Read Online Emergency: Wife Lost and Found by Carol Marinelli - Free Book Online Page B

Wednesday.’
    ‘That’s good.’
    It wasn’t, actually. For Lorna it was daunting.
    ‘So will you go to your friend’s?’
    ‘I don’t think so. She’s away for another week and returning to find me in this state might be stretching the boundaries of friendship.’
    ‘Will you go to your parents’, then?’
    Lorna hesitated before answering. ‘I guess I’ll have to. I don’t know…’ Just the thought of sitting in the carfor the six-hour drive with her ribcage like this was bad enough, but with her father driving…Lorna closed her eyes at the horror of moving back there.
    ‘You don’t seem too pleased at the prospect. Are you not getting on?’
    ‘We haven’t got on for years, James.’
    ‘They were desperately worried about you.’
    ‘I’m their daughter,’ Lorna said. ‘They love me, of course they were worried when I was injured. They weren’t at all pleased that I was thinking of moving back to London. This is proof to them that I shouldn’t come.’
    Her phone bleeped then, more than a week’s worth of calls and texts all there, worried friends and family no doubt. She scrolled through them quickly, would get back to them later. It was actually the interview callbacks she really needed to hear about.
    ‘Do you want me to go?’ James offered, but she shook her head, rolling her eyes as she played back her messages, her pale cheeks tinging pink as four times, though nicely, though regretfully, she found out she’d been rejected.
    ‘Well, now I really do wish I’d just stayed home that day!’ She attempted a bright smile, but it faltered. ‘I don’t have enough experience…’
    ‘You’re a great doctor.’
    ‘You never knew me as a doctor,’ Lorna pointed out, ‘but, yes, I am. I’m just not the one they want for the job.’ She gave a small shrug, but it hurt to do so and she grimaced, not at the job loss but at the pain.
    ‘Do you need something for pain?’ James checked.
    ‘I had something an hour ago.’
    ‘Well, it isn’t working. They can be mean with painkillers.’ He stood up and picked up her chart, a doctor through and through. It didn’t enter his head that it might be intrusive. ‘You need to be doing some deep breathing and coughing if you don’t want to get a chest infection and two paracetamol aren’t…’ His voice trailed off. He even blinked a couple of times when he saw just how strong the painkillers were that she was on.
    ‘I’m on plenty.’ Lorna tried to make light of it. ‘It just hurts, that’s all. Apart from getting someone to knock me out, I’m just going to have to put up with it.’ She could see his worried features as he sat down. ‘Mr Braun did the rounds this morning and he explained how long the cardiac massage went on for. Add that to fractured ribs and a seat-belt injury, well, I’m just going to have to put up with it for a while.’
    ‘That bruise.’ James pointed to his own chest, but they both knew he meant hers. ‘How far does it go?’
    ‘Down to my stomach, under my arms. It really is quite spectacular!’ It was, black and purple now, smudged with dirty yellow around the edges. In Emergency she’d been lily white with just a few shiny new blue bruises, with her hypothermia there had been no real sign of the extensive bruising that would follow.
    ‘You poor thing.’ James said simply, and it was said in such a way that it was more a fact he delivered, a statement that touched somewhere inside, made her feel like someone understood, because bruising and rib fractures didn’t really describe the battering her body had taken. ‘Lorna,’ James said, ‘you can’t go home on Wednesday.’
    ‘I know,’ she answered, because since Mr. Braun had said that an hour or so ago, her mind had been goinglike a table-tennis ball, pinging back and forward with possibilities. As well as dealing with the pain, as well as remembering her baby, as well as seeing James, even if she looked as if she was just lying back on the