Page 39 of The Girlfriend

L AURA DIDN’T LEAVE THE HOSPITAL, FEARING THAT IF SHE DID , Daniel would die when she wasn’t there.

She called Mrs. Moore to put aside some clean clothes and sent a cab to pick them up.

At night, she slept on a temporary bed next to his that the nurses had put up for her.

Howard came as much as he could, but his work meant that he had to spend at least a couple of hours in the office every day.

The nurses said that often they could tell when a patient “didn’t have very long” and would tell Laura so she could call her husband if that time came.

Four days in, she noticed that some of the flowers were dying.

It depressed her that they should mirror what was going on in the bed and she plucked them out with distaste.

She didn’t even want them in the bin in the room and took them outside to dispose of elsewhere.

As she closed the door behind her and started to walk down the corridor, she heard something, a deviation from the rhythm of the beeps that had become as familiar to her as her own heartbeat.

A nurse rushed past her. Jesus, thought Laura, he’s died!

He’s died as soon as I left the room. She let out an anguished wail and ran back in, rushing up to the bed, desperate to hold him, for it not to be too late.

Dr. Bell had come in a split second after her.

“Mrs. Cavendish, if you could just give us some room,” he said, and the nurse firmly took her by the elbow and moved her aside as he ran his eyes over Daniel and the monitors.

“He’s trying to breathe. ”

Laura stared incredulously. “He’s what?”

“Breathe. On his own.” Dr. Bell smiled and looked at the readouts. “Three breaths in the last minute. Well, well, well.”

She shook her head. “I don’t understand.”

“He’s breathing independently. Some of the time. It’s good news,” he said cautiously. “I think we’ll trial him with the ventilator, change it so it reduces the amount of work it has to do. Let’s see if he can take on more.”

“Oh, my God.”

“He’ll be carefully monitored over the next twenty-four hours as we see how much his lungs want to take on.”

“Then what?”

“Let’s just deal with the next few hours first,” said Dr. Bell kindly.

* * *

Laura was ecstatic—for a few minutes—and then she’d swing back to despair again.

It was just a cruel trick, medicine playing with her emotions, offering a strange grasp at life before Daniel left her for good.

She stayed glued to his bedside, watching him, staring at his chest, her eyes willing on every breath that he seemed to take.

She asked the nurse exactly what each of the numbers on the machine meant, which were related to his lungs, and got obsessed with willing it to register another breath.

She barely slept that night, lying close to him on her makeshift bed, getting up every hour or so just to check the monitors.

Early the next morning, she and Howard waited impatiently for Dr. Bell’s prognosis.

“He’s doing extremely well. In fact, I think we should take him off the ventilator.”

Laura turned to Howard and they exchanged radiant, tense smiles, hardly daring to believe what was happening.

“I’m just going to remove the ET tube.” As he disconnected the ventilator, then gently took out the endotracheal tube that fed down into Daniel’s lungs, Daniel suddenly coughed and his eyes opened .

“Oh, my God,” said Laura, her hands to her face.

“Daniel, can you hear me?” said Dr. Bell, placing an oxygen mask on him. “You’re perfectly safe, you’re in the hospital. My name is Dr. Bell and I’m here to look after you.”

Daniel stared around wildly, uncomprehendingly.

“Don’t panic, everything’s fine. I’m going to hold your hand and I want you to blink if you can hear me.”

For a few seconds, nothing happened. Then he blinked and Laura was filled with a joy that weakened her even as it exploded through her body and tears poured uncontrollably down her face.

“You’re in the hospital and your mum and dad are here.”

“I’m here, I’m here,” said Laura, wiping away her tears as she went to him and took his other hand. He looked at her, but she wasn’t sure if he could see.

“You’ve had an accident, but you’re getting better,” said Dr. Bell.

Daniel’s eyes closed again and Laura panicked. “What’s happened?”

“It’s perfectly normal. He’ll come round gradually, regain his orientation over time.”

“So he’s okay?”

“We’ll know more later, maybe over the next few days and weeks, but this is very good.”

* * *

Daniel’s recovery started slowly, and Laura, at first, was constantly reminded of how much he couldn’t do, how it took him two weeks just to sit up in bed, how he still needed to be fed, how the sores on his body and lips took so long to heal, but gradually she noticed little parts of him coming back to her.

A smile, a hoarse word, a moment of lucidity—and after each of these, she was amazed at the progress he’d made.

“It’s because he’s young and he wants to get better,” said Dr. Bell, and Laura felt an immense pride that Daniel was so determined .

She would stare at him in wonder, amazed by the transformation.

The doctors repeatedly reminded her that there was a long way to go: He could still have some damage to the brain; his memory could be affected.

Laura, though, was filled with euphoria and brushed these warnings aside.

So caught up was she in his recuperation that at first she forgot about Cherry.

Then, in the kitchen one evening, preparing a meal for herself and Howard, it came back to her like a steam train, fast, thundering, flattening everything in its path. I told Cherry he was dead.

It was a huge problem, but something she didn’t want to deal with at that moment.

All her thoughts were taken up with Daniel’s recovery and the work involved, the physiotherapy, the speech therapy, the time spent just talking to him, encouraging him.

She didn’t want that interrupted or complicated in any way, and Cherry was most definitely a complication.

Laura had a vision of Cherry sucking the new life out of him, telling lies, emotionally manipulating him with her eye on the prize, and she felt a wave of fear.

Although recovering well, he was nowhere near his optimum strength, and Laura pushed aside the guilt and told herself it was the best thing for him that Cherry was kept away for now.

She went down to the den to get some wine for their meal and saw Howard thrashing out laps in the pool.

She realized she’d have to think of something to tell him, something to explain Cherry’s absence.

Thank God he hadn’t asked about her; presumably, he’d also been so involved in Daniel, he hadn’t thought to.

What on earth could she say? She felt panicked as she remembered what she’d done, the lie she’d told, and quickly moved through the pool room to the cellar and grabbed a chilled bottle of Chablis from the fridge.

As she made her way back upstairs, she saw something wet on the floor, a patch of glistening tiles, and she bent down to investigate.

It seemed to be water, but it hadn’t come from the pool.

A languid drip fell onto her hair, and, startled, she looked up.

She was right underneath the opaque window.

She frowned. Had it come from there? It was too far to see, but that would mean there was a leak .

“What’s the matter?” called Howard.

“I think we’ve got a leak.”

He swam over and stared up at the ceiling. “What? We’ve only just got the tiles repaired. Bloody next-door builders.”

“I’ll get in touch with them.”

Later, as she and Howard sat down at the table, she tentatively broached the subject.

“By the way, I spoke to Cherry a few weeks ago.”

“Yes? What day’s she been visiting?”

Laura hid her trembling hands under the table. “She’s moved on.”

He put down his glass of wine. “What?”

“Yes, I’m afraid she came to the decision just after she returned from holiday.”

“That was ages ago. You didn’t mention it.”

“I didn’t think it important—too caught up in Daniel, you know, the bad news we thought we had.”

“So she doesn’t know he’s come round?”

“No, she does. That’s why I called her.” It was another lie, her fourth now. One was breeding another.

“Does he know?”

“I haven’t brought it up, and he hasn’t mentioned her. But I think he may have guessed.” She paused. “I think we need to protect him. If he does say something, I think it might be easier to take if he thinks she walked away some months ago.”

Howard was silent for a moment, angry at what his son still had to go through, then nodded.

For a moment, Laura couldn’t quite believe how easy it was. Then she breathed a silent sigh of relief and pushed the whole thing to the back of her mind.

* * *

Two months after regaining consciousness, Daniel finished his physio session, and after getting back into his chair, he sat back exhausted. It hurt him, she could see that in his eyes, and she was about to tell him how well he was doing when he spoke first .

“Where’s Cherry?”

A thick layer of dread stuck in her throat.

This was her chance, the moment she could put things right.

She could just say something about Cherry giving him space to recover, that she was dying to see him.

She could tell Cherry—What? That she’d been delirious?

Deranged with grief that her son had been given only a day or two to live?

Life had taken on a new joy, a new purpose, since Daniel had come back to her.

It was as if someone or something had decided at the very last second not to take away her remaining child, despite her failing to keep her promise.

Because she had failed. She’d said she would protect him, never let anything happen to him, and in return he would be kept safe.

No carelessness like with Rose, no misjudged calls.

That had been the deal. And she’d failed to keep her side of it.

She’d invited Cherry into the family. Yes, Daniel was dating her, but Laura had encouraged it without even a thought to who the girlfriend was.

She’d asked her to come to France. God, at one point, she’d even looked upon her as some sort of surrogate daughter.

Laura shuddered. She’d failed so abysmally and yet had been given another chance.

What kind of mother was she if she just let Cherry waltz back in again?

She suddenly sat up straight. Was she mad? How many warnings did she need to get?

“She’s not been to see you for a while,” she said regretfully, pained. It wasn’t a lie, but it wasn’t the whole truth either. The look on his face told her everything; he’d deducted that she’d left him when he was in a coma.

He stared out the window for a bit and Laura looked away, feeling awful. She had a sudden urgent impulse to tell him it wasn’t true. But the seconds ticked on and she said nothing.

Daniel continued to improve and didn’t mention Cherry again.

But Laura still worried. What if he tried to get hold of her?

Once, when they were in the hospital gardens, taking a slow walk because his leg muscles were still so wasted, she tentatively brought it up.

They’d been talking about his old school friends visiting that weekend and it seemed like the right time .

“Are you going to get in touch with Cherry?”

“No.”

And the subject was closed. Although she was relieved that he seemed to have moved on, part of her knew it would only take a simple call to unravel everything.

His phone was in a box upstairs, in her dressing room.

She went home that night and was going to delete Cherry’s number, just to make sure she left their lives forever, but then realized that it would look a bit odd if it was the only one gone.

So she took the phone outside on the patio and smashed it, taking the SIM out and destroying that too.

She stared at the pieces and then hurriedly gathered them up and tied them in a plastic bag.

She buried them under some rubbish in the trash can, glad the garbage men were coming the next day.

The whole thing made her distinctly uncomfortable.

The only reassurance was that she knew she was getting to the end of the fallout of her lie.

The loose ends were being tied up. No one knew anyone’s number by heart anymore.

Everyone relied on their mobiles so much; they told their owners where to walk, whether they were going to get rained on, and they stored their contacts so that most people didn’t even know the number of their own mother.

Daniel was no doubt the same and would have inputted Cherry’s number into his phone once only—not even that if she’d called him from hers and then he saved it, and he would never have dialed it again.

The phone would have done the work for him.

She got him a new phone, telling him the old one had gone missing somewhere from hospital to hospital.

It had a new number, just in case Cherry should accidentally call him.

But there was still one thing. Something that made her stomach churn with worry.

Cherry still worked a mere ten-minute walk from the house.

If Daniel were to pass by her office . .

. well, it didn’t bear thinking about. It tormented her, kept her awake at night, and she didn’t know what to do.

It was the doctors who gave her the idea.

It was only temporary, but it would give her some time to think.

They said that Daniel was ready to go home soon, but he still had weeks of physio to do: swimming, walking, and lots of recuperation.

She knew exactly what to do; they would go to France, where it was warm.

Daniel agreed without a murmur and Laura was deeply relieved.

She booked their flights for the day he was discharged.