by Jenny Colgan
Dedication
This book is dedicated with love and gratitude to organ donors everywhere. You are the true heroes of so many stories.
Epigraph
There are two teachers in the school,
One has a gentle voice and low,
And smiles upon her scholars, as
She softly passes to and fro.
Her name is Love; ’tis very plain
She shuns the sharper teacher, Pain.
Or so I sometimes think; and then,
At other times, they meet and kiss,
And look so strangely like, that I
Am puzzled to tell how it is,
Or whence the change which makes it vain
To guess if it be—Love, or Pain.
—SUSAN COOLIDGE, WHAT KATY DID
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Part I
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Part II
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Part III
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Jenny Colgan
Copyright
About the Publisher
Part I
Chapter 1
It should have started with ominous dark crows, great murmurations and flutterings, bad omens taking to the sky; with thick storm clouds rolling in, clocks striking thirteen.
In fact, it started with an extremely undignified argument with an old lady over a bar of chocolate.
“But you have a bar of Dairy Milk right there in your hand!”
Mrs. Marks looked up at her, heavy and glowering, from the cracked brown leather sofa. “I do not!”
“Behind your back!”
Like a tiny child, Mrs. Marks refused to remove her hand, just shook her head mutinously.
Lissa Westcott put down the medical equipment she’d been packing away and strode back into the center of the room, exasperated. “You thought I’d gone! You thought I was leaving the room and you were making a grab for a hidden Dairy Milk!”
Mrs. Marks fixed her with beady eyes. “What the bleedin’ hell are you then, the chocolate police?”
“No. Yes!” said Lissa, rather desperately.
She held out her hand. Mrs. Marks finally handed it over. It was, in fact, a Bournville.
“Ha!” said Mrs. Marks.
Lissa looked at her.
Old Mrs. Marks lived on the fourteenth floor of a South London tower block where the lifts were often broken. Her foot was gradually giving in to diabetes, and Lissa was trying her absolute hardest to save it. She glanced out from the dingy, fussy room with dusty fake flowers everywhere, over at the grand views of the river to the north, at the great towers of the City, glinting in the light, bright and beautiful, clean and full of money, like a vast array of glittering palaces, completely out of reach, though less than two miles away.
“We’ve just been talking about your diet for twenty minutes!” she said to the poor woman who was practically a shut-in, with only her daughter to visit her. Watching EastEnders with family-sized bars of chocolate was one of the few pleasures she had left, but it wasn’t doing her any good. “I don’t want to be coming up here one day and finding you in a coma,” Lissa went on, as severely as she dared.
Mrs. Marks just laughed at her. “Oh, don’t you worry about me, duck. Whatever will be will be.”
“That’s not how health care works!” said Lissa, glancing at her watch. She was due in Peckham in twenty minutes. Driving in London was an absolute fool’s errand, but she didn’t have any choice; she couldn’t carry drugs on the tube.
Lissa was an NPL: a nurse practitioner liaison. She followed up on hospital discharges who had trouble attending outpatient departments in the hopes that they didn’t become readmissions. Or, she said in her more cynical moments, did half of what community nurses did when they still had the budget and half of what GPs used to do when they could still be asked to leave the office. Originally trained as an accident and emergency nurse, she loved her current job, which involved rather fewer drunks spewing up on her than A&E did—particularly the bits of it when she got chocolate.
Her hopes, though, in Mrs. Marks’s case, were not at their highest.
“You’re not exactly a sylph yourself,” said Mrs. Marks.
“You sound like my mum,” complained Lissa, who had her mother’s curvy frame, to her mother’s occasionally vocal and occasionally silent disappointment.
“You take it then,” said Mrs. Marks grudgingly.
Lissa made a face. “I hate dark chocolate,” she said. But she took it anyway. “Please,” she said again. “Please. I’d hate them to admit you again. Next time you might lose your foot. Seriously.”
In response, Mrs. Marks sighed and indicated the entire old brown three-piece suite. Lissa put her hands down the backs of the cushions and found chocolate bars behind every one.
“I’m donating them to the food bank,” she said. “Do you want me to buy them off you?”
Mrs. Marks waved her away. “No,” she said. “But if I do end up back in that place again, I’ll blame you.”
“Deal,” said Lissa.
IT WAS CHILLY for mid-March as she left the tall building, but the sun was shining behind a faint cloud of smog in the air, and Lissa could sense spring coming, somewhere on the horizon. She prayed, as she always did, that nobody had seen the medical personnel sticker on her car and attempted to break into it in case she’d left any drugs in there, and contemplated the new Korean barbecue place
she was due to meet some friends in later. It looked good on Instagram, but this wasn’t necessarily a good thing and sometimes quite the opposite if it was just full of people photographing cold food.
She noticed the boys loitering on the sidewalk, which was nothing unusual. It was hard to tell with some teenage boys, whether they should be at school; they were so big these days. The best thing to do was keep her head down, hide her ringlets in a tight braid or a scarf, and just keep moving past them. She remained profoundly glad of the unflattering green trousers she wore as part of her uniform that rendered her practically invisible.
These boys, however, weren’t talking to her; they were arguing with one another. Just the normal teenage beefs, showing off, puffing out their chests like peacocks. They were a mix of races, with tiny little wispy beards and mustaches, lanky legs and too-pointy elbows, a strong smell of Lynx Africa, and massive trainers the size of boats. It was slightly endearing in its way, watching them try to pretend they knew how to be men. But intimidating too, and she was about to give them a wide berth when she realized she recognized one of them. In fact, it made her wince. It was one of Ezra’s cousins. Ezra, beautiful Ezra, whose graceful body and lovely face made him irresistible whenever he got back in touch and messaged her. Unfortunately, Ezra was well aware of this, which was why he felt obliged to spread himself pretty thinly all around South London. Every time he ghosted her Lissa swore blind she’d never fall for it again. She was not much better at keeping that promise than she was about not eating Mrs. Marks’s chocolate.
But she’d met Kai by accident—Ezra had never introduced her to his family—down in Brixton market one morning when they were grabbing breakfast supplies. He was a bright, mouthy fifteen-year-old and should, Lissa thought with a sigh, really be in school. She wouldn’t mention that.
“Kai!” She raised her hand.
Just as she did so, he turned to face her, his open mouth already starting to grin as he recognized her, and then, out of the blue, there was a sudden roar of an engine, a screech of brakes, a glint in the sky as something was thrown up, a sickening sound.
Chapter 2
Five hundred and eighty-three miles north by northwest, in the small village of Kirrinfief, on the shores of Loch Ness, a cool March wind was blowing off the water, rippling the white tops of the little waves, and the clouds were hanging heavy off the peaks of the purple mountains.
Cormac MacPherson, the town’s NPL, glanced at his watch. Joan the GP was over on the other side of the moor tending to a hiatal hernia. In a human, Cormac assumed, although with Joan it could be hard to tell. She rarely traveled anywhere without being surrounded by a dust cloud of wire fox terriers. So Jake, the local ambulance paramedic, had corralled him in to help with a DNR on a very old lady. Jake knew Cormac could never say no to someone in distress and took wide advantage of his soft nature. They had sat with the family and made sure Edie was as comfortable as possible to the end, in the bed in the little cottage she’d been born in ninety years before. As these things went, it had not been bad.
Now they were heading out for a well-deserved pint.
“Not a bad way to go,” said Jake philosophically as they headed down the cobbles, the air cool on their faces.
“Mm-hmm,” said Cormac, glancing at his phone.
“Emer on you again?” Jake glanced over.
“Aw crap, she came over to make me a surprise dinner.”
“That’s terrifying.”
“It’s not terrifying,” protested Cormac weakly. “It’s sweet.”
“She must know you’re out on calls all the time.”
“I said I was off duty.”
“Yeah, well,” said Jake, not looking remotely embarrassed. “Might as well have a pint now, though.”
Cormac glanced at his watch and shook his head, just as a door opened from the little row of terraced houses they were passing; the sitting rooms came straight onto the street.
“Jake! Cormac!” came a soft voice. “I didnae want tae—”
“Bother the doctor,” finished Jake for her. “Yup, we know.”
Chapter 3
A glint of something in the air. An incredible cacophony of sound.
She had seen it only briefly, out of the corner of her eye: she had been watching the boys yelling, gauging with that innate city sense whether they were dangerous and whether it was likely to escalate—Lissa had a good antenna for trouble, having mopped up the effects of so much of it—when she heard what sounded like a car speeding.
At first she’d ignored it, but then she realized that rather than slowing as it rounded the corner into the housing development, it had sped up. She had turned around instinctively to where her own car was to make sure it didn’t crash into it, and by the time she turned back, there was a huge howling screech from the wheels as it mounted the curb—deliberately mounted the curb—and she saw . . . the only thing she saw was the glint of a phone, bouncing up in the air, spinning, catching the light, almost lovely, so slow . . .
And then everything happened so fast and there was a twist and a turn of a hideous shape; a thumping noise, horrible, wet, and loud, reverberating around her head; something unthinkable following the phone; and the car’s wheels, still moving, engine still revving, and the even harder cracking noise as the huge, unthinkable shape hit the ground, lay there, twisted, misshapen. Lissa couldn’t actually believe what she was looking at, that it could not—absolutely could not—be Kai, and she lifted her eyes and found herself staring straight into the face of the driver, whose mouth was drawn back in a snarl, or a leer, or something; something, thought Lissa, through her incomprehension, through her panic, that she couldn’t figure out, not at all, as it screamed something about “staying out of Leaf Field”—and then the car revved and sped on.
THERE WAS A moment’s silence, then the yelling started: disbelief, fury; and suddenly Lissa found herself clicking into action, found her training propping her up, propelling her forward.
“I’m a nurse. Move away please, I can help.”
She expected to have to clear a path, but the other youths bounced upward, shouting their heads off, and dashed screaming in pursuit of the car.
“Dial 999!” Lissa shouted as she knelt down to examine Kai, pulling her phone out of her pocket. She had no idea if the lads could catch the car and was terrified they’d get hit again; there was only one way out of the development, it would have to double back at some point—but she had to prioritize.
She looked down at the figure on the pavement, his head sideways on the sunbaked stone, next to cigarette ends strewn in the gutter.
“DARLING.”
He was beautiful, fifteen years old. Lissa couldn’t get over it. Not that that mattered, of course; of course it didn’t. It had absolutely nothing to do with it. But as she bent desperately trying to save him, as she finally, finally, heard the sirens she’d been waiting for, she couldn’t get over it: the sheer heart-stopping beauty of the young soft skin, the curve of the neck, the dark hair. He was a child. She couldn’t bear to think of how the family was going to take it. She cursed herself; her best friend had deleted Ezra’s number from her phone, for her own good. She couldn’t even call him.
Even when the paramedics arrived she didn’t stop CPR. She carried on compressing, using the heels of her hands as they joined her, monitoring the oxygen, grabbing the adrenaline to shoot into his heart. She knew the paramedics and they trusted her and brought her along, Ashkan working with her, Kerry driving like a fiend as the blue lights screamed over the traffic, even if that clogged up the overwhelmingly crowded London roads, too stuffed full with lorries, vans, Ubers, motorbikes—everything jammed up so tight they could barely find room to pull over to let an ambulance through.
But on this trip, they all knew, deep down, blue lights wouldn’t matter. No matter how quickly they moved, how urgently they shouted and cleared the way. Back at the crime scene, a policewoman would be kneeling down in a pool of blood on the pavement, concerne
d citizens gathering around, but anyone who could have been involved was long gone into the cacophonous city. The sun had gone down and now everything felt chilled.
Kai suddenly contorted, bounced in the air as Ashkan shouted, “Clear!” and Lissa had jumped back instinctively, watching him twitch, wondering if the policewoman sitting in the blood had started the weary business of figuring out who he was, had started the weary, unbearable process of contacting his family.
Lissa let the training take over completely, wouldn’t let herself think, automatically putting the oxygen mask back on the boy’s lips, still blue; injecting another shot of adrenaline; loading another pint of blood above his arm—all of them desperately hoping he could hold on, hold on just until they got there. None of them spoke apart from the basic terms of the attempt to resuscitate and trying to get more blood into him than was leaving him.
Attempts to resuscitate are, even with the most extraordinarily advanced equipment in the world, much more unsuccessful than not. People see miracle returns from the dead on TV all the time. They didn’t see this: the blood pumping out as fast as it could be pumped in; the lack of response in the pupils every time they checked; the artificial twitching and stimulation of the young body; the barked commands and steady listening for independent breath—the hot chaos of it all as the ambulance swerved and howled through the thick London rush hour, only one of many screaming sirens, helicopters, dispatches, attending to pain and blood.
“The doctors are going to call it,” predicted Ashkan, glancing at his watch.
“You can’t,” said Lissa.
Ashkan swore. The pointlessness of it. A hit-and-run that looked deliberate. On a child. He turned away and tuned in to the police radio for a bit, then even half smiled.
“They got him,” he said grimly. “The rest of the lads jumped on the car, wouldn’t let it leave. Smashed in his windows. It must have felt like a zombie attack.”
It didn’t register with Lissa at all.
“Carry on. More blood! Now!” said Lissa fiercely, and redoubled her efforts, hissing into the boy’s ear, “Come on, Kai! Wake up! Wake up!”
THEY HAD ARRIVED at Guy’s Hospital: the ambulance doors were hurled open without ceremony and two porters and an A&E doctor jumped aboard.