In Her Boss's Special Care by MELANIE MILBURNE

Author:MELANIE MILBURNE
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2013-09-17T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER ELEVEN

ALLEGRA arrived in ICTU the following morning well before her shift officially began, and painstakingly looked through the printouts on Tommy’s BIS monitor. There had been no change, which was dispiriting enough, but with the deadline Joel had now attached to the case, the sense of urgency seemed all the more gut-wrenching. She had hardly slept for thinking about the little boy’s life, how he would look in five, ten years’ time if he survived. Would he retain the slight build of his mother, or during adolescence develop the shorter and thicker set of his father? Would he do well at school? What sort of sense of humour would he have?

And what about his aunt? Was Tommy close to her? Did he understand at his young age the difficulties of his father’s relationship with his own parents, Tommy’s grandparents? Did he see much of his mother’s parents and if not, why not?

There were so many unanswerable questions that she was finding difficult enough—how much worse would it be being the parent and never having those questions answered? She had seen that level of devastating grief on the faces of Julie’s parents all those years ago and more recently on the faces of Robyn and Jeff Greeson as their precious daughter’s chest had moved up and down for the very last time. Allegra had seen the pain flash across their faces as they’d come to terms with the fact that they would never know what their daughter would have looked like on her wedding day, never know what sort of man she would have fallen in love with. Every birthday, Christmas or special anniversary would no longer be a cause for celebration but a reminder of their unrelenting pain.

Statistics showed most couples didn’t survive the loss of a child and it was easy to see why. The burden of grief was like a sharp, invisible knife that progressively severed the ties of even the closest couple with cruelly isolating dissection. Allegra had felt it herself all the way through medical school and beyond. She’d felt as if she’d been walled inside a see-through barrier that no one could penetrate. She’d been cut away from the rest of her peers by the experience of her closest friend’s suicide, and her guilt and sense of inadequacy had been intensified by that ongoing isolation.

Allegra looked up from Tommy’s notes to see Judy, the nurse in charge of Kate Lowe’s room, approach. Judy had been the one who had been on duty when Kate Lowe’s ventilator had been sabotaged two nights previously.

‘Dr Tallis? You’re in early this morning. I was just going to call you at home,’ Judy said. ‘I thought you might be interested in Mrs Lowe’s current condition.’

‘How is she?’ Allegra asked.

‘She’s extubated, and drifting in and out of lucidity,’ Judy informed her.

‘Has she said anything at any time during her conscious times?’

‘She’s said Tommy’s name several times and the nurse who covered for me over my break said she asked for Tommy’s aunt once or twice.

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