‘Wonderful. You can bath the kids.’

She closed her eyes, suddenly tired. Why had she agreed to it?

Because Matt was going to be there.

She felt a shiver of anticipation, and suppressed it. Matt was a colleague—nothing more, nothing less. Just a colleague.

So they shared a zany sense of humour.

Colleague, she said to herself. Colleague, colleague, colleague.

And, anyway, she wasn’t interested in men…

CHAPTER TWO

SPENDING time with Ryan and his children was a refined form of torture. It was, however, a torture Sarah subjected herself to regularly, and Ryan and Ginny seemed to accept her without question. Ryan, of course, knew about Rob and the children, at least in outline, and he knew her well enough to know that his children were safe with her.

How safe she was with them was another question entirely.

She heard the front door open and shut, and Matt’s voice filtered up the stairs and into the bathroom. She pulled out the plug and reached for a towel.

‘Come on, kids, time to get out and say hello to Emily. Where are your pyjamas?’

Evie, of course, knew where hers were. Gus, of course, didn’t have a clue and they had to play hunt the PJs for five minutes in, on and around his bed. The bottoms emerged easily enough from the chaos, but the top was more determined. She ended up lying across the bed, head down, fishing underneath it amongst the clutter he’d hidden there. Finally, though, she located the top.

‘Eureka!’ Sarah cried and came up victorious, clutching the pyjamas in her hand, her hair dishevelled and on end, to find Matt standing in the doorway with an enigmatic expression on his face. In front of him, wide-eyed and silent, was a little girl with dark hair and huge grey eyes, regarding her steadily as if she were quite mad.

‘He lost his pyjamas,’ she explained a little lamely, shovelling her hair off her face with one hand and scooting across the bed. ‘Gus, here you go, put the top on, please.’ She struggled to her feet, straightened her sweatshirt and tried to find a smile.

‘You must be Emily,’ Sarah said to the child, and she nodded soberly. Gosh, what gorgeous eyes. Like Matt’s. ‘So, how was school?’ she asked her.

For a moment she said nothing, then she sat down next to Gus and sorted out his pyjamas. ‘OK, I guess. Mrs Bright’s nice. I like her name and she’s funny. No, Gus, you put your head through this hole here.’

Sarah hid a smile. Why was it that girls always seemed to end up mothering boys? Even older boys. If things had been different—

She straightened, the urge to smile gone. ‘I need to go and help Ryan in the kitchen. Ginny will be home soon and she won’t want to have to cook after her long drive.’

‘She’s back. That’s what I came to tell you—and to get out of their way so they can say hi in peace.’

‘Oh.’ She glanced down at the children, playing happily on the floor with a model farmyard. ‘We may as well go down, anyway. We’ll just have to interrupt them. I could murder a drink.’

‘You and me both,’ he murmured. ‘I don’t think we had time to stop today after that first coffee. I feel totally dehydrated.’

‘We’ll go and break things up, then, before they get so sidetracked that they forget to cook. I expect your Emily will be tired tonight after her first day at a new school and will need an early night.’

‘Not to mention me.’

She grinned. ‘You tired? You amaze me.’

He returned her smile with a slow one of his own. ‘It’s just getting used to the new set-up, although it’s not as bad as I thought it might be. It’s all surprisingly familiar, really, apart from the odd hiccup when I say CBC instead of FBC.’

She shrugged and started down the stairs. ‘Same difference. Full blood count, complete blood count—what’s the odds? I find EKG harder. How do you get K from electrocardiogram?’ she asked laughingly.

He paused on the top step. ‘Search me,’ he said with a grin. ‘Just so long as you yell when you’re lost.’

She stopped on the half landing and turned to look up at him. Heavens, he looked even bigger! ‘Don’t worry, I’m never lost, and if I was, believe me, I’d yell.’ She ran down the last few stairs, conscious of him close behind her, exuding masculine charm in waves.

They found Ryan and Ginny in the kitchen, his hands in the sink scrubbing potatoes, her arms around his waist and her head resting on his shoulderblades.

Ginny straightened and smiled, and Sarah thought she looked tired. ‘Hi, there,’ Ginny said, and her eyes flicked past Sarah to Matt. ‘How did you get on? Ryan says you seemed to fit in very well.’

‘He has the same sick sense of humour at least,’ Ryan growled from the depths of the sink.

Matt laughed. ‘That was just something silly the guy said. It wasn’t even that funny, it just struck a note.’ He peered in the sink. ‘Anything I can do?’

‘Yes—make me a cup of tea while Ryan sticks the jacket potatoes in the microwave. He’s got fresh salads and cold meat and cheese from the deli counter in the supermarket, so he’s got damn all to do. For heaven’s sake, don’t help him, he’s got it easy enough as it is!’

‘Ignore her, she’s just jealous because she insists on doing it the hard way,’ Ryan said with a grin, and then ducked the end of a teatowel Ginny snapped at him.

‘Cook, slave,’ she ordered, and then ran upstairs to change, leaving Ryan humming happily over his potatoes.

‘So, who am I making tea for?’ Matt asked.

‘Pass. Ginny definitely, and I’ve never known Sarah say no,’ Ryan told him, stabbing potatoes and lobbing them into a dish.

‘Absolutely not. Count me in.’

‘Unless you’d prefer wine or beer?’ he continued, looking at Matt.

‘Got any low-alcohol beer?’

‘In the fridge. I’ll have some too. Sarah?’

She was watching Matt as he stooped over the fridge, his jeans pulled taut over his hips and thighs. ‘Tea is fine. I’ll make it,’ she said absently, and wondered what on earth had got into her that she couldn’t seem to stop looking at him. She made tea for herself and Ginny, then took it through to the sitting room, leaving Ryan and Matt alone together.

She needed a minute or two alone, time to think about how she felt and why. It was crazy—must be because they’d worked together all day and were in tune.

So why didn’t she feel the same about Ryan, or Patrick, or Jack? Because she worked with them often enough, God knows, and they shared sick jokes and horrendous tragedies and hilarious moments of black comedy.

So why Matt? And why now, after all this time, did she have to choose a man with a child—and not just a child, but a girl, a five-year-old girl with dark hair and solemn eyes, in need of a mother.

Her arms ached, and she hugged them around her waist so they didn’t feel so empty. Overhead she could hear Ginny, talking to Ryan’s children. She was a stepmother. Her own life had contained tragedy, as had Ryan’s, and they were happy.

Clearly it was possible to start again, to find happiness again with someone else.

She tried to remember Rob’s face, but she couldn’t see it, or hear his voice. Only the voices of the children, and the lusty wail of a new-born baby girl—

‘Hi. Which tea’s mine?’

‘Um—the mug with yellow poppies on it,’ she said, and wondered if her voice sounded odd to Ginny or if she’d get away with it.

Nope.

Ginny sat down beside her and laid a hand on her arm. ‘You OK?’

She nodded and dredged up a smile. ‘Yes, fine. Just a bit tired. I think I’m getting a cold,’ she lied.

‘Aren’t we all? Norwich is hell. I’m thinking of giving up.’

Sarah looked at her in astonishment. ‘But you’re almost there! You’ve nearly done your training!’

She shrugged. ‘I didn’t mean just yet. I want to qualify as a GP, then I can do locum work in the term, but the kids need me. It’s all very well Betty and Doug having them occasionally, but they’re getting on a bit to have them all the time in the holidays and they need continuity.’

‘And you need them,’ Sarah added quietly.

‘Yes—yes, I do.’

‘I can understand that. I need them, too. We’re no different in that respect.’

Ginny looked down into her tea and swirled it, her face pensive. ‘You could always get married again and have more children,’ she suggested tentatively.

Sarah swallowed the tight lump in her throat. ‘Yes, I suppose I could. I won’t get them back, though.’

Anguish chased across Ginny’s weary features, and she reached out to Sarah. ‘No, of course not. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to imply they were like tins of beans in a supermarket—just go and buy some more or something. I know you can’t get them back. I just thought, if you could fill the void—’

‘I know.’ Sarah reached out and laid her hand on Ginny’s knee for a second. ‘I know. Don’t worry about me, Ginny, I’m fine.’

‘Virginia, do you want me to do all this garlic bread?’ Ryan yelled from the kitchen.

She stood up with an apologetic smile. ‘Don’t run away.’

Sarah didn’t run. She sat there, listening to the byplay in the kitchen, the teasing laughter and affectionate ribbing, and tried to remember what it had been like married to Rob.

Very similar, she thought. She couldn’t quite remember, though, not clearly. It was almost sad how little she did remember, how much she must have forgotten. It didn’t seem to do them all justice, somehow.

Gus came in, trailed by Emily, looking tired but otherwise quite at home. It was amazing how resilient and flexible children were. Gus turned on the television and they sat down cross-legged in front of the screen. Evie ran in then, hugged Sarah in passing and sat down beside them, changing channels until she found something she wanted to watch.

Sensing a squabble brewing, Sarah got to her feet and called the children. ‘Shall we go and see if the table needs laying? I think supper’s nearly ready.’

‘Did I hear Daddy say something about garlic bread?’ Evie asked, looking over her shoulder.

‘Yes, you did.’

Oh, yum, I like garlic bread. Come on, you two, let’s go and lay the table.’

Sarah followed the headlong dash into the dining room, helped them count the number of places that were needed and then went to find another chair while they set out the cutlery.

Matt was lounging in the kitchen doorway, a beer dangling from his finger, an indulgent smile playing around his lips. He turned to her. ‘How long have these two been married?’ he asked softly.

She peered past him to where they were wrestling with the corkscrew and giggling, and smiled. ‘Just over a year.’

‘It shows,’ he said drily. ‘Shall we start taking things through to the dining room?’

‘Good idea.’ They loaded up with salads, plates of cold meat and cheese, steaming garlic bread and hot jacket potatoes crisped in the oven, and then went back for Ryan and Ginny.

‘If you could bear to drag yourselves apart,’ Sarah said from the doorway, ‘we’ve taken everything through. All we need is the wine, one more chair and you two.’

They separated reluctantly, and as Sarah looked at the soft flush on Ginny’s cheeks and the possessive glow in Ryan’s eyes she thought inexplicably of Matt.

Heat raced through her, taking her breath away.

‘You’re mad,’ she muttered to herself, and turned to find her nose almost on Matt’s broad and rather solid chest.

‘Excuse me?’ he murmured.

‘Nothing. Come on, let’s eat.’

She went back into the dining room, herded the children onto their seats and sat down amongst them, automatically stopping fights, pouring them half-glasses of water from the jug and taking two of the four pieces of garlic bread away from Gus.

‘But I like it!’ he protested.

‘So does everyone else. You have to share—and, anyway, if you have all that, you won’t have room for all the other lovely things.’

The others were seating themselves during this exchange, and Ryan turned to Matt with a laugh. ‘You can see why we love having Sarah here, can’t you? She’s just a natural with them.’

‘So I see.’

She could feel his eyes on her, seeing her, all the way through their meal. She had never felt more watched, and yet every time she looked up he was looking somewhere else, talking to someone else, spearing a piece of salad, handing someone something—never looking at her.

And yet she knew—she just knew—that he was.

What she didn’t understand was why.

A new SHO on her A and E rotation was attached to Sarah the next day, so she hardly saw Matt. She missed him, especially since the young woman was struggling to deal with the new job.

Sarah had to prompt her to X-ray a person who had come in, having had a minor shunt in her car and struck her head on the steering-wheel.

She’d been brought in by a friend, and so ambulance staff hadn’t had a chance to apply a neck brace. Jo Bailey, the new doctor, asked her how she felt and treated her like a minor head injury patient, while Sarah, gradually realising that a cervical examination wasn’t going to be forthcoming, quickly whipped out an X-ray request form, filled it in and slid it across the desk.

‘Dr Bailey, if you could just sign this while I put the neck brace on, I’ll take the patient round to X-Ray for you.’

Dr Bailey, confused and ready to protest, caught Sarah’s eye and subsided. She signed the form, handed it back and muttered, ‘Thanks.’ Sarah slid past her with the patient on the trolley.

‘Any time,’ she said with a smile and a wink, and stifled a sigh until she was out of earshot.

The result was clear, but it might not have been following a rapid deceleration and subsequent whiplash, and it wouldn’t hurt the doctor to learn before it was too late. They had coffee shortly afterwards, and Jo Bailey thanked her again.

‘I don’t know what I was thinking about. I know you have to check the neck—I must have been cuckoo.’

‘There’s a lot to remember all at once,’ Sarah consoled her, and then they were off again.

Now, however, she was erring on the side of caution, ordering tests that would bleed patients dry and clog up the labs and X-Ray for weeks. Sarah, once again taking over, edited the requests a little, except in cases where she herself felt out of her depth, and then they called on Jack or Ryan.

When Ryan came, Matt came too, and so she got to see him. At one point he paused beside her and, under cover of a screaming child, he glanced at Jo Bailey and raised an expressive brow. ‘Is she safe?’

Sarah nearly laughed. ‘I have no idea. I suspect not. It may just be nerves, but I think she needs to be attached to someone medical who can stop her using up the region’s financial resources single-handed.’

‘That bad, huh?’

‘Easily. Either that or she forgets to X-ray necks.’

‘Holy-moly. She’s a liability.’

‘Tell me about it. Talk to Ryan—if she works with him she won’t come to any trouble.’

‘He doesn’t need us both.’

Sarah laughed. ‘I can nursemaid you—you just use the wrong words.’

He mock-bristled. ‘They are not wrong!’

‘Just not English. See what he says.’

‘I will.’ He tapped her on the nose. ‘You’re prettier than he is.’

She blushed a little but he’d gone, whisked away by another call, and she was left alone with the screaming child and Jo.

Within half an hour they’d swapped, under the pretext of Ryan wanting Jo to see some action in Resus, and Matt was with Sarah. After that last remark she wasn’t sure it was a good idea, but after a few minutes she decided it had just been another joke.

She felt perversely disappointed, not that there was much time for flirting. They were rushed off their feet, and she was only too glad to be working alongside someone who knew what they were doing.

She soon got used to him saying ‘CBC’, ‘EKG’ and so on and, as on the day before, she found they worked together almost without the need for words.

At one point they were working in Resus alongside Ryan and Jo Bailey, and Sarah was hugely relieved to have Matt opposite her and not Jo. A woman was admitted with severe head injuries, including a massive scalping injury, due to her hair being caught in machinery. Her face had been torn apart, her skull compressed on one side, and there was no chance for her.

‘Ouch—bad hair day,’ Matt winced, and whistled under his breath. ‘Right, let’s see if we can stop this bleeding and assess her consciousness level. Do we have a GCS score yet?’

The Glasgow Coma Scale was an international scale used to evaluate the degree of consciousness of a patient, and there was no language barrier. There was no score, either, because the ambulance that had brought her in had had more important things to worry about—like keeping her alive.

Sarah wasn’t sure if they would succeed for much longer. They tried, anyway, because she was young and fit and it just seemed a lousy way to go, but it was hopeless.

They shocked her, they injected her with a cocktail of drugs to prompt her heart, but to no avail.

‘This is hopeless,’ Matt said, shaking his head.

‘Want to stop?’

‘No, but there’s no point going on. She’s a corpse, basically. What the hell are we trying to achieve?’

Sarah shut her eyes and sighed. ‘You’re right. Let’s give up. We might even get time for tea if we stop now.’

‘Her husband’s here,’ someone said around the door, and Matt rolled his eyes.

‘Wow. I’ll go get him, shall I? I expect he’d like to see her—one last fond look.’

They glanced down at the torn and devastated features despairingly. ‘Give me ten minutes,’ Sarah said.

‘You are kidding.’

‘No. Do it. Go and talk to him, and get someone to check with me.’

‘Goody. This is my first chance to ruin an English family’s lives, you realise.’

There was a gasp from the other end of the room, and Sarah looked up to see Jo, staring at Matt in horror.

‘Lighten up, kid, it happens all the time,’ Matt told her.

‘But to joke about it! Don’t you have any idea?’

Matt ignored her. ‘I guess I’d better wash up.’

‘Might be good,’ Sarah told him, not even bothering to look at him. She knew just how blood-splattered he must be. She turned her attention, instead, to the wreckage in front of her.

’I’m sorry, there was nothing we could do to save her. Her hair was caught in a machine—she had severe head injuries. There was no way she could have survived.’

The man, about Matt’s age, seemed to shrivel. For ages he said nothing, then he looked up, his eyes shocked and far-away. ‘Can I see her?’

Matt crossed his fingers discreetly. ‘In a while. I’ll get someone to come and sit with you and give you some tea—let it sink in a little.’

He slipped back into Resus and did a mild double-take. ‘Wow.’

Sarah stood back and looked at her handiwork. ‘Will that do?’

She’d obviously washed the woman’s face and head, dried the skin and then carefully rearranged the facial features. They looked battered, but the transparent micropore tape holding the skin together was hardly visible, and with the scalp area swathed in drapes the damage was hardly detectable.

Matt was touched. ‘That’s wonderful. At least he won’t have to torture himself for ever with what she might have looked like.’

‘Does he want to see her?’

‘Oh, yes—don’t they always?’

‘It does help,’ she said softly. ‘It makes it real—sometimes too real.’

She turned away, clearing up the mess, swabbing the floor, changing her gown. Jo and Ryan had gone, their patient stabilised and transferred to the ward, and they were alone.

Matt watched her, wondering what to say, how to raise the subject of her loss. ‘Do you ever talk about it?’

She stiffened. ‘Not often. It doesn’t help. It doesn’t bring them back. On the other hand it doesn’t make it any worse.’

‘Hard to see how it could.’

‘No. Well, I think we’re ready.’

She turned back and her eyes were calm and clear, not filled with tears, as he’d been expecting. She seemed to read his mind.

‘I’m OK, Matt. It’s all right. You don’t have to walk around me on eggshells.’

He nodded, then glanced once more at their patient. ‘I’ll bring her husband. Stay here, please, so we can restrain him if necessary. I don’t want him pulling those towels off and finding the mess underneath.’

She stayed, and while the shocked and grieving husband of their patient said his tearful farewell she stood close and tried not to hear the pain. She didn’t allow herself to think of the next few days, weeks, years of his life. Despite what she’d said, things like this brought it all a little too close to the surface.

The man went out, his wife was transferred to the hospital mortuary where the pathologist could do a little more cosmetic work following the post-mortem, and Matt and Sarah went into the staffroom and dropped bonelessly into the chairs.

‘Tea?’ Ryan offered.

‘You bet. Grieving relatives always make me thirsty.’

‘Me, too. Nice big mug, Ryan,’ Sarah said with a groan, and dropped her head back. ‘I could never work in an abbatoir—I just hate the smell of blood.’

Oh, I love it—did I mention my mother was a vampire?’ Matt murmured from the depths of his chair.

‘You lot are all so unfeeling!’

They lifted their heads and looked at Jo in astonishment.

‘Excuse me?’ Matt said mildly.

‘Don’t you have any thought for what they’re going through? The pain, the weeks of grief—’

‘Try years,’ Matt offered, his voice harsh.

‘Years, then. You’re all so callous. Your jokes—God, they’re sick. You’re sick. Fancy seeing that woman and saying she’d had a bad hair day! It’s really—Oh, I can’t find the words.’

‘Common problem down here, finding the right words,’ Ryan said in a conversational tone.

‘But it’s so distasteful!’

‘Dying’s pretty distasteful,’ Ryan told her. ‘And, anyway, how do you expect us to grieve with each and every one of our patients and their families? It simply isn’t possible.’

‘You could try.’

‘No—no, you couldn’t. It’s just a way of dealing with it. It may be sick, but it works, and it’s better than burnout.’

‘I’m not sure you’d know how to grieve, anyway,’ she said disparagingly.