Abbie braced herself, as she turned, for the first sight of her husband in what suddenly seemed a vast amount of time.
Three months.
But, at this moment, it felt like three years.
What would she see in his face? The joy of knowing she’d brought his daughter back to him? Anger that had burned away to leave a residue of resentment?
Echoes of the unbearable pain she’d seen before she’d turned her back and defiantly taken Ella away from him?
When she had turned and found herself facing Rafael with only a few feet between them, Abbie had to brace herself all over again.
How could she have forgotten the effect this man had on her? It was so much more than purely physical. More than emotional, even. It was a visceral thing. She was facing the part of her own being that had been torn free.
It stole her breath away. Made her heart stammer and trip.
‘Rafe...’
Abbie tried to smile but it wasn’t going to happen. Her lips simply wouldn’t co-operate. She could only stare, drinking in this first glimpse, anxiously scanning his body and face to try and collect her impressions.
Dear Lord, but he looked so tired. As though he hadn’t slept well for weeks. As though he hadn’t even shaved for more than a day or two. He hadn’t had a haircut for a while either, and... Had he just come straight from his stint in Theatre? Black curls were flattened in places and still looked damp with sweat. Were his scrubs a size larger than he usually wore or had he lost weight?
Yes. He looked exhausted. And wary but not angry.
He looked...
Wonderful.
Tall and commanding and every bit as gorgeous as the first time she had laid eyes on him. Despite everything, Abbie could feel a curl of sensation deep in her abdomen as her body responded to being this close to him, but this overwhelming awareness wasn’t anything as simple as physical attraction.
They knew each other so well. On so many levels. They made up two halves of a whole.
They loved each other.
At least, they had.
If only Rafael would smile. Or step closer. Hold his arms open so that she could fall into an embrace that would magically erase the pain they’d caused each other and make everything all right again.
But he wasn’t moving. He seemed to be staring back at her with a mirror image of her intense scrutiny of him.
‘How are you, Abbie?’
‘I’m...’ The word ‘fine’ tried to form on her lips but it wasn’t true. Abbie didn’t feel fine at all. She felt overwhelmed and unsure. ‘I’m...okay. A bit tired. It’s been a big day.’
A big twelve weeks.
A traumatic journey that she’d had to take alone. Abbie swallowed hard as she felt the hurt coalesce into the shape of the painful rock inside her chest that she’d lived with for so long now. ‘And you? How are you, Rafe?’
‘I’m...also okay...I think.’ The familiar gesture as Rafael raked his hair with his fingers made the rock shift a little and sent a painful shaft through Abbie’s heart. He was as overwhelmed as she was with this reunion. Unsure of what to say. Or do. ‘I...wasn’t expecting this. It’s...’
‘Sudden, I know.’ This was weird. To feel the hurt this man had caused her and yet to feel so much compassion for him at the same time. ‘I would have let you know sooner but it...just happened.’
He didn’t believe her and Abbie could understand that. The possibility of sending Ella back to her home town to continue her recuperation had only been talked about in the last few days. She was still fragile. How much organisation had been needed to send a sick baby to another country?
‘They only started to make enquiries first thing this morning. And things just fell into place. There was space available on a flight and a bed here at the Lighthouse and they didn’t have to arrange a medical escort. And...when her results came through later, looking so good, Dr Goldstein just looked at me and smiled and he said...he said, “How ’bout it, Mom? Would you like to go home today?” And...’
And Abbie’s voice was shaking now. Could she tell him that the first thing she’d thought at that point had been how badly she’d wanted to see him again? That the picture in her head of Rafael holding his baby daughter again and seeing how much better she looked had filled her heart with so much longing that it had felt like it might burst?
No. She couldn’t tell him because he had started speaking himself. She had to stop saying anything. Rafael had to repeat his question.
‘What results? What were the tests?’
Did it matter? This was a doctor talking, not a father. Was he still that distant? This was what had caused their separation in the first place, wasn’t it? The way he could remove himself from the emotional involvement of being a parent. To step back and see the bigger picture through a professional lens. To decide that the quality of what would be a very short life was more important than the desperation to keep your own child alive as long as humanly possible.
‘They took a bone-marrow biopsy yesterday. And bloods. We already knew she’d got through the dangerous cytokine release syndrome that the treatment caused. What we didn’t know was whether the T cell therapy was really working.’
‘And...’ It looked as though Rafael was having to swallow a large lump in his throat, judging by the way the muscles in his jaw and neck were working. ‘It’s looking good?’
That was more like it. The doctor would want the exact figures. A copy of the test results, like the one Abbie had ready for him in her bag. But for a father? Knowing that the results were good would be enough to create such a wash of relief and hope for the future that the numbers were irrelevant.
Abbie nodded. It took a moment to trust her voice. ‘She still needs protection for her immune system and she’ll need another bone-marrow biopsy at the three-month mark but...’ She took a deep breath as she blinked back tears. ‘It’s looking good, Rafe. As good as I hoped it would. The treatment’s worked.’
* * *
As good as she’d hoped?
The choice of pronoun pushed him away. Just as Rafael had been about to pull Abbie into his arms so that they could celebrate this miraculous milestone together as Ella’s parents.
To rush into the room they were standing outside and see for himself that Ella wasn’t the critically ill baby she’d been the last time he’d seen her.
But it was true. He deserved to be dismissed as having been one of the hopeful parents. As soon as Abbie had heard about the experimental treatment that took T cells from the blood and reengineered them in a laboratory so that they could be put back into the body to find and kill the cancerous leukaemia cells, the hope had been born on her side.
All Rafael had been able to see had been how experimental the treatment was. That the success rates with adults had not been consistent and it had never been tried in a baby. That the risks were enormous and going through with the treatment would only cause so much more suffering that would probably still end in Ella’s death. And he’d been right. The new T cells had caused an illness that had come within a heartbeat of killing Ella. She’d hovered between life and death in a paediatric intensive-care unit for weeks.
And he should have been there but he hadn’t been able to bring himself to travel so far in order to watch his baby die. And, yes...even though it shamed him to admit it, part of what had kept him here had been that it seemed like a fitting punishment for Abbie for taking his beloved child away from him.
So much pain. On both sides.
What would Abbie do if he tried to take her in his arms right now? Push him away? Flinch?
He