We did it, that expression said. You and me—we’ve made a miracle happen, haven’t we?
He didn’t need to say anything. He simply held that gaze. And smiled.
It was Emma who finally broke that memorable moment, gently removing the echo probe. ‘We need to get Mel up to Intensive Care. Keep her sedated and on the ventilator until we’re sure we’re out of the woods. And...and we need to get hold of her family.’
‘I’ll do that.’ The face of the young nurse who’d been helping was a picture of sheer relief. ‘Shall I get the ICU consultant paged?’
‘Yes, please.’ Emma had her gaze back on the monitor now, her fingers on their patient’s wrist as she felt her pulse. The joy in her eyes had faded when she looked away again. ‘Do you think she’ll have any neurological damage, Jack? It took such a long time...’
‘I don’t know,’ he had to admit. ‘We won’t know until we wake her up. But she’s young and we did the best CPR we could have done. What I do know is that if we hadn’t done what we did, she wouldn’t even be alive right now.’
Emma nodded. ‘And it’s Christmas Day,’ she said softly. ‘I don’t think it’s too much of an ask for a bit more of a miracle. That would be the best gift ever for her family, wouldn’t it? And her boyfriend.’
Jack could only nod. That pain in his chest that was purely emotional was sharp now.
To snatch life back from the jaws of death would indeed be the most amazing Christmas gift.
If only it could have been given to him last year.
And to Emma...
But it hadn’t and that was just how it was. How life was. Emma had moved forward and found something positive in her love for Lily but that was just the type of person she was. She gave and gave. She would do anything humanly possible to save the life of a complete stranger, as she had just demonstrated, and she could give all her love to a baby, even when every moment with Lily must remind her of the pain of what she had lost.
She was a better person than he was.
Emma Matthews was...well, she was amazing.
Jack found himself stepping back and simply watching as Emma continued her efforts to make sure Mel got through this unexpected crisis as unscathed as possible. He watched her take an arterial blood sample to check the oxygen level and listened to her handover to the ICU team that arrived a short time later.
‘Jack did most of the compressions,’ she told them, ‘and I could see the blood flow on the echo and it looked virtually normal.’
The ICU consultant glanced in his direction. And then took a second look.
‘Jack Reynolds. I remember you...’
Jack cringed inwardly. Of course he did. Everybody remembered him and he would prefer that they didn’t. How long had the gossip continued after he’d left?
But the consultant’s next words surprised him. ‘Your skills have been sadly missed around here,’ was all he said. ‘Your name still gets mentioned when some of our trauma patients need surgery. I hope you’ve come back to work.’
Emma didn’t look at him but he knew she was listening for his answer. He could sense how still she had suddenly become.
He was feeling a bit of that stillness himself. He’d missed this, he realised. He’d thought that the satisfaction of making a difference to lives by doing small things under such difficult circumstances had been more important somehow but a life was a life, wasn’t it? You could do so much more for people when you had all the resources of a major hospital around you. And...and maybe he’d had enough of the adrenaline rush of knowing that his own life could be in danger at any moment. Maybe, for the first time since he’d lost Ben, it felt like his own life mattered, too.
Because of Lily?
Because of Emma?
His head was aching again. Things he had thought were going to be the parameters of the rest of his life were shifting. Becoming confused...
Perhaps it was just as well that the arrival of Pete with the result of the blood gas level shifted the attention back to their patient before he had a chance to say anything. And then there was a flurry of activity as the transfer was begun and Mel started her journey up to the intensive care unit.
‘I’ll be up to check on her as soon as things quieten down around here,’ Emma said.
Unexpectedly, things actually looked well under control when they finally left the cubicle that had been their only focus for so long. The resuscitation areas were empty and the doctors looked as if they were all busy doing the kind of things they had to do on top of face-to-face patient encounters. They would be reviewing past notes or lab results, examining X-rays or writing discharge summaries, perhaps. The only real activity was coming from the other side of the department—the paediatric corner—where Pete was standing beside a woman who was crying loudly. Wailing, in fact.
‘No-o-o...you can’t do this. You can’t take him away...’
Emma’s head turned sharply. Alistair rose swiftly from where he’d been sitting in front of a computer screen.
‘I’ve got this,’ he told Emma. ‘I’ve already reviewed this case and been over it with the Child Protection people.’
‘But I need—’
‘This is the last case you need to get involved in right now,’ Alistair told her. ‘Take a break.’
Emma’s eyes were wide. She looked...haunted?
Of course she was. She had been exactly where that woman was right now. Having a child she desperately wanted to keep in her arms taken away from her. And he hadn’t helped, had he? In the short term, he’d made things worse for everybody involved.
Jack could see the tension in Alistair’s body language. He hadn’t been there that night but clearly he’d heard about it and he was trying to protect Emma.
And she was nodding slowly. ‘I guess I do need a minute to myself,’ she said quietly. ‘I’ll be in the office.’
She turned away without even looking at Jack.
He had to follow her but, as soon as he moved, he felt Alistair catch his arm.
‘She needs a minute to herself, mate.’
Jack pulled his arm free of the touch. ‘No.’
The muscles in his jaw felt almost too tight to let any words out. Alistair might think he knew the truth but he didn’t know all of it and this was none of his business. This was about himself. And Emma. And everything that had happened between them. And it was time to try and put something right.
He was moving again. ‘Actually, I think she needs a minute with me...’
CHAPTER SIX
HISTORY SEEMED BENT on repeating itself tonight.
The solitude of the office was initially a relief but a few seconds later Emma wondered if it had been a mistake to shut herself away like this.
There was nothing to distract her mind from slipping back in time.
To what had felt like the worst moment of her life.
Her best friend was gone forever, lying only a few feet away, and Emma was holding a baby who must have sensed that her life had just undergone a catastrophic change. Lily had been inconsolable. Words of comfort from someone who’d only seen her a couple of times before weren’t going to help and, even if they could have, Emma couldn’t get them past the wall of grief that was making her chest so tight it was hard to breathe. If she made any sound at all, it might not have been words. She might have started crying as desperately as Lily was.
It had taken an even deeper level of desperation to force her to speak. When she’d tried to explain that Sarah had begged her to care for her precious child and that she would do whatever it took to honour the promise she’d made.
‘I promised her mother. I’ll take care of her.’
But they’d taken Lily from her arms.
And Jack had been there. So furious.
‘She’s my brother
’s child. Now she’s mine.’
Without realising it, Emma had wrapped her arms tightly around herself in the flash of time that was all it took for the memories to coalesce into fear again.
Just how much of history was repeating itself? The date. The accident. And now Child Protection officers were here...
Had Jack been telling the truth when he’d promised that he wasn’t here to take Lily away from her?
‘Emma...?’
The door had opened so quietly behind her that Emma hadn’t heard it. Her name was no more than a whisper but she knew who’d slipped into this private space with her.
She didn’t turn around but she could feel Jack step closer. He was right behind her. And then he did something she would never have expected, folding his arms around her body and holding her as tightly as she’d been holding herself. His body was a solid wall to lean on and then he dipped his head to touch it against hers.
Neither of them said anything but Emma could feel the fear begin to ebb.
She trusted this man.
More than trusted him. Okay, she’d known that it had been a mistake to fall in love with him but doing so hadn’t been a conscious choice. The connection she’d felt had been so powerful it would have been easier to try and stop the sun rising than not to fall in love. And yes, in the long months of Jack’s absence, she’d tried to convince herself that she was over him. That one day she would find someone else. Seeing him again had been enough to tell her she’d been kidding herself. Feeling his arms around her like this took things to a whole new level.
This was nothing like the memories she had of their passionate physical relationship—the way any touch could inflame an irresistible desire.
This was about comfort.
About caring.
It felt like...love.
Releasing a breath she hadn’t realised she’d been holding, Emma felt her body loosening. Or maybe the hold of Jack’s arms was loosening. Whatever it was, it made it easy to turn around. To put her head in the hollow where she could feel his heart beating. To wrap her own arms around him.
‘I should never have done it,’ Jack said quietly. ‘I’m sorry, Red. I should never have taken Lily away from you that night. I could have stopped them trying to take her and told them you were the person I chose to care for my brother’s child.’
‘Why did you do it?’ Emma whispered. ‘Why were you so angry about me having her?’
‘It wasn’t you.’
Emma pulled back, so that she could see Jack’s face. He looked as shattered as she was feeling. The memories were too raw for both of them, weren’t they? But he also looked as if he was trying to find the words to explain something. Standing here in a small office wasn’t exactly conducive to talking, though. Emma turned her head even though she knew there was nowhere to sit down other than the single chair pushed under the desk attached to the wall beneath a window.
Jack seemed to read her mind. Taking hold of her hand, he sank down to sit on the floor, with his back against a tall bookshelf crammed with textbooks and medical journals, and Emma followed his lead. She leaned her head back against the bookshelf, closing her eyes as she let her breath out in a sigh.
‘What was it, Jack? What made you so angry? Were you blaming yourself for the accident?’
‘I don’t think so. Not then. If anything, I think I was blaming Lily.’
Emma’s intake of breath was a shocked gasp as she opened her eyes.
‘Why?’
‘If they hadn’t had a baby, they wouldn’t have been coming here. They wouldn’t have been so determined to show me how wrong I was.’
‘I don’t understand.’ Still shocked at the notion of blaming an innocent baby, Emma could feel herself trying to pull away from Jack. To remove her hand from beneath his. But he tightened his grip, just enough to hold her.
‘They had everything. Ben and Sarah. They were so much in love and now they had a family. Everything I’d convinced myself was the last thing I would ever want.’
A peculiar sensation in Emma’s chest felt heavy but sharp at the same time. A dream that was finally dying?
‘And it was Christmas and that made it worse because it’s the time when everybody celebrates having a family.’
‘But isn’t that what everyone wants? Family...and love?’
‘Of course it is. Unless they’ve been there before and they know the pain of losing it. That feeling that the world has ended and that you will never be truly happy ever again. That black hole that has sides so tall you know you’re never going to find a way to climb out.’
The discomfort in Emma’s chest was different now. It felt like her heart was breaking.
‘You’d lost Ben,’ she said softly. ‘Your only family.’
‘It was more than that. When I saw those people from the social services there, I felt like I was five years old again. It was my mother who’d gone and now they were going to take us away. And I could see the pain of what I knew had happened in the years ahead. Being taken away from Ben because nobody wanted to take twins. Being forced to live with strangers. People who pretended to care but they never did. Not really...’ It sounded like it was painful for Jack to swallow.
‘Is that why you hate Christmas so much?’
‘It was always the worst time. It was the real children that got to do the special things like hang the decorations on the tree or put cookies out for Father Christmas. They got the special presents, too, like a new phone or a bike. I’d get the things that had to be provided anyway. Pencils and schoolbooks. A school uniform, one year. Everyone would tell me how lucky I was to have a family that would put up with me but I knew that my only real family was Ben and that he would be as miserable as I was.’
Emma could feel tears gather. She could see that little boy so clearly. Amongst people but so terribly alone. She wanted to reach back through time and cuddle him. To tell him that he would find people that would love him and cherish him. That he would experience the kind of happiness that only love could bring. But he had shut himself away from that, hadn’t he? He’d convinced himself that it was the last thing he ever wanted.
As if he could read her thoughts, Jack released his breath in a long sigh.
‘Even though there was part of me that was totally irrational and blaming Lily for what had happened, I wasn’t going to let Ben’s child suffer the same fate we had. I wasn’t going to let them take her away.’
There was relief to be savoured now in the wake of understanding better. Jack had been trying to protect Lily that night. He was being honest in saying it wasn’t about Emma. He’d been distraught and not thinking clearly but his automatic reaction had been to try and protect his niece.
‘It was such a stupid thing to do,’ Jack said. ‘As if I knew anything about looking after a baby. Even with all the supplies and advice I got, there was no way I could have coped. You could see that when you came to visit after the funeral and that made it even worse. I felt like I’d done something dreadful. It wasn’t just me at the bottom of that black hole—I’d dragged Lily into it as well.’
‘I didn’t help,’ Emma said. ‘I hate to say it but maybe at some level I wanted you to fail. So that I could take Lily and keep my promise to Sarah. I could have tried to make things easier for you, instead of being so horrified at the mess. Accusing you of drinking too much. Of putting Lily in danger...’ Her breath hitched. ‘I had no idea of how cruel I was being, threatening to report you if you didn’t let me take her. I didn’t have any idea how awful your childhood was. I’m sorry, Jack...’
‘I don’t blame you.’ Jack’s fingers closed around her hand. ‘Thank goodness you were there. It was the right thing to do. I’m just sorry I made it so hard for you. Especially after you’d taken Lily and I was alone. I was drinking too much, then. I was sad and angry and I couldn�
�t see a way past the mess that my life had suddenly become.’
‘I was so scared you were going to come and take her back again. You had the right to do that.’ Emma sucked in a deep breath, knowing how hard it was to say what had to be said. ‘You’re still the only real family that Lily’s got. The only blood relative.’
‘No.’ Jack shook his head. ‘You’re Lily’s family. You’re her mother and I know how much you love her. She’s a very lucky little girl.’
‘She needs you, too.’
‘I don’t think so.’ But there was an edge of doubt in his words. ‘She’s managed better without me in her life so far, hasn’t she?’
‘That doesn’t mean you wouldn’t add something that no one else could give her. And you need her,’ Emma persisted. ‘You can’t shut yourself away from caring about anybody, Jack. That’s not living. Everybody needs someone special in their lives. Someone to care about.’
Maybe he did have someone, she thought, searching his face. Someone other than the patients he’d devoted his life to over the last year. She didn’t really want to know but she needed to.
His gaze held hers. Could he see the unasked question? Was that almost imperceptible shake of his head an answer to that question?
‘I care about you,’ Jack said. ‘I didn’t realise how much I’d missed you until I saw you again. You’re special, Red.’
Perhaps the dream hadn’t really died. Or it was being resuscitated by the breeze of hope.
‘I missed you, too, Jack,’ she whispered. ‘Every day.’
They could have been a world away from the emergency department they’d escaped from temporarily.
It felt like they were a world away from the grief and anger and pain of a year ago.
There had been forgiveness needed on both sides and it felt like it had been given and received already. That nothing more needed to be said.
Maybe it was because they had revisited such an emotional time for them both or that Jack had revealed more than he ever had about his past. Or maybe they had been holding each other’s gaze for too long. Or perhaps it was because this small, dim space behind a closed door had given them a privacy they hadn’t had since before any of the bad things had happened.
Their First Family Christmas Page 8