He gave a sharp sigh. ‘They’re different.’
‘No, they’re not. They sound like my sister and brother-in-law, and my parents, and my uncle and aunt. And Johnnie and Kate love each other to bits. They always have. They’re childhood sweethearts, and they’re wonderful together, but I just know I’m going to cry and make an idiot of myself and everybody’ll think it’s because of...’
‘So you want me there to—what? Pass you tissues?’
She laughed at that, at the thought of him handing her tissues like a production line as she sobbed her way through the ceremony that she’d been denied.
‘Well, I think you need to do something fairly mega to make up for being arrogant and then stealing my stethoscope. Is it really too much to ask?’
She was only joking, never for a moment thinking he’d agree, not now she knew he’d had an apparently disastrous marriage, and he stared at her slightly open-mouthed for a moment.
‘I didn’t steal it. I just forgot to give it back.’
‘So you’re not denying you were arrogant?’ she said with a little coaxing smile, and to her surprise he groaned and rolled his eyes. Was he weakening?
‘I’m not staying over,’ he said, jabbing his finger at her to add emphasis to every word. ‘I don’t want to stay over.’
So he’d go? ‘Nor do I, but it goes on until midnight so it’s a bit late to drive back. I should be there now, as well, but I lied and told them I was on call.’
He gave her an odd look. ‘Why would you do that?’
‘To get out of the family dinner, so they didn’t have to tiptoe round the elephant in the room? But I don’t really have a choice about tomorrow night. They’ll be expecting me to stay, and I’m sure there’ll be room for you somewhere. You can have my room if it comes to that. And you’d get to meet my sister and brother-in-law, too, and see why I want to make them happy.’
She left it there, hanging, holding her breath, and he said nothing for an age, just stared into his coffee, swirling it round and watching the froth, then he lifted it to his mouth, drained it and put it down with exaggerated care.
‘OK. I’ll do it,’ he said, his eyes deadly serious now. ‘As much as anything so I can meet them, and find out what kind of people would let you do this for them, because they’d have to be pretty special for you to make that kind of sacrifice.’
She felt her eyes fill and grabbed his hand, squeezing it hard. ‘They are—and thank you! You’re a life-saver.’
‘Don’t bother to thank me. I’ll probably spend most of the journey there and back trying to talk sense into you. So, what’s the dress code, and when do we need to leave?’
* * *
He picked her up at eleven, and she took one look at him in a blinding white dress shirt, black bow tie and immaculately cut black dress trousers, and felt her heart rate pick up.
He took her bag, put it in the back of the car and held the door for her, then slid behind the wheel and clipped on his seat belt, drawing her attention to his hands. He had beautiful hands. Clever hands.
‘OK?’
‘Yes. You scrub up quite nicely,’ she said rashly, and he turned his head and met her eyes.
‘You don’t do too badly yourself,’ he said, and then turned away before she could analyse the expression in them, but he’d looked...
‘What’s the postcode?’ he asked, and he keyed it into his satnav, started the engine and pulled away.
She swallowed, fastened her seat belt and took a deep breath, and he turned the radio on, saving her from the need to break the silence.
* * *
‘So, why interventional radiology?’ she asked after an hour interspersed with the odd comment about landmarks and idle chat.
He gave her a wry look and laughed as he turned his attention back to the road. ‘Are you afraid I’ll start lecturing you again or something?’
She felt her mouth twitch. ‘No, I’m not. I doubt if I could stop you, anyway, you’re like a dog with a bone. I’m just genuinely curious. It’s seems a bit...’
‘Dry?’ he offered.
‘Exactly. Or maybe not, not after what I saw you do yesterday.’
He laughed again. ‘Oh, that was pure theatre. Most of it’s much more mundane and measured. And the amount of learning, the sheer volume of what you have to know, is staggering. There are so many uses for it, so many different conditions that can be cured or alleviated by what is essentially a very minimal intervention. Every part of the body has a blood supply, and by using the blood vessels we can deliver life-saving interventions directly where they’re needed—stents, cancer treatments, clearing blockages, making blockages to stop bleeding—it’s endless.
‘We used to think that keyhole surgery was the holy grail, but IR is expanding so fast and there are so many potential uses for it it’s mind-boggling. I spend most of my waking hours either practising it or studying it, because if I don’t, I won’t know enough and I’ll make an error and someone will suffer when it could have been avoided.’
‘Is that what went wrong with your marriage?’ she asked without thinking, and he flashed her a glance.
‘What, that it suffered because I didn’t study it enough?’ he asked drily, and she laughed.
‘No, I meant you being a workaholic, but that wouldn’t have helped, either.’
He gave a soft snort, and nodded. ‘Probably not. No, she fancied the idea of being a doctor’s wife—the money, the social status—she had no idea what being married to a junior hospital doctor actually meant.’
‘She can’t have been that clueless.’
‘Oh, she wasn’t—far from it. She just hated her job and thought I’d be a good meal ticket, but then she realised that it wasn’t just for a year or two, it was going to be like it for at least a decade, and so...’
‘So?’
‘She found a way to deal with it. I didn’t know about it, but I knew she was unhappy, and one day I thought, To hell with it, I won’t stay at work practising in the skills lab, I’ll go home, take her out for dinner. And I caught her in bed—our bed—with her lover.’
She sucked in a breath. ‘Oh, Joe, that’s awful.’
His hands tightened on the wheel. ‘Yeah, tell me about it. He wasn’t the first, either, apparently, but it was my fault as much as hers. I was neglecting her, I was constantly tired, we hardly had a social life to speak of—it was no wonder, really, that she’d got bored with waiting for me to notice her and turned to other men.’
‘You still don’t do it like that,’ she said, furious on his behalf. ‘You stay, or you leave. You don’t cheat.’
‘Exactly, and especially not as many times as she told me she had, or for as long. So I left. And then, even though technically she was the one in the wrong, she got half the equity from the house. And we lived in London, so she did very nicely out of it because I’d bought it two years before I met her and pushed myself to the limit, and by the time the divorce settlement was through I’d been priced out of the market.’
She reached out and laid her hand lightly over his on the steering wheel. ‘I’m sorry, Joe.’
His head turned and his mouth flickered into a wry smile. ‘Don’t be sorry. It was a lesson learned. I won’t make the same mistake again.’
He drew in a slow