Helena had always preferred hospitals at night-time. When she had been training as a junior doctor, she was one of the few that looked forward to working the night shift. The dimmed lights, the sleeping patients, people talking in hushed voices, it was always a welcome calm after a hectic day. She had just said goodbye to Breda and Kevin, telling them to get some sleep and promising that she would call them if anything changed. Her own parents had travelled up from Connemara as soon as they got the news and James’s brother, Brian, and his sister, Lisa, had been in earlier too, and maybe it was because she was a doctor, but everyone seemed to be seeking reassurance from her that James was going to be okay. She was exhausted from putting on a brave face when all she really wanted to do was fall apart herself. She was glad to be left alone when they all finally left, to give her head a chance to get to grips with everything that had taken place.
James had spent most of the day asleep. His eyes would open periodically and look around, but he hadn’t said anything else, and Helena was now quite sure that his mention of Rowan’s name earlier had been nothing more than the drugs talking. She had reviewed his chart and he was on a lot of heavy medication. She still hadn’t been able to ask him about the circumstances of the accident, so she had no idea who the mystery driver was. She wasn’t even sure where exactly the accident had taken place – all she knew was that it had happened on the Coast Road. She had decided to call the Gardaí in the morning to see if she could find out anything else.
She kept thinking about poor Aidan. She had asked one of the ICU doctors how Milly was doing, but he had said she was still in a coma. Helena was praying that she would pull through – it was horrendous to think of the alternative.
As she sat at her husband’s bedside, her meeting with Ken that morning seemed like a lifetime ago. She still smarted with humiliation as she thought about how she had effectively been told that she wasn’t up to doing her job, but now it seemed so inconsequential given what had happened since then.
Her eyes were burning with tiredness and a tension headache was pulsing in her skull. Knowing that she had a long night ahead, she decided to go downstairs to the vending machine that spewed out lukewarm coffee.
She had just fed the machine with coins and selected a black coffee from the pictures on the panel, when she saw Aidan coming across the hospital foyer towards her. She noticed his wavy hair was tousled and unkempt, and he was still wearing his work suit, which was now badly creased. She left the machine spurting out watery coffee and hurried over to him.
‘Aidan,’ she began, ‘I’ve been thinking of you all day. How’s Milly doing?’
‘She’s still in the coma, I’m just heading back up to her now… I had to go home to tell the boys…’
She watched as his whole face crumpled as he started to break down into heaving sobs. Just a few hours ago, Helena had thought she had lost her husband and for those few minutes she had caught a glimpse of that terror, so her heart ached for the loss Aidan and his children were now enduring.
‘Oh, Aidan… I’m so sorry…’ She reached out to hug him. ‘I can’t even begin to imagine how awful that was.’ She shook her head at the injustice of it all. It was desperate seeing him in so much pain and to not be able to help him. She shivered to think of the grief those poor children were experiencing at an age where they should never have to know that such agony existed. ‘Look, James in on St Mary’s ward and I’m going to be here all night and probably for the next few days too, so take my number and if you need someone to talk to… or anything at all… just come and get me or call me or text me and I’ll come to you, okay?’
‘Thanks, Helena.’ He took out his phone and they exchanged numbers. ‘How is James by the way – sorry… I’ve been so wrapped up in what’s happened I never asked how he was?’ he asked sheepishly, which just broke Helena’s heart even more. Aidan was going through enough without feeling bad for not asking about her situation.
‘We won’t know for sure until he wakes up properly. He has a broken femur and has a long recovery ahead of him, but right now I’m counting my blessings.’ Her eyes darted to the floor as once again guilt wracked her, because her husband was still alive, but Aidan’s wife was not.
Aidan nodded. ‘Tell him that I’m thinking of him.’
‘I will, Aidan. Look after yourself.’
She went back to the machine, which was now finished, and took her coffee upstairs to James’s bedside. As she sat by her husband, watching the hours change, she couldn’t get the image of Aidan’s devastated face out of her head. The man was broken. She remembered him at their wedding, playing air guitar with her brother when the DJ had played ‘Satisfaction’ by the Rolling Stones.
She and James had met almost four years ago; he had proposed after just two months, and they had wed a few months later. It had been a wonderful whirlwind, but they had both been thirty-nine and neither of them had wanted to hang around. They had both had relationships before, but they knew as soon as they met that this was different. She had once overheard James telling his father that he knew he had met ‘the one’ so he wasn’t going to delay in making her his wife.
They had started trying for a baby even before their wedding. She had sought a referral for a fertility clinic when nothing had happened after six months. She hadn’t waited because she knew that her age was against her. She hadn’t been upset when it was suggested they would need to do IVF. She had seen so many of her patients in the same boat, but she had never thought she would have to endure six heart-breaking miscarriages on their journey to become parents.
As soon as the second blue line had appeared on that first pregnancy test, she had started to imagine what their baby would look like, would they have James’s nose or her pointy chin? Even though the books said they were a mere collection of cells at that stage of pregnancy, she already had a whole life planned out for her baby. She couldn’t help it. But then the bleeding had started and the hospital confirmed that all her hopes and dreams had left her body. She had picked herself up again after a few months and they had tried another round of IVF but little did she know that they would go on to endure that same pain a further five times and she still wouldn’t have a baby to hold at the end of it all. The losses had never left her; Helena still remembered all her babies’ due dates and often thought about what age they would be now if they had lived.
To be turned away from the clinic and given no hope of carrying a child of her own at that last consultation had been the straw that broke them. The awful finality of those words had crushed her. How do you accept that the one thing, the one thing your heart desired most in the world, no matter how much you yearned for it, would never happen?
Tears fell down her face and landed onto the sheets as she gently stroked James’s bruised face. ‘I love you,’ she whispered. ‘I’ll never leave your side again.’
His eyelids began to flicker.
‘Helena, you’re here,’ he croaked.
‘Of course I am,’ she cried, as she was overcome by tears. Relief, warm and joyous flooded through her. He remembered her. He hadn’t said her name earlier. This was a really good sign. Although the team had said his brain scans had all looked good, they couldn’t be sure there was no damage to his brain until he woke up.
She pressed the bell beside his bed to call a nurse.
‘I was so scared,’ she sobbed. ‘I thought I was going to lose you. I’m sorry – for everything, I want you to know that.’
‘I’m… sorry,’ he managed to say as he tried to sit up straighter in the bed but winced as pain shot through him.
‘Take your time,’ she cautioned as she helped prop him up with pillows. ‘You’ve had pretty major surgery.’
The door opened and a nurse entered the room.
‘He’s awake!’ Helena called out.
‘That’s good news; how are you feeling, James?’ she asked as she began checking him over.
‘Everything hurts,’ he moaned. ‘I feel like I’ve bruised every bone in my body.’
‘Well, that’s because you practically have.’ The nurse smiled.
‘How is he doing?’ Helena asked the nurse eagerly.
‘Everything looks good to me. We’ll keep an eye on his pain levels, but if you need anything else just ring the bell.’
‘Your mam and dad were here earlier and Brian and Lisa too,’ Helena continued as soon as they were alone again. ‘You gave us all a fright. Do you remember anything about the crash?’
‘I remember the car… and the sunlight…’ he rasped. ‘I can remember that, but then it’s a total blank… What about the others? Are they okay?’
She knew she had to ask the question that had been plaguing her. ‘Whose car were you in, darling?’
‘Rowan’s car… and her daughter,’ he paused for a breath, ‘Milly… was there too…’
Rowan and Milly. Her ears began ringing and her hearing went fuzzy. Her mind began whirring with questions. She knew they had been good friends in college, but as far as she was aware, they hadn’t seen each other since their wedding almost three years ago, bar the odd text here and there. Why was he in the car with Rowan? Then the rational part of her brain told her to calm down, there was probably a perfectly good reason for it. Perhaps his bike had had a puncture and she had been passing by and had given him a lift. There were lots of possible explanations, she couldn’t jump to conclusions.
‘Is she okay?’ he croaked.
Helena shook her head. ‘She passed away, James. Milly is in the ICU.’
She watched his face crease in pain and his eyes grew watery. ‘No – she can’t be,’ he cried.
Helena felt panicked as the peaks on his heart rate monitor became increasingly tachycardic and the bleeps on the machine became louder.
‘Take a deep breath,’ she ordered and was relieved when his heart rate began to slow once more. Once it had stabilised, she asked the question that she knew she had to ask no matter how much she wished she could run from it. ‘Why were you in the car together, James?’ She didn’t want to ask, but she knew she had no choice but to follow this through, even though she was terrified of what was waiting on the other side for her.
‘I… don’t know…’ he choked. ‘She said… she wanted to… to meet me… I said we could go to one… of the coffee shops…’ He stopped to catch his breath, which was heavy and laboured. ‘But she wanted to go somewhere where… we wouldn’t bump… into anyone.’
‘I don’t understand,’ Helena said. Her brain felt like it was filing through all this information but couldn’t make sense of it. She was unsure what he was trying to tell her. ‘So you haven’t been in contact for ages and then she gets in touch out of the blue wanting to meet up? Why would she do that?’
‘I’m… not… sure,’ he admitted. His eyelids were growing heavy, and she knew he was getting tired. She was on borrowed time, but she needed to get to the bottom of this.
‘Do you think it was something to do with UCD – I don’t know – maybe she was thinking of organising a reunion or something like that?’ She was grappling for reasons here, anything at all that would explain why her husband was travelling in a car with his old college friend and her young daughter.
His gaze dropped to the bed linen, and something told her that there was more going on here.
She felt as though she was unpicking a tapestry, stitch by stitch, but she was going to get to the bottom of this if it killed her. ‘What is it?’ she demanded. ‘What’s going on here, James?’
‘Well… Rowan and I… had history…’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘In college, well… we had a thing… we slept together… a few times.’
She had often wondered if anything had ever happened between them back then but had never asked James, feeling it was all so long ago. They were practically kids, and besides, it was none of her business anyway. ‘Okay, look that was over twenty years ago. We’ve all had college flings and, to be honest, I kind of suspected that was the case, but I don’t understand why you’re telling me this now?’
‘There’s more…’ he said cagily as he closed his eyes again. She knew the effort was exerting him, but she needed to discover the truth.
‘Please just tell me, James,’ she begged. She was holding her breath, bracing herself for the impact of whatever James was about to say next, knowing it could change everything between them.
James exhaled heavily. ‘Rowan and I… we slept together again… a few years ago… before I met you,’ he added quickly.
‘But she’s married to Aidan!’ Helena was horrified.
‘It never… should have… happened.’ His voice was weak and his breathing came ragged.
‘I can’t believe she did that to her husband!’ Helena was reeling from this revelation. She couldn’t help but think of poor Aidan’s devastated face when she had met him in the corridor earlier. Had he ever found out that his wife was unfaithful? And why had Rowan contacted James after all this time? Had she been hoping that something might rekindle between them? She felt fury warm her veins.
‘I’m sorry, Hel…’ he mumbled. She could see that the effort to tell this story had exhausted him. His breathing slowed to a shallow beat as he fell back asleep once more.