about you?’ he asked.
‘Cooking relaxes me. I like experimenting.’ She smiled. ‘And anything involving chocolate.’
He gestured to the table. ‘No chocolate here.’
‘Ah, but you wait until you try the chocolate and cardamom ice cream from the dessert menu.’
As they worked their way through the little savoury pastries stuffed with cheese, the stuffed vine leaves and the felafel, Rhys asked, ‘So how was little Petros Smith?’
Katrina wrinkled her nose. ‘His haemoglobin levels weren’t brilliant, but nowhere near bad enough to need a transfusion, and I think it would’ve been more stressful for him if I’d admitted him—so I let his mum take him home. I gave her a leaflet about Petros’s condition and told her what to look out for; she’s promised to bring him straight back to us if she’s worried at all. He should pick up with a bit of rest— and the main thing is that his family knows now that there’s a problem and what he needs to avoid in future.’
‘That’s good. What about the Jeffers family?’
‘They’re coming to terms with the situation,’ Katrina said. ‘They have another audiology appointment in six weeks’ time, but they were warned this morning that Ruby’s fairly likely to need an aid.’ She smiled wryly. ‘I wish health screening had been as good when I was a kid.’
Clearly Katrina had had hearing difficulties for a long time, Rhys thought. ‘So how long have you been deaf?’
‘I’m not profoundly deaf—it’s moderate to severe hearing loss,’ she explained. ‘Looking back, it started when I was about seven, but nobody picked it up until Maddie was at med school and did a module on audiology. I was in my first year, she was in her third, and you know what it’s like when you’re a med student—you read up on symptoms and you spot them in yourself or other people.’
‘Yes, I remember doing that myself,’ he said with a smile.
‘Anyway, she nagged me to go and get my hearing checked. She even came with me to the audiology department for moral support, bless her. And that’s when we found out.’
‘Why didn’t anyone pick it up earlier?’ he asked.
‘I was a bit of a dreamer as a child—well, I still am, from time to time—so everyone thought I was just on Planet Katrina and wasn’t listening.’ She shrugged. ‘And you know what it was like when we were young. They simply didn’t do the kind of screening they do now.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘I say “we”. I’m twenty-eight, and I assume you’re not that much older than I am?’
‘I’m thirty-two,’ he confirmed. ‘So it was a bit of a shock when you got the results?’
She nodded. ‘All I could think of was that I was too young to be going deaf—that it was something that only happened to geriatrics.’ She gave a mirthless laugh. ‘And that’s despite the fact that there were several children in the waiting room for the audiology test. I have to admit I was struggling a bit to hear in lectures, but I thought it was just the acoustics of the theatre—that the place was full so it swallowed up noise. You know, in the same way that empty tube trains are much noisier than ones that are stuffed with people in the rush hour.’
‘So having an aid fitted made a difference?’
‘And how.’ Her face was suddenly animated. ‘It was incredible. I discovered I could hear better from the back of the auditorium than I’d ever been able to do from the front. And the dawn chorus…I’d never been able to hear it before. Well, not that I remember, anyway. I drove everyone bananas for the first couple of months, wanting to know what each new sound was.’ She smiled. ‘I was really lucky and had one of the digital aids straight off—the microprocessor is programmed to fit my personal pattern of hearing loss. It’s never going to be quite as good as having full hearing, I know, but it’s made a big difference to me and I don’t get so tired—I don’t have to concentrate quite so hard talking to people, or rely on subtitles on a television screen.’
‘I had no idea you had a hearing difficulty until I saw you take your hearing aid out and show Ruby,’ he said.
‘I suppose I should have told you.’ She shrugged. ‘But, then again, just because I can’t hear that well, it doesn’t mean I have to be treated differently.’
He blinked in surprise. ‘Why on earth do you think I would have treated you differently?’
‘Some people can be a bit funny about it when they find out. They start talking really loudly—as if that makes any difference —or they treat me as if I’m slow and can’t understand what they’re saying. Which, I have to admit, drives me crazy. If you talk to me and I’m not facing you, I don’t always realise that you’re talking to me and I might not pick it up, but otherwise I’m just your average person.’
Average? No, she wasn’t just your average person. There was something special about Katrina Gregory.
Rhys suppressed the thought as quickly as it arrived. He wasn’t looking for a relationship. There wasn’t room in his life.
‘So I don’t tend to tell people unless they notice,’ she finished. ‘It avoids the fuss.’
He could understand that. He didn’t like fuss either. ‘Do you know what caused your hearing loss?’ he asked.
She nodded. ‘I had a CT scan because there was a spike in the higher frequencies and they wanted to rule out anything nasty, like an acoustic neuroma.’ She grinned. ‘I asked if I could have a picture. I thought they’d print something on paper, but they actually gave me a film. It’s fabulous. Maddie says I only did it so I could show everyone and prove that there was a brain in my head—but that’s because I got higher marks in my exams than she did.’
Katrina’s expression told him that this was mutual affectionate teasing rather than a bitchy swipe. Rhys found himself wondering what it would’ve been like to grow up with a sibling or close cousin teasing him like that.
His family didn’t do teasing.
If the truth were told, they didn’t do anything except avoid each other.
‘I take it the scan was clear?’ he asked.
‘Yes. And after talking to me the registrar said he thought my hearing loss was probably caused when I had mumps as a child. Maddie still has the odd guilty fit about it, because she says she’s the one who gave me mumps so therefore it’s her fault I can’t hear properly.’ Katrina flapped a hand. ‘But that’s just ridiculous. She’s also the one who gave me my hearing back, because if she hadn’t nagged me about it I probably wouldn’t have bothered getting a referral to audiology—I would’ve carried on as I was, assuming that I was completely normal because I didn’t know any different, and struggling a bit more than I’d ever admit to because I didn’t want to be treated differently.’
Rhys went very still. A child with a virus causing a serious condition. It was a little too close for comfort to his past. ‘So your family blames Maddie for your hearing loss?’ he asked.
‘No, of course they don’t!’ She frowned. ‘How on earth can you blame a child for falling ill? It’s not Maddie’s fault that she picked up a virus at school—the same as it wasn’t my fault that I caught it too and it affected me in a different way to the way it affected her.’ She shrugged. ‘These things just happen. You can’t let it ruin the rest of your life.’
These things just happen.
How very different his life might have been if his family had chosen that line of thought. If they’d been strong enough to pull together instead of letting his little sister’s death tear them apart.
‘Are you all right, Rhys?’ she asked, looking slightly concerned.
‘I’m fine.’ You couldn’t change the past, so in his view there was no point in talking about