City of Secrets by Mary Hoffman

Author:Mary Hoffman
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3, pdf
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA Childrens
Published: 2008-07-18T17:00:00+00:00

In the ICU Vicky Mulholland was still sitting with Jago’s mother, who had fallen into an exhausted doze in her chair. The boy was stable but still unconscious and Vicky was finding it harder and harder to stay positive for her friend. The nights were always the worst, she remembered. The lights of the ward dimmed, voices lowered and the blackness outside the window all made the hours pass more slowly and the hope that came with the dawn was often illusory.

Vicky thought back over the last three or four years. There had been the awful period of Lucien’s first illness, his chemotherapy, which robbed him of his black curls, and then what now felt like a sort of reprieve when he had been well enough to come with her and David to Venice. It hadn’t been long after that when they saw the hospital consultant and had been told that the brain tumour had returned.

But there had been something strange about Lucien’s last weeks, something that the doctors in this hospital hadn’t understood. He shouldn’t have gone into a coma but he had and all his brain activity had ceased. The day she and David had stood and watched Lucien’s breathing machine turned off had been the worst of her life. She could understand very well what Celia Jones was going through.

After the funeral of her son, Vicky had believed herself to be losing her reason. Not just mad with grief, which she recognised was part of what was happening to her, but genuinely, unpredictably mad. She had started to see Lucien in the streets of Islington. Of course David had said it was her imagination – until he saw him himself.

There hadn’t been many such sightings and they didn’t last long but the parents had to live with this secret; there was no question of telling anyone else.

And then, two years ago, the mystery that was Nicholas had landed on her doorstep, literally. A beautiful boy, with curly black hair, wounded in body and mind, needing a mother. Even though he was now a six foot plus fencing champion without even a trace of a limp, he was still the greatest single reason that she had survived Lucien’s death. Vicky had never shaken off the notion that Nick was somehow Lucien’s present to her.

It was ridiculous but no more so than seeing your dead son standing outside your house.

Vicky stretched her back muscles. She couldn’t face another cup of hospital coffee. She wanted to go home, to look in on Nick as he slept in the room that had once been Lucien’s and then to slip into bed beside her sleeping husband and take reassurance from him along with his warmth. But Celia needed her and she would stay.

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