they’re pretty much what I expected, so I’ve written up the drugs and admitted her. How come she didn’t go to her GP before? She must have had symptoms.’
‘She’s just been promoted. She’s been busy at work, thought maybe she was going through the menopause early and she’d picked up a bug that was doing the rounds.’
‘A pulmonary bug?’
Holly nodded, knowing that a pulmonary infection was the most common event that could spark off a thyroid storm. ‘Thanks for seeing her for me.’
‘Pleasure.’
She wished he hadn’t said that word. She scrunched her cardboard cup into a ball and threw it at the bin. It went straight in first time. ‘I’d better get back to my patients. I told Michelle I was just taking five minutes. And we’re short today.’
‘Right.’
She’d half expected him to say, See you. But he hadn’t. Just as well. Because she didn’t want to see David any more than she had to.
Did she?
IT WASN’T working.
Holly gritted her teeth, adjusted the incline on the treadmill and increased the speed. But running uphill to the beat of the rock music she was playing on headphones—even at high volume—wasn’t enough to drown out her thoughts. It wasn’t enough to stop her remembering.
The past is over, she reminded herself harshly. You got through it. You don’t have to go back there. You’re thirty years old, you’re a registrar in the emergency department and everybody at London City General respects you. You are not eighteen years old with your world collapsing round your ears. Get a grip.
But the pep-talk didn’t work.
Even though she knew it was pointless and stupid and wasn’t going to change anything—yada, yada, yada—she still couldn’t get David out of her head. Couldn’t stop the memories replaying. David, leaning over her in the orchard next to her parents’ house. Those blue, blue eyes, the same colour as a midsummer sky, glittering with love and laughter. The smile on his face, making him more handsome than ever—and then suddenly growing serious as he lowered his mouth to hers. Kissed her. Made love with her, their textbooks and revision forgotten. Skin to skin with sunlight dappling over them, the scent of apple blossom in the air and the sound of birdsong all around.
Stop. Just stop. Holly slammed the ‘stop’ button on the treadmill, switched off the music and leaned with her arms on the supports and her forehead resting on her arms.
She hadn’t thought about this for years. Hadn’t allowed herself to think about it for years.
Oh, who was she trying to kid? She faced it every time there was an obstetric emergency. Every time a child was brought in. Faced it for a second, blanked it and made the professional in her take over. She was a doctor. First, last and always. Nothing else.
And yet her hands crept instinctively to her flat stomach. Rubbed. Splayed in the protective gesture that all newly pregnant women made, cradling the little life in their womb.
The little life hadn’t been there for long. Just long enough to disappoint her parents—nice, middle-class Mr and Mrs Jones, in their big house in the posh bit of Liverpool, with their orchard and their two big cars and their terribly nice, clever children.
Ha. She’d hit eighteen and she’d let them down. Her brother Daniel had waited until he was nineteen before he’d gone off the rails, and he still wasn’t quite back on them. They’d both been a disappointment. And Holly’s career hadn’t quite redeemed her in her parents’ eyes. After all, she was in east London, practically the slums as far as they were concerned, when she could have lived somewhere so much more upmarket.
‘Holly, how could you be so stupid?’
The words echoed again and again in her head, in her mother’s cut-glass tones.
Stupid. She’d been that all right. Stupid enough to think that David would stand by her. OK, so it would have changed their plans a bit, having a baby. A lot, even. She’d have had to take a gap year for starters. But there were nurseries, day-care centres, crèches. They could have coped. Studied together and watched their baby grow up into a toddler and start primary school. Qualified. Moved to a little cottage in the country where they’d have been the village GPs, with four children, a couple of dogs and a rabbit and a guinea pig and maybe a pony for the kids.
Everything they’d wanted. Just as they’d planned—except one of the children would have been a teensy bit older.
Holly took a shuddering breath, willing herself not to cry. She’d cried enough over David the day she’d phoned him to tell him the news. The news that she’d gone into Liverpool the previous day and bought a pregnancy testing kit from a chemist’s where nobody had known her or would report back to her mother. She’d done the test secretly that morning. Squirreled the test stick back to her bedroom and watched for five agonisingly slow minutes until the results had shown up. And then she’d known her missed periods and nausea had been nothing to do with exam stress.
Except he hadn’t been there.
And he hadn’t returned her call—that day, or the next, when she’d phoned him again. She’d believed in David. He wouldn’t let her down. He wouldn’t desert her when she needed him most…
But he hadn’t called her back. It had reached the point where Holly had suspected he’d actually told his mum to lie on the phone and tell Holly that he wasn’t there.
He’d been doing biology A level, so he’d have been perfectly capable of working it out for himself. Missed periods probably equalled baby. But he had also been a teenage boy. Full of testosterone and panic. It had taken her long enough to work it out, but in the end she had appreciated his logic. Warped, but understandable. He’d gone for the easy way out. If he didn’t contact her again, his girlfriend would eventually realise that he’d dumped her. No mess, nothing to face, nice and clean.
For him.
Not for her.
At least her parents hadn’t gloated. Hadn’t gone into the I-told-you-so routine. Laura Jones had simply held her daughter and gone into organisation mode. Not for nothing was Laura the chair of the local WI, the Rotary Group and the local school governors.
‘We’ll get through this. You know you can’t possibly keep the baby. Not unless you want to ruin your career before you’ve even started. So I’ll get you booked in somewhere to deal with it. Concentrate on your exams—and we’ll get your exam centre changed. You can sit them without having to worry about seeing him.’
Holly hadn’t wanted a termination. OK, so the baby hadn’t been planned, and the father didn’t want to know, but plenty of people coped in the same situation. Maybe once the baby was born, her mother would come round to her way of thinking. She’d get decent A-level grades, take a gap year, then start her course when her baby was around nine months old.
If her parents wouldn’t support her, she’d find a way. She’d become a damned good doctor, and she’d be all the family her baby would ever need. She’d do it all on her own if she had to.
Except it hadn’t turned out like that.
It had all come crashing down, two hours before her first A-level exam.
Holly scrubbed at her eyes. Stop being such a wimp, she told herself fiercely. You’ve got everything you want in London. The best possible friends and the best possible job—a job where every single minute’s different. And where there wasn’t any time to think and wonder about what might have been.
So what if her two best friends had both just got married and she’d been their bridesmaids? So what if, a year or two down the line, Zoe and Jude would have babies and ask Holly to be godmother?
It