Page 19 of Mending Hearts at the Cornish Country Hospital (The Cornish Country Hospital #6)

Drew pushed the door of the refrigerated cabinet closed and laid a hand against it.

Postmortems were never easy, but some of them were far harder than others, and this had been a tough one.

Whenever children were involved it was tragic, but this had been the most difficult for him personally since he’d taken on his role at St Piran’s.

The little girl had been nine when she’d died as a result of a brain tumour, the same illness that had taken Drew’s sister.

Flora was his reason for doing the job he did, and it killed him to think that in the more than twenty-five years since she’d died there hadn’t been the kind of advances he’d desperately hoped for.

He hadn’t wanted any other children to die the way she had and naively he’d been certain that the work he and others like him did would have contributed to finding a cure by now.

Even though he knew it didn’t make sense to blame himself for the fact that children were still dying from this unutterably awful disease, for once Drew couldn’t fall back on logic.

He still felt as if he’d let Flora down, and all the children who’d suffered the same fate.

He wasn’t sure yet whether he’d be asked to speak to the little girl’s parents about the results of the postmortem.

Occasionally he did talk to family members, but that was usually when the death had been unexpected or unexplained.

In those instances the family needed answers and an explanation only the postmortem could give.

Connie’s parents knew why she’d died: an aggressive brain tumour that had taken her from them less than six months after diagnosis.

The speed of Connie’s decline was unusual even with glioblastoma, and they probably wanted to know whether an earlier diagnosis could have changed things and given them more time with their beloved daughter.

But no matter what Drew was able to tell them, it wouldn’t change the outcome and that’s what he really wanted.

He didn’t want to see cases like this any more and his anger and frustration at the lack of progress in preventing deaths like Connie’s was close to boiling over.

‘You need to take a break, have at least an hour away from here before we do anything else.’ Drew’s instruction to Saskia left no room for argument, but his assistant clearly realised she wasn’t the only one who needed to follow that advice.

‘I will if you will.’ The team had been short-staffed due to illness, and both he and Saskia had been working long hours for the past week, forgoing breaks as often as possible. But they couldn’t push on through, not today.

‘I will.’ Drew nodded. He couldn’t wait to get the PPE off and be outside in his normal clothes, breathing in air that didn’t smell of formaldehyde, but there was something he needed to say to Saskia first. ‘That was tough, but you did really well.’

‘So did you.’ She laid a hand on his shoulder for a moment and then turned away.

There was nothing left to say, nothing more they could do for Connie, and Drew had to get out of there.

He needed to go somewhere to find some peace and try to escape from the thoughts racing through his head, and he knew exactly where he wanted to go.

* * *

St Piran’s was a busy hospital, but if you knew where to look there were a few places around the grounds where a bit of quiet contemplation was possible.

Drew knew all of them. As someone with a neurodiversity that had gone undiagnosed for the first two decades of his life, he could do a good job of masking and pretending to be like everyone else if he tried.

Sometimes it wasn’t that difficult to understand the way that other people expected him to act, but sometimes it was, and either way it was exhausting keeping up the pretence.

He’d been told during his medical training that he needed to smile more, and it had felt like his face was a mask he couldn’t take off.

He’d spent most of his life anticipating other people’s expectations and trying to live up to them, instead of just being who he was.

The environment he worked in and the life he’d chosen to lead, meant he didn’t have to put on that act nearly so often these days.

Yet there were still times when he did, and that’s why he valued these quiet spaces so much, places he could come to and just be.

There was an area behind the Thornberry Centre, where the oncology unit was housed, which had been made into a memorial garden that was almost always quiet.

Maybe it was a strange choice of place to decompress, given how much cancer had taken from Drew, but he always felt at peace in the garden.

It was as if he could feel Flora’s presence there somehow, despite the fact that she’d died hundreds of miles away, in a children’s hospice near Edinburgh.

Seeing Connie had been such a gut-wrenching reminder of the last time he’d seen his sister and all the pain he’d tried so hard to bury had threatened to come rushing to the surface.

It had been almost unbearable, and it was the closest he’d ever come to not being able to do his job.

Three decades after her death, he still wished with all his heart that Flora was still around.

The only part of his family Drew had left now was their father, and it was pushing the definition of family to even describe them that way.

If Flora hadn’t died, maybe their mother wouldn’t have become addicted to prescription painkillers, finding dangerous ways to source more supplies when the prescribed medication was no longer enough.

And maybe Drew wouldn’t have felt the need to be her everything and try to fill all the gaps his sister had left behind.

He wouldn’t have had to try so hard to be the perfect son, and to push aside all of his quirks in order to be the ‘normal’ boy she so desperately wanted.

Deep down he knew that no one could be responsible for someone else’s happiness, just like he’d said to Eden.

But that didn’t stop him feeling guilty for not doing a good enough job of being the kind of boy his mother had wanted him to be, otherwise she wouldn’t have continued spiralling in the way she had.

It wasn’t logical to blame himself for her unhappiness, but even someone who usually saw things as black and white as he did couldn’t apply the rules in such a simple way.

That was the trouble with feelings and emotions, they messed with logic, and it was why he had often found them so difficult to navigate.

‘I need it to numb the pain of losing Flora.’ Drew’s mother had pleaded with him more than once to steal medication from the hospital where he was training to feed her habit.

He’d seen what the pain of losing her daughter had done to her, and how his father’s impatience at her inability to move on from that loss had compounded that pain.

But Drew had never considered stealing the medication she desperately wanted – it was a line he couldn’t cross even for her.

He had no way of knowing for sure whether his mother would still have died, even if Flora had lived.

He doubted that she’d ever been happy in her marriage.

His mother had been warm and loving, and had longed for their family unit to be the centre of everything, but she’d picked the wrong husband for that.

That had probably been what had sealed her fate, long before her children were born, let alone before she’d so tragically lost her only daughter.

‘Are you okay, Drew?’ He recognised Eden’s voice before he even looked up from the bench.

‘I’m fine, thank you.’ It wasn’t true, but something else he’d learned over the years was that most people didn’t want to hear how you really were and Drew had never been comfortable talking about emotions anyway.

It had surprised him just how much he’d opened up to Eden when they’d gone to the country park.

She’d shared so much with him about her relationship with Teddie’s father and he’d felt he’d had to offer up something about his own life.

Although there’d been more to it than that, because he’d found himself wanting to tell her, not just feeling as though he should.

But he didn’t want to offload on her now, she had problems of her own, she wouldn’t want to know about his.

‘I’m glad you’re fine, but I’m not sure I am.’ It was only when Eden responded that he realised he hadn’t asked her how she was, another social cue he’d missed. ‘Do you mind if I sit down? I won’t be offended if you say no.’

‘I think you might be.’ Drew looked directly at her and raised his eyebrows, making her laugh.

‘Alright you’ve got me, maybe I will be offended.’

‘You’d better sit down in that case.’ Drew’s smile was genuine; he liked making her laugh. But then he remembered what she’d said about not being fine and the smile slid off his face. ‘Are you having a bad day?’

‘I got some sad news when I came on shift. I saw a patient not long after I started here, a little girl. She was being sick and complaining about pain in her head. I hoped at first that it might be a migraine, but I was scared it could be something far worse.’ Eden swallowed so hard it was audible.

‘And sadly it turned out to be the worst possible kind of something else: an inoperable brain tumour. I hoped so much that Connie might get longer than anyone thought, but I found out from one of the other nurses that she died the day before yesterday. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about her and I know she was in the Thornberry Centre for her treatment, so I just wanted to be here on my break.

It’s silly really, there’s nothing I can do to help her family, but it felt like the right thing to do.

God, I’m sorry, I always seem to spill out all of my problems to you; maybe you should start charging me for your time. ’