Their First Family Christmas Read online

  ‘I’ll call you when we’re through,’ the consultant said as she left. ‘Try not to worry—he’s going to get our platinum service.’

  Emma was left standing in the empty space where the bed had been. Littered around her were the plastic wrappers from syringes and IV supplies. The top of a glass drug ampoule was still spinning after being knocked and an ECG electrode was stuck to the floor where it had been dropped. There were no Christmas decorations in here because it had been deemed inappropriate for patients—and their families—who might be facing an unsuccessful conclusion to a life-threatening crisis.

  She could hear the sounds of a busy—and very well decorated—department just through the doors. Clearly, the first of the alcohol-related injuries were arriving, judging by the raised voices and the loud, tuneless singing of a Christmas carol that was happening out there.

  It was only then that she realised she was standing in the same resus area that she’d been in last Christmas Eve. Where she’d had to sit and hold the hand of her best friend as Sarah had taken her last breaths.

  She couldn’t hold back the tears by blinking now. Turning, she ripped some paper towels from the dispenser by the sink and pressed them to her face.

  Only a few minutes ago, she’d been blessed by one of those jewels of excitement but now she was teetering on the edge of that dark space she never wanted to enter again.

  It was all going wrong.

  There would be no decorating the Christmas tree tonight and attaching those very special ornaments to the top. How many tears had been quietly shed as she’d crafted those two little felt angels—a mummy one and a daddy one—in memory of Lily’s parents? Putting them in pride of place at the top of the tree and sharing a moment of remembrance was going to be a new, private Christmas tradition just for her special little family.

  Like kisses for Kissmas.

  She wouldn’t be hanging up the stocking that she had embroidered Lily’s name on, either. No putting carrots out for the reindeer. No squeezy cuddles or sticky kisses to make everything seem worthwhile.

  And no Jack, either.

  Had she really thought that this anniversary might be the one thing that would persuade him to come back?

  To see Lily, at least?

  She’d been hoping for far too much. But right now, it didn’t seem to matter. She needed to refocus those hopes and give them all to Stuart for the next few hours. Knowing that he was going to be all right was the only Christmas magic she needed now.

  ‘You okay, Emma?’

  ‘Mmm.’ A quick swipe with the paper towels and Emma was ready to turn around. ‘How’s it going, Caroline?’

  ‘Not good, I’m sorry. I can’t find anyone to come in. Alistair’s going to stay on, though, and I can probably find an extra registrar from somewhere. We’ve cancelled our drinks. Nobody’s really in the mood anymore...’

  ‘I’ll stay,’ Emma told her.

  ‘But—’

  ‘There’s no way I’m going home until I hear how Stuart’s doing and by then Lily will be fast asleep, so I may as well stay until the morning crew gets here.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘I’m sure. I just need to ring Mum and let her know what’s happening.’

  She was getting good at these white lies, wasn’t she? Emma wasn’t at all sure about this. It would mean she would still be in the department late this evening and how hard was it going to be not to remember every agonising detail about last year?

  But she didn’t have a choice.

  Any more than she had had a year ago, when she’d given that solemn promise to Sarah.

  She’d coped since then. And she would cope now.

  Because that was how things had to be.

  * * *

  Man, it was cold...

  Despite the full leather gear and a state-of-the-art helmet, Jack Reynolds was beginning to feel like he was frozen to the seat of the powerful motorbike beneath him.

  It was time he took a break but he was so close now. In less than an hour he’d be hitting the outskirts of Glasgow and then he could find his motel and thaw out with a long, hot shower.

  And tomorrow, he’d do something he’d sworn he’d never do.

  He would celebrate Christmas.

  Well...maybe celebrate wasn’t exactly the right word. This journey was more like the world’s biggest apology.

  He just happened to have a brightly wrapped gift in the pannier of his bike that the sales assistant in Hamleys—London’s best toy shop—had assured him would be perfect for an eighteen-month-old child. The little girl he hadn’t seen in nearly a year.

  His goddaughter.

  And his niece...

  A wave of the sensation that had grown from a flicker, that had been all too easy to bury months ago, to its current unpleasant burn generated a warmth that Jack would rather not be feeling right now, despite the chill of the wind seeping into his bones.

  An unfamiliar feeling that he could only identify as shame.

  Who knew that grief could mess with your head enough to turn you into someone you couldn’t even recognise?

  How painful was it to start realising how much that could have hurt others?

  At least Lily was too young to have been affected by it, but what on earth was he going to say to Emma to try and start mending bridges?

  He’d been unbelievably selfish, hadn’t he?

  It had been all about him. He’d lost his twin brother, Ben, in that dreadful accident and it had felt as if more than half of himself had died that night.

  But Emma had lost Sarah, who’d been her best friend forever, and they’d been as close as sisters. Closer than most sisters, probably. What had given him the right to think his loss had been greater?

  The traffic was building up as the M74 into Glasgow bypassed the township of Uddingston. Somewhere in the darkness to the left the river Clyde was shadowing his route into the city he’d never really expected to see again. He’d turned his back on everything there—and everyone—when he’d walked out all those months ago.

  The rain spattering his visor felt different now. There was a sludgy edge to it that was making visibility worse than it had been and the lights of the vehicles around him were blurred and fragmented. Signposts warned of the major road changes ahead where the M73 joined the M74.

  That was where it had happened, wasn’t it?

  Where Ben and Sarah had had the accident that had claimed their lives exactly a year ago today?

  Almost to the minute...

  There was a new burning sensation now, behind his eyes this time, and he recognised that feeling.

  It had been only a couple of weeks ago. In the burning heat of an African summer, when one of his colleagues had started reminiscing about English winters. About Christmas...

  He could have sworn that Ben was right beside him, giving him one of those none-too-gentle elbow nudges in his ribs. Saying the words that had been the last thing his brother had ever said to him.

  ‘See you tomorrow, bro. For once, you’re going to enjoy Christmas. Me and Sarah and Lily...we’re going to show you what Christmas is all about. Family...’

  It hadn’t been the first time he’d found a private spot with the view of nothing but desert but it had been the first time in forever that he’d cried. Gut-wrenching sobs that had been torn from his soul. And that was why he recognised this painful stinging sensation at the back of his eyes.

  It couldn’t happen now. Not in heavy traffic and with what looked like sleet getting thicker by the second. There was an exit lane ahead and he needed to change lanes and make sure he was well clear of any idiot who might decide to take the exit unexpectedly.

  Like that dodgy-looking small truck that was crossing the line directly in front of him.

  Tilti
ng his body weight, after checking there was a gap in the lane beside him, Jack flipped on his indicator and glanced over his shoulder again to check the lane was still clear.

  Where the hell had that car come from? And what did it think it was doing?

  No-o-o...

  * * *

  Text messages had been frequent over the last hour, including one that accompanied an adorable photo of Lily, bundled up like a little Eskimo in her puffy, pink jacket, with tinsel in her dark curls, crouching down to put an enormous carrot beside a bucket of water. Emma could see the ropes of the swing hanging from the branch of the old oak tree in the garden in the background so she knew exactly where the bucket had been placed.

  Exactly where she should have been, too.

  Just as well she was too busy to dwell on the unexpected turn her evening had taken.

  The waiting room was crowded but the curtained cubicles were all full right now. Every doctor had several patients to cover and Emma was trying to keep herself mobile so she could help wherever she was needed. She just had to decide on the priority as she looked at the list on the glass board.

  It wouldn’t be the drunk in Curtain Eight who’d been punched in the nose and had a septal haematoma that needed draining. Or the teenager that had downed enough alcohol at a work Christmas party to collapse. Someone else could supervise the administration of activated charcoal there. Was it the young woman with epigastric pain in Curtain Four? The dislocated shoulder in Curtain Two that needed sedation and relocation? That was a task that needed quite a lot of physical strength sometimes so she might need to wait until Alistair had a free moment, and he was busy sorting pain relief for that nasty foot fracture that had come in a little while ago when an elderly man had fallen from the ladder he was using to hang twinkly lights in a garden tree.

  The X-rays were up on the screen beside her and Emma couldn’t help leaning in for a closer look. A Lisfranc fracture and a fracture/dislocation of at least two other joints. This patient was going to need some urgent orthopaedic management as soon as pain relief was on board and a plaster back-slab applied. He’d need to be kept nil by mouth, too, in case a theatre slot became available.

  The baby, Emma decided. The one with the rash that looked like a bad reaction to antibiotics. She’d just pop her head into the side room and check that something had been given to settle the miserable infant and calm its mother.

  And she wouldn’t look at the clock on the way.

  It was getting too close to that time.

  The moment her world had started to fall apart this time last year. When those sliding doors had opened for two stretchers to be rolled in amongst a team of paramedics that all had the grim faces that advertised how bad this accident had been. With the policeman behind them carrying a baby in its car seat.

  Not that she had had any idea of how bad this really was. Neither had Jack, who was standing in one of the resus rooms, having been summoned as the orthopaedic component of the major trauma team that had gathered to receive the victims of the MVA out on the M74.

  The injuries had been so bad, he hadn’t even recognised his twin brother in those first minutes. It had been Emma who recognised Sarah on the second stretcher. Still conscious. Asking over and over whether Lily was all right and where was Ben?

  She’d had to go into Resus One. Just as Stuart was shaking his head before he glanced up at the clock.

  ‘Time of death, twenty-two thirty-five...’

  ‘Jack?’ It had been so hard to get the words out. ‘Jack...? I think...I think this might be Ben...I’m so, so sorry...’

  Later, she’d wondered if he’d already guessed but had been too shocked to process the information. You’d think that the kind of connection between twins would make it plausible but Jack and Ben had been opposite sides of the same coin, hadn’t they? Ben was the quiet one. The responsible one. The perfect husband and father material that Sarah couldn’t believe how lucky she’d been to find.

  Jack might have mirrored his brother’s career in medicine and achieved even greater popularity and success but he was the wild one of the pair.

  She’d been warned by Sarah to stay away from him.

  Jack had been warned by Ben to stay away from her.

  Not that their disobedience had mattered in the end, because any connection as far as Jack was concerned had evaporated in the instant she’d passed on that devastating news.

  It was another thing she’d lost that night...

  * * *

  Emma sucked in a deep breath. The noises around her seem to be amplified for a moment as she dragged herself back to the present. People shouting. Babies crying. A shriek of pain. Phones ringing. An ambulance call coming through on the radio. Caroline should have gone home ages ago but she was still there, fielding the calls.

  ‘Go ahead, Rescue Seven. Reading you loud and clear. Over...’

  ‘We’re coming to you with a thirty-six-year-old male, result of a motorbike accident on the M74. Query chest injury. Multiple contusions. Query fracture left tib/fib. Vital signs as follows: GCS fifteen, heart rate one-twenty...’

  Breathe, Emma told herself. Without thinking, she reached up to touch her hair, finding the inevitable tight curl that had sprung free from its clip and making sure it was trapped again. It was an action that always made her feel that little bit more in control.

  This was just another accident. Not even a particularly serious one, by the sound of things, but she wasn’t going to take anything for granted.

  ‘I’ll be in Resus One,’ she told Caroline.

  ‘Want me to activate the trauma team?’

  A GCS of fifteen meant that the victim was conscious and alert. Okay, he might have a chest injury but he was breathing well enough for the moment. Part of her job in charge of this department was to make sure she used potentially limited extra resources as wisely as possible.

  ‘Not yet. I’ll take a look at him first. How far away are they?’

  ‘About five minutes.’

  Emma couldn’t help glancing up at the clock as she walked into Resus One and pulled on a disposable gown and some gloves.

  Twenty-two thirty. It would probably be twenty-two thirty-five as they rolled the stretcher in.

  Breathe, she reminded herself again, as she heard the whoosh of the ambulance bay doors.

  Alistair came in and grabbed a gown, closely followed by a nurse. And then the stretcher arrived. Nothing could have prompted Emma to take a breath when she saw who was on the stretcher. The opposite happened as her body and brain both froze. There was just enough breath left to utter a single, horrified word.

  ‘Jack...?’

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE JOY CAME from nowhere.

  It caught her in that moment when Jack opened his eyes and his startled gaze met her own. When she saw the flare of recognition and something more... Relief that he was in a place he knew he’d be cared for? Or was it because he wanted to see her? Was it the reason he’d finally come back?

  It only lasted a heartbeat, that joy, but in that instant, every cell in Emma’s body was singing.

  He’s come back...

  Jack’s here...

  But following so closely on the heels of joy that it morphed with it and then took over was fear.

  He’s hurt...

  Maybe badly hurt...

  She could see the lines of pain etched on his face and in the way he was pressing his lips together as he closed his eyes again.

  This might be the biggest challenge of her career so far in not allowing emotional involvement to interfere with delivering clinical excellence but, to her surprise, Emma found she was up for it.

  It was a relief, even, to turn away from such overpowering feelings to something she knew she could handle. The paramedic who was giving a rapid but thor
ough handover had her full attention.

  ‘High-speed collision. Mr Reynolds got cut off by someone coming into his lane. He swerved, apparently, but lost control of the bike. GCS is fifteen but he may have been KO’d briefly. I suspect the bike landed on his left leg. We’ve splinted the possible tib/fib fracture there. The chest injury may have come from contact with the handlebars. One sleeve of his jacket got ripped so there’s road rash and a potential fracture on his left forearm.’

  ‘Got his helmet?’

  ‘Yes. Superficial damage but it’s not broken.’

  Emma nodded. She listened to the quick summary of the most recent vital signs and glanced at the monitor, which was showing a rapid but normal heart rhythm. His oxygen saturation level was also good.

  ‘Let’s get him on the bed.’

  As lead physician, it was Emma’s job to be at the head end of their patient. The ambulance crew had put a neck collar on Jack, quite correctly assuming that the mechanism of injury could mean he had a spinal injury, so she had to ensure that the transfer from stretcher to bed did not do anything to risk making it worse. Having the paramedics here was helpful in having enough people to do the job well.

  ‘Three on each side, please. On my count...’ Emma put her hands on either side of Jack’s head. Mostly, all she could feel was the plastic collar but at the base of her hands she could feel the warmth of his scalp. The softness of that shaggy black hair...

  ‘One...two...three...’

  A smooth transfer. Emma had a moment to scan her patient and assess his airway as her colleagues went into a well-rehearsed routine.

  Alistair was unhooking the leads of the ambulance monitor to replace them with their own. A nurse had a pair of shears in her hands.

  ‘I’m sorry, sir, but I’m going to have to cut the rest of your leathers...’

  Jack nodded, but didn’t say anything. His eyes were still shut.

  ‘Keep your head still,’ Emma reminded him. ‘We haven’t cleared your neck, yet. Your sats are good but are you having any trouble breathing?’

  ‘No.’