The Midwife's Longed-For Baby. Caroline Anderson

his eyes off her.

      * * *

      She’d get better a lot quicker, Liv thought, if they’d only leave her alone to sleep, but she knew why they were doing it, and it was reassuring in a mildly irritating way.

      The nurses came intermittently to do her obs, and after a while Nick told them not to bother, he’d do them. It meant he had to touch her, to feel the pulse beating in her wrist, to check her pupils with a pen light, and although he was doing exactly what the nurses had, somehow his touch was different.

      Not quite so clinical as theirs, lingering a little longer than was strictly necessary, and his voice was quiet and soothing but also filled with an emotion that he either didn’t or couldn’t disguise. And when she had to stare into his eyes so he could test her pupil reflexes, there was a tenderness there that made her want to cry.

      A nurse brought him a cup of tea at one point, and a couple of times Sam popped his head round the curtain, glanced at her chart and exchanged a few words with them, asked her questions, made her squeeze his hands, push against him, wiggle her toes, shone a light in her eyes to check her pupil reflexes and accommodation, but all of it with an appropriate clinical detachment which just made Nick’s touch all the more obviously different.

      It was weird having him there with her. He was so gentle, so quiet and unobtrusive, and yet even when he was sitting silently beside her, she was aware of him with every battered cell in her body. She’d been so desperate to get away from him that she’d nearly died, and now that seemed ridiculous because she actually wanted him there, crazy though it was.

      Because she still loved him, despite the lie? Maybe even because of it—because of the fact that he hadn’t, after all, slept with Suzanne.