Sarah Morgan - Brides of Penhally Bay - Vol 1

And for the first time she felt the tension ease and some of the dread fade away.

‘It’ll be all right, Lucy. Don’t worry. I’ll look after you.’

‘We aren’t getting married, Ben.’

‘Don’t close your mind to it,’ he said softly.

‘It’s too soon.’

‘Of course it is—but it’s one of our options.’

Ours?

She would have moved away from him, but he had her pinned up against the sink and in the narrow kitchen there was nowhere to go. So she turned her back to him, but it didn’t help because he simply moved up closer, sliding his arms around her, resting both hands on her tummy and drawing her gently back into his warm embrace. ‘Don’t be scared.’

‘I’m not scared,’ she lied. ‘I just don’t like you turning up out of the blue and telling me what to do.’

‘Out of the blue? I hardly abandoned you, Lucy. The last conversation we had, you told me it wasn’t going to work. Too much baggage.’

‘And you agreed.’

‘So I did,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘But that was then, and this is now, and things are different. The baggage certainly is. I can’t let you face your father alone.’

‘And you really think you being there, telling him you’re the baby’s father, will help?’

He sighed and moved away at last, giving her room to breathe, to re-establish her personal space and gather her composure around her like a security blanket.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘You haven’t finished your sandwich. Come and sit down and put your feet up and tell me what you were planning.’

She laughed wryly. ‘I didn’t have any plans,’ she confessed, feeling suddenly lost again. ‘I was just winging it, getting through a day at a time. And Dad hasn’t really asked very much about the baby’s father. Just how could I have been so silly and that I’d have his support. He wants me to move back in with him, but I don’t want to.’

‘Lucy, you can’t stay here,’ he said, his voice appalled, and she felt her mouth tighten.

‘Why not? Don’t come in here and start insulting my home, Ben.’

‘I’m not insulting your home, sweetheart, but look at it. It’s tiny, and it’s up a steep hill and a narrow flight of stairs, with no parking outside—where do you keep your car? The surgery? That’ll be handy in the pouring rain when you’ve got a screaming baby and all your shopping.’

She bit her lip, knowing he was right and yet not wanting to admit it. Of course the flat wasn’t suitable for a baby, and she’d been meaning to find somewhere else, but anything rented was usually in holiday lets in the summer, and she couldn’t afford those rates, not unless she went back to work, and buying somewhere in the village on a part-time salary probably wasn’t an option either.

‘I don’t suppose he’s any nearer to accepting that I wasn’t to blame for your mother’s death?’ he suggested, and Lucy shook her head.

‘I don’t think so. He wasn’t very pleased this morning when Kate announced that it was you coming.’

A frown pleated his brow. ‘Really? But it was decided weeks ago. Kate said everyone was fine with it. I assumed he must know.’

She met his eyes, and realisation dawned. ‘She’s worked it out,’ she said slowly. ‘She knows you’re the father. Well, at least, she knows I don’t have a life outside Penhally, because she can see the surgery car park from her house up behind it, and she’ll know my car’s always there unless I’m out on a call or visiting friends, and she can see my window here—that’s her house over there,’ she said, pointing out to him the pretty little cottage tucked against the hillside above the surgery. ‘So there’s nothing I can do without her knowing, and if I had a man, believe me, Penhally would be talking about it. And the last man I was seen with was you, and of course she knows we’d worked together, that we were friends.’

‘I don’t know how you can stay in this place,’ he said gruffly, and sighed. ‘You reckon she knows?’

‘I think so. She gave us a look as we left the surgery.’

‘A look?’

‘Yeah—one of those knowing ones.’

He grinned a little crookedly. ‘Ah. Right. And do you think she’ll tell your father?’

Lucy felt a little bubble of hysterical laughter rising in her chest. ‘I wish. Maybe that way he’d calm down before I had to talk to him about it.’

‘You really think it’ll be that bad?’

She stared at him blankly. ‘You don’t have any idea, do you? Because you haven’t seen him since Mum died, apart from the lifeboat barbeque. Ben, he—’ She broke off, not knowing quite how to put it, but he did it for her, his voice soft and sad.

‘Hates me? I know. I’ve already worked that out. And I can see why.’

‘But it wasn’t your fault!’ she said, searching his face and finding regret and maybe a little doubt. ‘Ben, it wasn’t. The inquiry exonerated you absolutely. Mum died because she didn’t tell anyone how sick she was until it was too late. I wasn’t there, Dad was too busy setting up the practice with Marco, and she downplayed it just too long.’

‘Lucy, she died because when she arrived in the A and E department she didn’t check herself in straight away, so nobody flagged her up as urgent, nobody kept an eye on her, nobody realised she was there until they found her collapsed in the corner. There’d been a massive RTA, there were ambulances streaming in, we were on the verge of meltdown—I don’t have to explain it to you. You know the kind of mayhem I’m talking about, you’ve seen it all too often. I was trapped in Resus, the walking wounded were way down the list. Too far. And the other people waiting just thought she was asleep, instead of which she’d all but OD’d on painkillers and by the time we got to her it was too late.’

‘They said her appendix had ruptured. She must have been in so much pain. I knew she’d been feeling rough but I had no idea how rough. It must have been agony.’

‘Yes. Hence the painkillers. She’d obviously had a hell of a cocktail. We found codeine and paracetamol and ibuprofen and aspirin in her bag. The codeine must have knocked her out, but it was the aspirin that killed her. By the time she arrived at the hospital, she was too woozy to talk to anyone. The CCTV footage shows her stumbling to a chair in the corner and sitting down, and because she didn’t check in or tell anyone how bad she felt, she was overlooked until it was too late. You know how aspirin works—it’s an anticoagulant, like warfarin, and it stops the platelets clumping to arrest a bleed in the normal way. And with the rupture in her abdomen, she just bled out before we could get to it. If your father hadn’t phoned her mobile, she wouldn’t have been found until she was dead. It was only because the phone kept ringing and she was ignoring it that the alarm was raised. And we did everything we could at that point, but it just wasn’t enough, and everything we touched was breaking down and starting another bleed. And I can tell you how sorry I am for ever, but it won’t bring her back.’

She shook her head and squeezed her eyes shut to close out the images, but they wouldn’t be banished, and she knew her father had seen it because they’d called him immediately to ask if he knew why she might be there, and he’d arrived while they had been in Resus, fighting for her life, and had insisted on going in. It must have been hideous for him, but it didn’t change the facts. ‘It wasn’t your fault,’ she told Ben yet again.

‘I was in charge. I know I wasn’t a consultant then, but I was the most senior person in the department that day, and so the responsibility rested with me.’

‘You’re not God.’

‘No. So I needed to be more careful, because I don’t just know everything, but things are different now that I’m a consultant and actually have some say. It couldn’t happen now. All patients are intercepted on their way into the department by the triage nurse, people waiting are checked at regular intervals, and I insist on being constantly alerted to what’s happening in my department. I can’t let it happen again.’