The phone rang stridently at her elbow, snapping her out of her pointless reflections and doubling her pulse rate with the expectation that she would hear Daniel’s voice when she answered it. It was a complete letdown to realise that the caller had simply been connected to the wrong department.
‘Jenny?’ Daniel’s voice behind her had her whirling to face him, the first of at least a dozen questions on the tip of her tongue until she saw his face.
‘Daniel? What’s happened?’ she demanded, automatically reaching out to take his arm. ‘Are you ill?’ He looked positively grim, and in the short time he’d been away from the department, his face had somehow become hollow-looking, his eyes filled with shadows.
‘I was too late to do anything to slow down Sheelagh’s labour,’ he said bluntly, and she could hear the same defeated tone that always emerged in his voice whenever something happened to one of their special babies, but this time there was something more, something infinitely darker.
CHAPTER TWO
‘ARE the babies still alive? Have they gone to Josh’s unit?’
Even babies that premature were often born alive and a few of them actually pulled through, albeit with a legacy of permanent disabilities, but it was an outside chance that they would have survived anything other than a Caesarean birth.
‘One is.’ Daniel grimaced, silently, the brilliant colour of his dancing blue eyes strangely flat. ‘I’ve admitted Sheelagh into the isolation room overnight. I told her it was in case of complications, but they both know it’s just a matter of time before …’
She nodded her understanding even as she thought that they really should think of a better name for the little suite at the furthest end of the unit. Apparently, that little area had been one of the arrangements Daniel had instigated within the first few days of his appointment—a place where mothers who had lost their babies could stay for monitoring and treatment without fear that their devastation would be made worse by the sights and sounds of pregnant women or healthy newborn babies all around them.
‘Did it happen because of the accident?’ Jenny demanded, something about the tension surrounding him like an electrical field warning her that there was worse news to come.
‘My guess is that one of the babies died in utero and that triggered a spontaneous abortion of both foetuses.’ He sank heavily into the chair and came to rest with his hands tightly linked together on the array of happy photos still spread over the inevitable pile of papers in front of him. He gazed blankly at them for several endless seconds while she fought the urge to go to him and throw her arms around him, to cradle his head against her and ask if there was anything she could do.
‘The person they ran down was Aliyah’s husband,’ he announced rawly, and his devastated expression rocked her back on her heels.
‘Dear Lord,’ she gasped, sinking heavily onto the edge of the nearest chair when her legs refused to support her. ‘Is he …?’ She couldn’t bring herself to say the word, but she didn’t need to for him to know what she was asking.
‘He’s in theatre. Depressed skull fracture, punctured lung, broken leg … you name it, he’s got it,’ he listed grimly and she felt her eyes widen with each additional injury on the list.
‘But he’s still alive?’ she pleaded anxiously.
‘For the moment,’ he agreed and it only took the tone of his voice to know that the prognosis wasn’t good.
Her heart sank like a stone. ‘What are you going to tell Aliyah?’ The image in her head of how tenderly the injured man had been supporting his wife less than an hour ago was so clear that it was almost painful.
‘How on earth was he injured so badly?’ she demanded on a sudden surge of anger for the destruction of such a perfect couple made even more tragic by the fact they were finally expecting the babies they both wanted so badly.
‘Did he forget where he was and step out into the traffic, or …?’
‘Apparently, the Griffiths’ car went out of control and mounted the pavement at the entrance to the hospital. He was slammed against one of the pillars and trapped.’
Jenny winced as she imagined a human head coming into contact with that impressive construction of unforgiving Cornish granite.
‘And I have absolutely no idea what I’m going to say to Aliyah,’ he said finally, his voice as rough as gravel. ‘She’s still shaky after that scare with the baby and we’re waiting for the antibiotics to do their thing. I don’t know whether I should hold off telling her in the hopes that he comes out of surgery with some sort of positive prognosis, or whether I should go to her straight away in case she needs to prepare herself to say her final farewell while he’s still alive.’
‘Or at least given a semblance of life by various machinery,’ she muttered, feeling sickened by the awful possibility.
How would she feel if she were in the same position?
Would she rather know, immediately, that the man she loved had been terribly injured and was not expected to live, and have to agonise for hours imagining what was going on in theatre? Or would she prefer to receive the news after every effort had been made to repair the damage?
‘If she weren’t pregnant …’ Daniel muttered and she knew he was weighing up exactly the same options and trying to balance their patient’s right to know against the increased risk to her pregnancy such a shock might cause.
A sudden unearthly scream from further along the corridor sent all the hairs up on the back of Jenny’s neck.
‘What on earth …?’ She whirled and took off out of Daniel’s office at a fast clip, almost colliding with a young nurse catapulting out of Aliyah Farouk’s room.
‘Nooo!’ The unearthly scream sounded again, then was replaced by a wail that degenerated into inconsolable weeping.
‘What’s going on here?’ Daniel demanded, glaring fiercely at the shocked-looking nurse.
‘I don’t know, s-sir!’ The poor girl’s teeth were almost chattering. ‘Sh-she was trying to phone her husband’s work to leave a message and they said he hadn’t arrived. S-so she said she was going to try his mobile phone and … and …’
Jenny winced as she put two and two together. It didn’t take much to imagine the scene in a busy A and E, especially as her husband’s clothing would have been summarily cut off his body to enable swift access to his injuries. Keeping track of his mobile phone would have been a low priority, everything being stuffed into the same bag for later retrieval.
It was all too easy to imagine the junior member of staff detailed to take charge of yet another patient’s belongings to think it was a good idea to tell a seriously injured patient’s wife that she needed to come to the hospital as soon as possible.
‘Okay, Joanne. Go and get yourself a cup of tea and don’t come back until you’ve stopped shaking. Let someone know where you’re going,’ Jenny said.
‘Th-thank you,’ she stammered, but Jenny was already following Daniel into the room, shutting the door firmly against any intrusion.
She was just in time to see him reach out to the keening woman and gasped in disbelief when Aliyah turned on him like a rabid dog, her eyes wild and her fingers stiffly curved as though ready to rip him to shreds.
‘No, Aliyah, no,’ Daniel said, his deep voice almost crooning as, far from backing away, he stepped straight into the danger zone and wrapped a consoling arm around her shoulders. ‘Gently. Gently,’ he said. ‘This is not good for the babies. Think about those precious babies.’ His words were almost hypnotic in their gentle rise and fall, but it took several racking moments before Aliyah’s devastation would allow her to hear what he was saying.
Suddenly,