A helicopter had been dispatched from a London hospital that had a dedicated emergency unit for stroke patients but it was still ten minutes away. Mitch had been paged as the local FRAME doctor and had arrived at the same time as their local ambulance service to face dealing with precisely the kind of case that had prompted him to go to that course in the first place.
Having to deal with a difficult airway.
He had positioned Shona’s head and one of the two paramedics was pre-oxygenating her, the other was drawing up the drugs needed. Mitch had a cricothyroidotomy kit unrolled as an insurance policy because he knew that this was likely to be a difficult intubation and if he wasn’t successful within the maximum three attempts, he would move swiftly on to creating a surgical airway. He also had his video laryngoscope and the stylet to help shape the endotracheal tube as it was manoeuvred past the vocal cords.
As focused as he was on his task, Mitch was also aware of something that wasn’t even here.
Jenna.
Part of his brain was back in that classroom, using this equipment with a mannequin. He could sense the same anxiety of failure but he could also feel the confidence that Jenna had exuded. That belief that he was going to succeed. He could actually hear an echo of the calm advice she had given him, regarding the shape of this stylet, when he’d found it difficult to advance the breathing tube through the vocal cords and into the trachea.
Try popping the stylet off with your thumb, back it out a bit and then try advancing the tube...
And, just like it had with that mannequin, the action made it possible to slip the tube into place, check its position and secure it and then move on to everything else that was urgently needed to stabilise Shona’s condition before transport to hospital. One of the flight medics took in the challenging size of their patient and the successful intubation and nodded at Mitch.
‘Good job,’ he murmured. ‘I’m sure that wasn’t an easy one.’
* * *
News that Shona had undergone emergency thrombectomy to remove the clot in a cerebral artery and that she was expected to make a good recovery made that call-out all the more satisfying. The only downside of that interruption to his normal clinic, other than running late for the rest of the day, was that Mitch hadn’t been able to shake off that awareness of Jenna. She was just there, in the back of his mind, along with that now familiar ache of missing her.
Getting home was usually enough to be able to shake it off because he had the reason why he’d had to walk away from her right in front of him. Ollie. Mitch would always do whatever he needed to do in order to protect his precious son. Even if it meant giving up a woman he’d fallen in love with. An amazing woman that he was missing with every breath he took, even weeks after that unfortunate incident in the playground of that fast food restaurant.
He’d expected the ache to have faded by now because it had been weeks but today had let him know that it might take a lot longer than expected. Still, he would cope. It was definitely better than that first week, when he’d been so upset by Ollie being so blatantly rejected, worried about his father’s health and fighting the urge to contact Jenna when he knew he shouldn’t. He had to put Ollie first. He’d vowed to do that when he’d been sitting beside his dying wife.
‘I’m going to take such good care of our son,’ he’d whispered. ‘I’ll keep him safe. As healthy and happy as it’s possible to be and...and I’ll love him with all my heart. I’ll never let anything get in the way of that...’
Ollie was healthy, thank goodness. And happy. Mitch could hear his giggles as he played with Jet in the garden when he arrived home that evening.
‘Heard about Shona,’ Michael Mitchell said, when Mitch arrived home. He was tossing a salad and there were salmon steaks on the kitchen bench waiting to be grilled. ‘Makes you think, doesn’t it? You never know what’s just around the corner. Could have been me, if that chest pain had been a real heart attack.’
‘You’re going the right way about improving the chances it won’t happen for real.’ His father had lost a bit of weight since that scare with the chest pain, modified his diet and was taking some medication. ‘That’s a nice healthy looking dinner you’re making.’ Mitch went to the fridge. ‘Fancy a beer?’
‘Good idea. I imagine it’s been a long day for you.’
‘Mmm...’ Mitch pulled out two bottles of lager. ‘It has.’ And it wasn’t over yet. The feel of those icy bottles in his hands had just triggered a memory of that night in the pub with Jenna. That pleasant surprise of finding that her choice of beverage was just that bit different. The amusement that had danced in her eyes when he’d said that he’d have what she was having. It inevitably morphed into a memory of what had come later that evening when they’d made love that first time and the fresh awareness of what was missing from his life was more than an ache—it was an actual pain.
He stared through the window as he swallowed a mouthful of beer. ‘Ollie looks happy.’
‘Hmm.’ Michael was looking at Mitch rather than his grandson. ‘Wish I could say the same about you.’
‘I’m fine, Dad.’
‘You don’t look it. You haven’t looked happy for weeks, son. Ever since that visit I had to hospital. You not worried about my health, are you?’
Mitch shook his head. ‘You’re looking better than you have in a long time.’
‘So why are you hanging around home so much, then? You loved your days being out in that rapid response vehicle.’
Mitch shrugged. ‘I only did that to get back up to speed with the kind of skills I might need in emergencies here.’
‘Oh...’ His father turned away to get on with his dinner preparations. ‘That’ll be why you invited Jenna to Pets’ Day, then, I guess? Why you’ve looked happier in the last couple of months than you’ve been ever since Tegan died.’
Mitch was silent.
‘I’m not stupid,’ Michael added quietly.
‘I know that.’ Mitch took another mouthful of his beer. He knew his friendship with Jenna had made enough of a difference in his life that it was no surprise others had noticed.
‘You might be, though.’
‘What?’
‘If you let Jenna disappear from your life like this.’
‘Ollie comes first,’ Mitch said. ‘And Jenna rejected him. End of.’
Ollie had come through the kitchen door as Mitch was speaking. ‘What’s “’jected”?’ he asked.
‘Rejected.’ Mitch ruffled his son’s soft hair. ‘It means that you don’t want to accept something that someone’s trying to give you. Like a cuddle, maybe. That’s what I was talking to Grandpa about—that Jenna didn’t want your cuddle.’
Ollie’s shrug was so like one of his own gestures that it made Mitch smile.
‘Sometimes I ’ject cuddles,’ he said. ‘If I’m cross. Or sad. You have to be ready for cuddles.’ He was heading for the pantry. ‘Jenna was sad. Can I have a biscuit, Grandpa?’
‘Nope. We’re going to have dinner very soon. You can have a bit of carrot, though. Here...’ Michael held out a strip of the carrots he was cutting but his gaze was on Mitch.
‘Out of the mouths of babes,’ he murmured. ‘He’s not stupid, either.’
But Mitch was frowning. Had he missed something important? That looking after Ollie had made Jenna sad, perhaps? How much worse had he made it, if that was the case, by accusing her of deliberately hurting his son? By not accepting her apology? Not even trying to make contact with her?
Ollie was feeding the carrot stick to Jet. ‘Let’s go outside again,’ he said to the dog. ‘And find sticks to throw.’
‘Hang on,’ Mitch called. ‘If it was okay that Jenna didn’t want your cuddle, why were you crying so much?’
Ollie didn’t bother turning around. ‘I lost my car,’ he called over his shoulder. ‘The blue one that Jenna gave me. And I wa
s sad because it was my favouritest.’
Mitch turned to find himself under his father’s steady gaze. ‘Maybe Jenna knows where it is,’ he said. ‘You never know, it might be worth asking.’
Oh...the thought of talking to Jenna. Hearing her voice again gave Mitch an odd feeling in his chest. A tightness that made it noticeably hard to pull in his next breath. He didn’t want the concern he could see in his father’s eyes though because the thought that his father still felt the same way about him as he did about Ollie was enough to give him a prickle of tears at the back of his eyes. So he turned away, lifting his shoulders in a half-hearted shrug.
‘Maybe...’
* * *
Jenna had learned how incredibly long a day could seem many years ago. Back when she had been trying to take life one day at a time. Again and again, she’d told herself she only had to get through this one day in order to survive but it felt like it went on for ever.
This had been longer than any of those days.
She wasn’t about to try and unpick the emotional threads that were contributing to the crushing weight she was carrying because that would have meant thinking about a future she wouldn’t have chosen again in a million years. Another child. Years and years and years of that fear that something terrible could happen and she would have to face the kind of devastation you surely couldn’t survive more than once.
It was much better to have something else to focus on and Jenna put everything she had into making the sessions for her class today as memorable as possible as she covered spinal and head injuries, blunt trauma and management of burns. To keep herself busy throughout the evening, Jenna decided to revamp her entire folder of triage scenarios, spending many hours making new cards that listed the injuries and condition of a good variety of patients that could be attached to the mannequins she would arrange tomorrow to look as though they’d been in a bus crash, an explosion or under a collapsed building in an earthquake. Her course attendees would arrive on scene and have to prioritise the patients in order from those who needed immediate, life-saving resuscitation through to those who were so badly injured they were unlikely to survive despite major intervention.
It was a case of rinse or repeat to get through the second to last day of the course where she covered the session on triage along with fracture management, soft tissue injuries and safety around helicopters. It was ironic that the last session of the day was about critical incident stress management when she noticed she had some of the physical symptoms of that kind of stress herself. Slight dizziness and a headache that could be caused by her blood pressure being higher than normal. Chest pain... No. It was more like abdominal pain.
Cramps.
‘Excuse me for just a minute,’ she said. ‘Talk amongst yourselves and come up with the types of situations you think you would struggle to cope with. I’ll be right back.’
Except she wasn’t. Jenna had to spend more than five minutes just sitting on that toilet seat, her head in her hands, breathing through the relief that she wasn’t going to have to face the situation she’d known she could never deal with.
She wasn’t pregnant.
And she’d never been so relieved in her entire life.
So why was it that, when she got back to her hotel room that evening, she could still feel like she hadn’t shrugged off that weight of despair? Why did she feel a kind of grief, even, that she wasn’t pregnant? This was crazy. So confusing that Jenna had to give up even thinking about it because it was too exhausting. She lay on the couch and closed her eyes, so drained that surely she would fall asleep and be able to escape in a matter of minutes.
She almost did. But it was in that space just before you fell asleep—that half-dream, half-reality space—that Jenna thought about Ollie. She could feel the weight of him falling asleep against her arm. She could smell that whiff of baby shampoo. And she could hear Mitch...that tone in his voice—not when he’d been so angry with her but way before that, the day that she’d found out he was a father and he’d been speaking to Ollie on the phone and she’d heard that note that had pierced her heart so sharply—the tone of a parent speaking to their precious child.
The sound of love.
Jenna opened her eyes as she felt the tears streaming down her face. She knew what the problem was, here. Despite a crippling fear that had made her avoid any kind of significant relationship in the last eight years and had made her believe that having another child was the last thing she would ever want, it had been nothing more than an extreme form of self-protection.
And it was a lie.
A baby would have been the best thing that could have happened for her.
A baby with a father like Andrew Mitchell would have been an absolute blessing.
Being a parent alongside Mitch—as partners, as lovers, perhaps even as husband and wife—would have made anything possible. Could have given her the courage to face all those fears.
Was it possible to feel something this big if it was only one-sided?
Was Jenna brave enough to try and find out?
This time, as her eyes drifted shut, Jenna knew she would be able to sleep peacefully. She had learned something about herself that, if nothing else, gave her hope in a future she hadn’t known she’d wanted so much.
Was she brave enough to find out whether that was a possibility with Mitch? Whether what she’d thought she might have seen in his eyes that day, after they’d shared that butterfly’s wing kiss, had been as real as the plans they had been making for a romantic getaway to a Greek Island.
Yes...but she needed to think about it. About how to do it. And that was when inspiration struck. When she got back to London, she needed to have a hunt in the glovebox of her vehicle. It was where she’d put that little blue car when she’d stumbled out of that restaurant having given Mitch enough time to carry Ollie well away from her.
Maybe it was still there.
Maybe Ollie might like it back?
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE LITTLE BLUE car was sitting on the dashboard of the rapid response vehicle. Maybe that was why Ollie was the first thing to cross Jenna’s mind when a Code Blue priority call came through on her radio to go to an incident with a critically ill child at the medical centre in Allensbury.
She was already past the outskirts of Greater London, on that side of the city, with her last call to a cyclist who had been knocked off her bike by a van in a village about halfway between Allensbury and Croydon. That patient was now being transported to a trauma centre by the helicopter that wouldn’t be available to be dispatched to Allensbury for at least fifteen minutes.
Jenna was twenty minutes’ drive away under legal speed limits but she knew she could do it in less than ten. She activated the siren and beacons with one hand as she pushed her responding button with the other. Then she pushed her accelerator to the floor. There was a hard knot in her belly that was rapidly getting bigger. Harder. It felt like fear. Was this fate trying to remind her of why she’s been prepared to believe, for years and years, that she never wanted to be a mother again? Or a stepmother—especially to a child as adorable as Ollie?
A flash of blue caught in the periphery of Jenna’s vision as she hurtled along in the fast lane of the motorway. Maybe it was just as well she hadn’t quite found the courage to do something with that toy car in the few days since she’d been back from Ireland. This horrible fear couldn’t be dismissed. Fear for Ollie. Fear for Mitch. And...yeah, fear for herself, even though she’d thought she’d kept herself safe from ever feeling fear like this again. If she’d needed any confirmation of just how deeply she cared for both Mitch and Ollie, this was it. This meant everything.
‘Not Ollie,’ she found herself whispering aloud. ‘Please...let it not be Ollie...’
But Ollie was the first person Jenna saw as she rushed through the front doors of Allenbury’s medical centre a short time later. He wa
s in the waiting room, on his grandfather’s lap, and Michael Mitchell had his arms wrapped around the frightened looking child. He saw the alarm on Jenna’s face but shook his head.
‘Ollie’s fine,’ he told her quietly. ‘Just scared. It’s Mia that’s sick.’
She didn’t have to pause to try and give Ollie a reassuring smile and give his grandpa a nod of thanks for the information. Jenna kept moving, her arms full of the medical gear and drugs she was hoping she wouldn’t need to use. The receptionist, with ‘Josie’ on her name tag, was pointing to a door.
‘In here,’ she urged Jenna. ‘Dr Mitchell’s with her. Her mum’s here, now, too.’
It was Hanna who was sitting on the bed in Mitch’s consulting room, in fact, but it was very clear that the patient was the small girl she was holding in her arms. Mia had a nebuliser mask on her face and Jenna could see what hard work it was for her to breathe. She was hunched forward, breathing at a rapid rate with her nostrils flaring, and she was using accessory muscles in her neck and chest. More worryingly, she looked very different to the happy little girl Jenna had seen rolling around and throwing grass at Pets’ Day. This Mia was so lethargic, she was barely conscious. She didn’t even look up when Jenna arrived.
Mitch did look up as she entered his consulting room and that first shared glance set the pattern for a current of non-verbal communication that did nothing to undermine what needed to happen here for Mia but did everything to let Jenna know she was in the right place at the right time for more than professional reasons.
I’m so glad you’re here, Mitch’s gaze told her.
I’m so glad I’m here, too.
Mitch’s tone was calm as he spoke aloud. ‘Mia was playing at home with Ollie after school. This could be an exercise-induced asthma attack although Hanna said she’s had a bit of a runny nose for a day or two so it might be something viral. She didn’t respond to repeated doses of her inhaler so Dad brought her in fast. Currently, she’s tachycardic, tachypnoeic and breath sounds are decreasing despite the nebuliser. I’m about to get IV access.’
Stolen Nights with the Single Dad Page 14