by Amy Andrews
Was it not bad enough that he had removed a vital part of her reproduction capabilities? Did he really have to dismiss it like it meant nothing? Pass it off as some clinical surgical decision with no consequences? ‘Speak for yourself.’
Gill cursed in French. ‘I didn’t mean it like that, Harry…I meant the tube was too damaged to even attempt it.’
‘Oh, right,’ she said, sniffling and flicking her hair off her face and wiping at the flow of tears with the back of her hand. ‘You can spend half an hour getting an amputation just right but you can’t give me equal consideration?’
‘That’s different, Harry…’
‘Is it? Is it?’ she demanded, not caring that her voice was verging on hysterical or that the pitch hurt her vocal cords tremendously. ‘The difference is, Gill, that a stranger’s prosthetic future was more important than my future fertility. Because, let’s face it, that’s hardly on your list of priorities, right?’
Gill could feel his jaw clenching at the unfairness of her verbal attack and took a moment to answer. She was angry and upset, saying the first thing that came into her head, he knew that. But it still hurt.
She continued into his silence. ‘I mean, what do you care? Suck out a baby, rip out a tube. What’s it’s to you? Just one less complication in your perfect, child-free existence.’
Harriet broke off on a sob, lying back against her pillows, and he could hear the anguish in her cries.
‘It was my baby, too,’ he said quietly.
She raised her head up and fixed him with an angry stare as a harsh, incredulous laugh curled her lips. ‘Your baby? Since when have you cared?’
He reached for her hand, to tell her that he did care. That losing a child, no matter how embryonic, had been unexpectedly devastating and a wake-up call to his paternal instincts.
‘Don’t touch me,’ she snarled, withdrawing her hand from his reach. ‘Don’t ever touch me again.’
He swallowed a lump in his throat as he pulled his hand away. Her distress was painful to watch. She was like a wounded animal lashing out at whoever was closest. And it just happened to be him.
He knew she wasn’t being rational and refused to take what she said to heart, but he also knew that trying to reason with her at the moment was folly. The news was too new, too raw. Anything he said now about his new feelings would only be dismissed with a cutting cynicism. She needed some time to digest what had happened, grieve for her baby and her Fallopian tube.
She was sobbing loudly now and he wished he could say or do something to help. It seemed ludicrous to be sitting so near his distraught wife and not be able to comfort her.
‘Just go, Gill,’ Harriet said between sobs, not even bothering to look at him. ‘Leave me alone.’
‘No, I want to stay.’
‘I don’t want you here,’ she said miserably, even though perversely every cell in her body wanted to fall into his arms and cry until there were no tears left.
Her rejection hurt but, despite his injured pride, he sensed it wasn’t what she really wanted. He looked helplessly at Megan and she shrugged.
‘Give her some time,’ she mouthed at Gill.
‘I’ll come back in a bit,’ said Gill, rising to leave, feeling completely out of his depth.
Harriet turned on her side, away from him. ‘Don’t bother.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
0500 HOURS
HARRIET lay awake, crying silently into her pillow as a desert dawn broke gently over the harsh landscape outside. Megan came by every now and then to check on her and ask if she needed any pain relief. She refused. The pain was hardly anything compared to what it had been before she’d collapsed. And nothing compared to the ache in her heart and the bruise on her soul.
In fact, she welcomed the vague incisional discomfort. At least it was a reminder that, ever so briefly, she had actually been pregnant. There was nothing else to show for it. No trace that a baby had been growing inside her. Gill’s baby. Just the pain and eventually, she supposed, a scar.
Trying to get her fuzzy head around the fact that she’d actually conceived was almost too much in her weakened anaemic state. How could she not have known? She knew enough as a nurse to know that the contraceptive pill wasn’t infallible, that there was a small failure rate. But how could she not have known?
She’d always thought she would just…know. The minute…the second it happened. That her desire for a baby was so strong, so elemental that she’d be totally in tune with her body’s signals. That something inside her would know the exact moment egg and sperm joined and started to multiply.
But apparently not. She thought back to her cycle, trying to work out when she had conceived. The two-day lurgy she had caught initially had probably been the culprit. She’d been about mid-cycle when she’d arrived two months ago so she had obviously ovulated when the Pill’s influence had been interrupted because of her illness.
Which meant she must have fallen almost immediately afterwards. She thought back to the time when Gill had knocked on her door the night after her symptoms had abated. She had felt wrung out and had spent most of the day in bed, sleeping. He had spent fifteen hours operating and had looked as done in as her.
But he had made her get up and have a shower and brush her teeth and put on clean pyjamas. You’ll feel better, he’d said, and he’d been right. He had changed the sheets for her and brought a tray of tea and a mountain of hot buttered toast and ordered her to eat it. He had made enough for both of them and helped her finish off the entire plate.
He’d also helped himself to her shower and had come out with her towel slung low on his hips and asked her if she fancied some company. Just sleep, he had assured her. They were both exhausted. She’d nodded because he’d been such a sight for sore eyes and she didn’t have the energy or desire to turn him away.
And they had slept. For about five hours. But then she had woken to his hand on her hip and his stubble on her shoulder and she had wanted him. And it had been as if he had known, too, because he’d stirred, kissed her shoulder and she had turned in his arms and they had made love. And had been doing it ever since, despite their irreconcilable differences!
She forced her mind away from replaying images of their two months together. It hadn’t resolved anything and she’d probably been exceedingly foolish to have ever thought it would. She did a quick calculation to banish the self-recriminations. She must have been about seven to eight weeks along, which fitted the time frame for a ruptured ectopic perfectly.
She gingerly felt her abdomen. It was still so hard to believe. She had been pregnant for almost the entire time she had been here, and hadn’t known. There had been none of the usual symptoms newly pregnant women complained of. No nausea, no breast tenderness, no debilitating tiredness, no funny cravings.
If only she had known! But how could she have? She’d had two periods while she’d been here. Looking back, they hadn’t been typical—a little lighter and shorter than normal but not noticeably so. She hadn’t really thought about it, had put it down to a different time zone, country and climate mucking with her cycle—quite common in her line of work.
Being pregnant had never occurred to her. Never! She knew that you could still have a cyclic bleed if you were pregnant and taking the Pill and could only assume that this was what had happened to her. Why hadn’t she questioned a scant period instead of just being relieved and grateful?
She felt the hot sting of tears in her eyes again. It just wasn’t fair to learn of her baby and lose it all in the space of two hours. Why couldn’t she have had some time to savour the new life growing inside her? To be happy and joyous as all mothers-to-be were? To walk around with the delicious secret like she was the only woman in the world who had ever managed the miracle of new life.
But, then, how would she have handled Gill? Would she have told him or kept it from him? Could she have borne it if he had stuck to his guns and rejected their baby? But what right would she have had to withhold i
t from him?
Despite her anger at him, there was no other man’s baby she wanted more. Despite her insistence that he sign the divorce papers and set her free to find someone else, deep down she doubted she’d ever find another Gill. Another man she could love enough to share the most intimate of human experiences. She had come here to leave her marriage behind, but maybe the invisible hand of fate had had other things in mind.
Maybe it had been her destiny to come back and fall pregnant by Gill. Maybe there was some vital life lesson they were both supposed to learn from these tragic circumstances. Was it supposed to make them see reason? Bring them closer? Because at the moment she had never felt further from him.
They should be together as a couple mourning their loss. She should want him to be by her side, comforting her. And she should be letting him lean on her, giving him a shoulder to cry on. But why would he waste his breath grieving for something he had made patently obvious he had never wanted in the first place?
What had he said—it was his baby, too? What the hell did that mean? She daren’t let herself think it was an emotional plea from a man who really cared. It was probably more some macho statement. Staking a claim. Another way to tie her to him.
She was too physically and mentally done in to try and figure it out. The only important thing was that she’d been pregnant and now she wasn’t. Her head hurt and her heart ached and all she wanted to do was cry herself to sleep.
‘Harry?’
Harriet shut her eyes hard and lay very still on hearing Katya’s voice. Go away. Leave me be. You promised, too, damn it. You’re as bad as him.
Katya came round and stood in front of her. ‘I know you’re awake, Harry, I could hear you crying.’
Harriet reluctantly opened her eyes. ‘I’m tired,’ she said, fixing her gaze on the neckline of Katya’s scrubs.
‘You’re angry,’ said Katya, coming straight to the point in her typically blunt fashion.
Harriet felt tears well in her eyes again and choked on a sob. Yes. She was. But she was hurting deep inside more than anything else.
‘Gill did an excellent job. He did everything he could.’
Harriet snorted, not ready to forgive Gill yet. Was he sending others to fight his battles now? ‘He didn’t even try to repair the tube, Katya. You were there, you know that.’
Katya stood staring down at her for a few moments, the things she wanted to say getting all jumbled up inside her head in a bilingual tangle. Her friends were hurting and she wanted to help get them back on track. To get them to see that they belonged with each other.
She decided showing was better than telling. ‘I brought something for you.’ She thrust the medium-sized specimen jar at Harriet. The damaged Fallopian tube floated in a clear alcoholic solution.
Harriet looked at the offering but could barely see it properly through her watery eyes. ‘What is it?’ she asked, grabbing a tissue from the box Megan had left on her table.
‘It’s your tube.’
Harriet blinked. She slowly reached out and took it from Katya. She gingerly tried to pull herself up into a more upright position, failing badly until Katya took pity and helped.
Harriet blew her nose and wiped her eyes then held the jar up to the light. Oh, dear. What a mess. There was a gaping hole in the middle of the specimen. The slenderest thread of tissue held it precariously in one piece superiorly. The ragged edges of the rupture looked like they’d been put through a mincer and there was obviously not enough tissue remaining to have made closing the shredded edges even a remote possibility.
Harriet felt hot tears rise in her eyes again and the specimen blurred out of focus. Katya took the jar from her trembling fingers and placed it on the table.
‘There was nothing he could do, Harry,’ she reiterated gently.
‘Oh, Katya,’ cried Harriet. ‘It’s not fair. Why me, why me?’ Her face crumpled and when she felt the comforting hug of Katya’s arms around her shoulder, she completely broke down.
After a while Harriet’s distress quieted and Katya handed her the box of tissues. ‘I must look an absolute mess,’ said Harriet, drying her face again.
‘I have seen you look better,’ Katya admitted.
Harriet laughed at her friend’s candour and felt the strain on her vocal cords. You would never get a big head around Katya.
‘Oh, God, Katya,’ she said, chewing her lip. ‘I was so horrible to Gill.’
‘Gill is a big boy. He understands,’ she dismissed.
Harriet laughed again and felt it in her stitches this time. They sat in companionable silence for a couple of minutes. Harriet picked up the jar again. ‘I don’t have another. What am I going to do, Katya?’
Katya placed her hand over Harriet’s. ‘There are many ways to have a baby,’ she said. ‘So, it’s not going to be as easy for you as a lot of women out there. So be it. IVF, adoption.’ She shrugged. ‘You will have a baby, Harry. I just know it.’
Harriet felt the threat of new tears at her friend’s faith. She wished she could be so certain. ‘It’s not such a romantic way to start a new life with someone, though, is it? Marry me and have my babies—you don’t mind providing a specimen in this jar do you?’
They both laughed, but it hurt Harriet’s stomach, and the thought was so depressing that she quickly sobered. ‘What if no one wants me?’
‘Gill does.’
Harriet nodded slowly. ‘It’s not enough. I need more.’ She picked up the jar again, inspecting her lost tube. ‘This just makes me more determined. For a few weeks I was a mother. I want that again.’
‘And Gill was a father. A lot has happened tonight, my friend. You two need to talk. Why don’t I go and get him?’
She shook her head. ‘He said he’d be back.’ Well, before she’d told him not to bother, anyway. Luckily, he didn’t insult easily. ‘I’m tired and I need some time to think for a while.’
They did need to talk—she definitely needed to apologise to him if nothing else. But the op and the bleeding and a thousands tears had left her drained and weary. She felt like she could sleep for an eternity. Gill could wait.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
0600 HOURS
GILL sat on the edge of his bed beside his packed bag. He held his copy of the divorce papers in his hand. He was staring so hard that the words ‘irreconcilable differences’ duplicated themselves before his tired eyes. Harriet’s bitter ‘Don’t bother’ echoed through his head.
He’d had a good hard think about his life since Harriet had asked him to go. He didn’t want this. He’d never wanted it, had only signed the damn papers because she’d wanted it. But the events of the last twenty-four hours had made him reassess their supposed differences.
So much had happened in such a short space of time. It was like each thing that had happened had been part of some grand plan, bigger than him, to make him see the error of his ways. Unbeknownst, each wake-up call had given him a piece of a puzzle. A puzzle that he hadn’t been able to figure out until all the pieces were in place.
His first wake-up call had been the divorce papers. After two months when he had thought they’d been reconciling, they’d come as a surprise. They’d made him really look hard at the things Harriet had been asking of him over the last two years. And had made him question the strength of his beliefs. Were they really worth losing Harry over?
Next had been his grandfather falling ill. The news that his fit and healthy grandfather had succumbed to a massive heart attack had been a shock. He’d always seemed larger than life, like he’d live for another eighty years. But…he was…old and Gill realised that he’d neglected him over the last decade.
Sure, his grandfather didn’t mind in the least, was proud of his humanitarian-minded grandson and encouraged him to continue the aid work. But family was important, too, and it had taken this one last day to make him realise that.
Next had been Nimuk. The baby’s death had affected them all but particularly Harriet. Her distress had r
eached inside and clawed at his gut. But more surprisingly had been the way he’d identified with the mother. Looking at her, mute with grief, had scared the hell out of him. The emotional vulnerability of parents was frightening. A fact that he’d confronted a mere two hours ago when he’d been unable to protect his unborn baby.
And then a really startling wake-up call. The death of Peter Hanley and the aid team, shot out of the sky by the very people they were here to help. It was easy to forget his job was dangerous. Potentially, anyway. He’d never felt unsafe, or rarely anyway, but a tragedy like that brought the safety issue into the spotlight and Harriet’s worry about him continuing his work in such areas had made him think more seriously about the dangers.
After that, there had been Gillian. Wake-up call number five. Puzzle piece number five. His reaction to seeing Harriet holding the newborn had been unexpected. Suddenly, out of the blue, he’d been able to see her holding their own child. A child he’d been fighting with her about for two years. A child he’d had no interest in. But he had passed Gillian to her and he had seen the whole fairy-tale. He’d seen what happened after happily ever after. And it hadn’t been awful. In fact, it had looked kind of nice.
And then the biggest wake-up call of all. Harriet. Even thinking back now to how much blood there had been and how another ten or fifteen minutes and she could have been dead was unbearable. And knowing that somewhere in all the blood had been the remains of his baby. A child he hadn’t even known about, but its embryonic death and having to excise it from her body had left him with a deep, deep sadness. And worse, a gut-wrenching helplessness. The sort he had seen already on Nimuk’s mother’s face.
And afterwards, when Harriet had been so distressed and angry, lashing out at him because he had done his job, no matter how much he wished it hadn’t been his to do. Her angry ‘Since when have you cared?’ had really hit home.
Since the divorce papers and his grandfather and Peter and Nimuk and Gillian. Since being inside her, her blood everywhere, scared that she could die and feeling so helpless that he hadn’t been able to keep his baby safe. He cared. It’d just taken an extraordinary amount of wake-up calls.