‘Thank you, but I don’t want it,’ Mrs Pryor said when Isla offered her the paper cup. ‘It won’t bring my son back.’
‘I know,’ Isla said gently, ‘but you’ve just had a horrible shock and this will help. Just a little bit, but it will help.’
Mrs Pryor looked as if she didn’t believe the nurse, but she took the paper cup and sipped from it.
‘Is there anyone we can call for you?’ Harry asked.
‘My—my husband.’ She shook her head blankly. ‘Oh, God. How am I going to tell him?’
‘I can do that for you,’ Harry said gently. ‘It might be easier on both of you if I tell him.’ Even though he hated breaking bad news.
Mrs Pryor dragged in a breath. ‘All right—thank you.’
‘And you can come and see Jonathan whenever you feel ready,’ Isla said. ‘I’ll come with you, and you can spend some time alone with him, too. I can call the hospital chaplain to come and see you, if you’d like me to.’
Mrs Pryor shook her head. ‘I’ve never been the religious type. Talking to the chaplain’s not going to help. It’s not going to bring Jonathan back, is it?”
‘I understand,’ Isla said, ‘but if you change your mind just tell me. Anything we can do to help, we will.’
‘He was only twenty-seven. That’s way too young to die.’ Mrs Pryor shut her eyes very tightly. ‘And that’s a stupid thing to say. I know children younger than that get killed in accidents every day.’
Yeah, Harry thought. Or, if not killed, left with life-changing injuries, even if they weren’t picked up at first. His own little sister was proof of that. He pushed the thought and the guilt away. Not now. He needed to concentrate on his patient’s bereaved mother.
‘It’s just … you never think it’s going to happen to your own. You hope and you pray it never will.’ She sighed. ‘I know he was a grown man, but he’ll always be my little boy.’
Harry went out to his office to call Mr Pryor to break the bad news, while Isla took over his job of holding Mrs Pryor’s hand and letting her talk. On the way to his office, Harry asked one of the team to clean Jonathan’s face and prepare him so his parents wouldn’t have to see the full damage caused to their son by the crash. And then he went back to the relatives’ room to join Isla and Mrs Pryor, staying there until Mr Pryor arrived, twenty minutes later. The Pryors clung together in their grief, clearly having trouble taking it all in. But finally, Mr Pryor asked brokenly, ‘Can we see him?’
‘Of course,’ Harry said.
He and Isla took the Pryors through to the side room where Jonathan’s body had been taken so they could see their son in private. They stayed for a few minutes in case the Pryors had any questions; then Isla caught Harry’s eye and he gave the tiniest nod of agreement, knowing what she was going to say.
Then Isla said gently to the Pryors, ‘We’ll be just outside if you need us for anything.’
‘Thank you,’ Mrs Pryor said, her voice full of tears.
Outside the side room, Isla said to Harry, ‘I’ll finish up here—you’ll be needed back in Resus.’
‘Are you sure?’ he asked. He was needed back in Resus; but at the same time he didn’t think it was fair to leave Isla to deal with grieving parents all on her own.
She nodded. ‘I’m sure.’
He reached out and squeezed her hand, trying to ignore the tingle that spread through his skin at her touch—now really wasn’t an appropriate time. ‘Thank you. You were brilliant. And even though I know you’re more than capable of answering any questions the Pryors might have, if you need backup or want me to come and talk to them about anything, you know where to find me.’
‘Yes. Those poor people,’ she said softly.
‘This is the bit of our job I really wish didn’t exist,’ Harry said.
‘I know. But it does, and we have to do our best.’ She squeezed his hand back, and loosened it. ‘Off you go.’
He wrote up the paperwork, and headed back to Resus. To his relief, the next case was one that he could actually fix. The patient had collapsed, and all the tests showed Harry that it was a case of undiagnosed diabetes. The patient was in diabetic ketoacidosis; Harry was able to start treatment, and then explain to the patient’s very relieved wife that her husband would be fine but they’d need to see a specialist about diabetes and learn how to monitor his blood sugar, plus in future they’d have to keep an eye on his diet to suit his medical condition.
Mid-afternoon, Harry actually had a chance to take his break. He hadn’t seen Isla back in Resus since leaving her with the Pryors, so he went in search of her; he discovered that she was doing paperwork.
‘Hey. I’m pulling rank,’ he said.
She looked up. ‘What?’
‘Right now, I really need some cake. And I think, after the day you’ve had, so do you. So I prescribe the hospital canteen for both of us.’
‘What about Josie?’
Harry smiled. ‘She’s already had her break and is in cubicles right now, but I’m going to bring her some cake back. You can help me pick what she’d like.’
For a moment, he thought Isla was going to balk at being alone with him; then she smiled. ‘Thanks. I’d like that.’
‘Let’s go,’ he said. ‘We have fifteen minutes. Which is just about enough time to walk to the canteen, grab cake, and chuck back a mug of coffee.’
She rolled her eyes, but stood up to join him.
‘How were the Pryors?’ he asked softly when they were sitting at the table in the canteen with a massive slice of carrot cake and a mug of good, strong coffee each.
‘Devastated,’ she said. ‘But they got to spend time with their son and I explained that he didn’t suffer in Resus—that the end was quick.’
‘Yeah,’ he said with a sigh. ‘I hate cases like that. The guy still had his whole life before him.’ And something else had been bugging him. ‘He was only five years younger than I am.’ The exact same age as one of his siblings. And he’d had to fight the urge to text every single one of his siblings who was old enough to drive to say that they were never, ever, ever to ride a motorbike.
‘He was three years younger than me,’ Isla said.
It was first time she’d offered any personal information, and it encouraged him enough to say, ‘You were brilliant with the Pryors and I really appreciate it. I assume you had a fair bit of experience with bereaved relatives when you worked in your last emergency department?’
‘Actually, no.’
He blinked at her. ‘How come?’
‘I wasn’t in an emergency department, as such—I was a nurse practitioner in a GP surgery. I retrained in Glasgow and then came here,’ she said.
Something else he hadn’t known about her. ‘You retrained to give you better opportunities for promotion?’ he asked.
‘Something like that.’
She was clearly regretting sharing as much as she had, and he could tell that she was giving him back-off signals. OK. He’d take the hint. He smiled at her. ‘Sorry. We’re a nosey bunch at the London Victoria—and I talk way too much. Blame it on the sugar rush from the cake.’
‘And on having