False Hope

by Lynne Lee

  ALSO BY LYNNE LEE

  Can You See Me?

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2021 by Lynne Lee

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781542017534

  ISBN-10: 154201753X

  Cover design by Tom Sanderson

  For Felix

  CONTENTS

  Start Reading

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  But I will wear my heart upon my sleeve

  For daws to peck at. I am not what I am.

  From Othello by William Shakespeare

  Chapter 1

  Brighton, Sunday 15th December 2019

  5.12 a.m.

  I have a well-developed sixth sense when it comes to calls in the small hours. So when my phone screen lit up that night, a fraction of a second before it rang, I automatically reached for it, even though I was still only half awake. It was Sid. Which was a relief. Not my mum again, thank goodness. Though it could have been, because she’d been making small-hours calls to me too. Two a.m. Four a.m. Would the next come at 6 a.m.? I knew I needed to do something about this new development, but what? I didn’t even have a clue what it was about yet.

  Our special nocturnal relationship meant I knew Sid would wait for me, so I peeled the duvet off and padded out on to the landing, then pulled the bedroom door shut again before answering. Not that Matt had stirred. Or was likely to, either. My husband, out of necessity, slept with earplugs.

  ‘So sorry to call again so early, Mrs Hamilton.’ Sid, short for Siddhant, was my surgical registrar. As ever, he was politeness personified. He was also conscientious, hard-working, and capable beyond his training grade, and barely a day (or night) passed when I didn’t count those blessings. I made another mental note, to remind him to stop apologising all the time. To understand that calling me, if he needed to, was exactly what he should do. ‘I just wanted to fill you in,’ he went on, ‘on a new trauma case, just come in. It’s a male. No ID yet. Late thirties, early forties. RTC overnight. Driving under the influence. Lost control – on the ice, they think – and hit a parked lorry at speed. Crush injury. Right forearm and hand. Significant soft-tissue loss. Open fractures. I couldn’t feel a radial pulse, and there’s mottling of the hand and fingers.’

  All of which was longhand for Serious. Please come in.

  ‘Extensive damage, then.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And how is he systemically?’

  ‘He’s in shock. Low GCS. But we suspect that’s to be expected. Alcohol, as I say, and they found drugs in the car too.’

  ‘Okay. Half an hour,’ I said. ‘I’ll meet you in resusc.’

  Having showered before bed, it was only the work of moments to get my clothes on, plus a minute or two more to scour my face and tie my hair back. I then checked on the boys, who were still sharing a bedroom, and not just because Daniel’s needed decorating. It had been four months since we moved in, but there were lots of big adjustments – new home, two new schools, brand-new friendships to make and navigate. It was taking its toll on them both – especially Dillon. Where his older brother, like his dad, seemed to adapt to change with equanimity, Dillon was a fretter, a chronically anxious little soul. I understood. It was a lot to deal with. A lot for us all to deal with. The Christmas holidays really couldn’t come soon enough.

  Both were soundly, sweetly sleeping, though, in their own idiosyncratic ways – Daniel face down and starfished, Dillon coiled into a little comma. I touched the warm shapes beneath the duvets only fleetingly and lightly, so as not to wake them, before heading downstairs.

  I continued on autopilot in the kitchen, assembling phone, bag and car keys. And while the machine spat strong coffee into my travel mug for the journey, I chatted, as had become something of a habit, to Mr Weasley, the toffee-coloured hamster who’d become part of the family when we’d moved here. Along with the magnificent tree house Matt had promised to build for the boys come the spring, he’d been a sweetener, a bribe, and, seeming to know that, he regularly nipped the boys to remind them. But the two of us had struck up an unlikely small-hours friendship.

  But perhaps it wasn’t so unlikely, I thought, as I watched him clean his whiskers. Though his hours were from choice, and mine professional necessity, we were both creatures of the night.

  Out into the garage, then, where my car was parked, so I’d be spared having to scrape a frozen windscreen. At this time of year, when on call, I took precedence. Or rather – another flashpoint among several at the moment – my patients did.

  I reversed out on to the drive, into the lane, into the inky winter night. Despite the cold and dark, I was more than happy to get going. Most of the stress of being on call was in the anticipation, after all.

  A bit like Christmas, which was now just ten days away. And the journey into work, at least the first part, the wooded part (the reason we’d ‘agreed’ to move out here to ‘the bloody sticks’ part), was as Christmas-biscuit-tin perfect as I’d hoped it would be. Were Daniel and Dillon in the car with me, I’d be seeing it that way too. Beautiful. Ethereal. Breathtaking. Narnian. As it was, I saw one thing only. Ice.

  Ice as bone breaker. Life-changer. Maker of all kinds of trouble. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my years as an orthopaedic surgeon, it’s that where there is ice there will always be trouble. Which in my line of work equals Trauma.

  The capital ‘T’ Trauma that dictates much of my work life is the ‘T’ to the ‘O’ of Orthopaedics. Though they coexist in the job spec, it’s an unequal pairing. Trauma, my sub-speciality, is the upstart who holds the power. It trumps routine orthopaedics every time, because it has to. It also has its own hierarchy, which is strict and unchanging, because not all medical traumas are created equal.

  So I couldn’t help but feel sorry for the two elderly patients, both of whom had suffered hip fractures, who were already on my morning list. Starved overnight, having waited patiently since their own mishaps yesterday, they might, given this new casualty, now be waiting even longer. If I could save his arm, that was. I hoped I could.

  I was in luck. When I arrived, there was still one on-call parking space free, which would save me having to find a space in the staff car park and, of course, time. You mean you don’t even get your own parking space by now? Matt was incredulous about that. I wasn’t. As our careers had progressed – his in priv
ate-sector engineering, mine in public-sector medicine – so the gulf in our respective professional expectations had widened.

  Time was of the essence, too, because I didn’t need my patient’s low GCS score to tell me that he was in serious trouble. The moment I saw him, it was all too obvious.

  Bloodied and barely conscious, he was already being intubated, and his face, blackened and bruised, was a bloated, angry mess, all but obscured by the mask and paraphernalia attached to him and the dressing that covered much of his forehead. Whoever he was, one thing I did know, even before I properly examined him, was that it wasn’t just his Sunday morning that had been derailed. Or even just his Christmas. Every aspect of his life would now be dramatically changed too.

  It was the sort of thing I saw all the time at work, this colossal change in patients’ fortunes; a constant reminder that no one’s future was guaranteed. It was something I’d understood, almost intuitively, since I was fourteen, when I’d stumbled upon a book of short stories by Ray Bradbury. One, A Sound of Thunder, involved a time-travelling safari, in which a frightened hunter (there to shoot a T-rex that the guides knew was already going to die shortly afterwards) left the designated path. In doing so, he accidentally stepped on a butterfly, and when he returned to 2055 – his own time – everything had changed. In science, it’s called the butterfly effect.

  It was something I now reflected on as I approached my battered patient. Another night, a different route, less treacherous weather – and things might have turned out very differently.

  Both photographs and bloods had already been taken, and there was the usual gaggle of medical professionals clustered around his bed. Sid, plus the senior house officer, the emergency duty registrar, and two nurses. Plus two policemen, whose continuing presence told its own story. First on the scene, they wouldn’t leave till they’d got what they needed, to be sure they were in possession of what were probably damning facts. That the patient was intoxicated, incapacitated, and in possession of illegal drugs.

  That – at least from the point of view of the law, their department – he was as culpable as the ice that had caught him out.

  I wondered what had happened, beyond the obvious fact that he had pulverised his right arm. I wondered what chain of events (the injury was several hours old now) had taken him from one place – travelling home, travelling to work, travelling somewhere, still able-bodied – to the forced quit and reboot that was happening to him now.

  ‘Busy night, then?’ I asked Sid, as I approached to inspect the limb.

  ‘Just a bit,’ he agreed, stepping aside to let me examine it. Despite the adrenaline rush I knew he’d have had, knowing what was coming, he still looked exhausted; the default status for junior doctors everywhere. ‘The police doctor has already taken bloods,’ he went on. ‘He’s just left. And I’ve spoken to theatres; the team in two is prepped and waiting, and the consultant anaesthetist is on his way in.’

  I nodded approval – I was also pleased to see they’d left the tourniquet in place – and he watched silently as I made my assessment. Which didn’t take long. Bad as it was, the man was lucky to be alive. Had it not been for the sub-zero temperatures, and the fact that his upper arm was apparently pinioned between the two vehicles, he would almost certainly have bled to death before they found him. Because what I was examining was no longer recognisable as an arm. Just a collection of shattered bone shards, clots of blood, a muddle of snapped nerves and tendons, shreds of flayed skin, and strands of muscle fibre – all of it pulverised into a mash of stringy pink pulp. Had I any hope of reconstructing such a mess? Any realistic hope?

  The more I saw, the more I doubted. Sid had been conservative, even optimistic, staying on the hopeful side of stating the obvious – that the fixed mottling of what was left of the skin on the pulps of his fingers meant the damage was almost certainly irreversible. Which wasn’t surprising; he had all but amputated his own arm already. My only contribution now, surely, could be to finish the job.

  While Sid prepared the patient – currently known only, and perhaps appropriately, as Mr Hotel Trauma – I headed off to scrub up at the sink, already second-guessing the amended timeline of my day. This wouldn’t take long. Perhaps an hour. Much less than a reconstruction. The two scheduled hip fractures might yet be done by lunchtime, this man’s terrible loss their unlikely gain. Though if I saw the day out without at least one other ice-related injury, it would be a Christmas miracle.

  It was just approaching six by the time I was gowned up and ready, and while Justin the anaesthetist put lines into the patient, I thought about Matt, almost certainly asleep still, though by now on my side of the bed, and whether the latest arguments about Mum (as most arguments were about these days) would be more or less complicated by her new nocturnal habit. Glancing over at my phone – which I obviously couldn’t touch now – I saw another missed call from her, bang on cue.

  It could be worse, I told myself. Because that was always the best thing to do. After all, seeing worse, day in, day out, was what I did. Always a great way to maintain a sense of perspective. Especially when other lives were in your hands.

  And this life, at least for now, was no longer at risk, thankfully, and the amputation looked pretty straightforward. Almost textbook, in fact, and I soon lost myself within it; tinkering with the workings of a human body was a daily, compelling wonder, and one of the main reasons I’d made the stressful mid-career change from A and E to trauma orthopaedics: it meant I could spend more time in theatre.

  I loved surgery. While ostensibly dehumanising – a sentient being reduced to architecture, wiring, and plumbing – it was at the same time a powerfully human thing to be engaged in. I was never happier at work than when wielding a scalpel. Never tired. Never distracted. Under stress, but never stressed.

  Once I was done, I left Sid to finish closing. And despite the tragedy of the hand and wrist I’d been powerless to save, I automatically began thinking the positive thoughts I hoped, and intended, to convey to the patient over the coming days. He was alive. He could have lost so much more than he did. I’d at least saved his elbow, and retaining that would mean a lot to him. Modern prosthetics were a world away from old ones. Yes, he’d suffer shock, disbelief, even a form of bereavement. He would almost certainly experience phantom limb pain, which would be distressing for him, but he was alive. Whatever happened now, it could all have been so much worse for him.

  So I was optimistic. Professionally detached and relentlessly optimistic. Because I’d yet to find out that his butterfly effect was destined to ripple out to include someone else as well.

  And that that someone else would be me.

  While Sid prepared the patient to be moved to ICU, I stripped off my gloves and headed to the writing-up room to do my op note. Then grabbed a coffee break, not least to make sure all was well with Mum, before scrubbing up again, in a different theatre, to operate on the first of the next two patients on the list. Neither turned out to be as straightforward as we’d expected, so it was mid-afternoon by the time I made my way up to the ward to start my round, as yet unaware that my life was about to be turned upside down and hurled into a time and place I thought I’d long left.

  Sid was already there, waiting to accompany me. Just behind where he was standing there was a wall-mounted whiteboard, detailing the names and whereabouts of all the current inpatients. As I’d already spotted mine, however, I had no need to check it. I’d find out soon enough who Mr Hotel Trauma had been ID’d as; there were already visitors beside the bed.

  I wish I had checked it. Looking back, perhaps it wouldn’t have made any difference, but it would at least have given me a moment to mentally reorient. Because when it happened, it was without warning. As I approached, and saw him properly for the first time, I noticed something about the man whose forearm and hand I’d taken off. Something familiar about the jawline. The Grecian nose. The full mouth. The thatch of unkempt, almost shoulder-length black hair. Pirate’s hair. Not my descrip
tion, but definitely an apt one, and part of a package (apparently irresistible, at least to one person) whose appeal I’d had cause to consider often over the years. Though, happily, not in a long time. Not until now.

  I scanned the wider picture. The slight blonde woman sitting beside his bed, her hair – thick and wavy – gathered into a tortoiseshell claw grip. Gathered chaotically, and almost certainly in haste. The two little girls on her lap, one dark-haired, one blonde, who were encircled, one per knee, by her slender arms. All three were pale and puffy-eyed from lack of sleep. So presumably his wife, or his partner, and their children. Almost definitely – we’d retrieved a ring from the third finger of his left hand. But as I revisited the man’s profile – he had yet to notice I was approaching – I was sure. I was looking at someone I knew.

  Someone I used to know. Someone I wished I’d never had to know. That’s when I glanced behind me, finally, towards the board, and confirmed it. The name, scrawled in marker pen, immediately jumped out at me. It couldn’t fail to.

  It was Aidan Kennedy, my late sister’s nemesis.

  Nemesis is a strong word, but it was also the only word. No, he didn’t kill her – but he wielded considerable power over her: he controlled her, abused her, was unfaithful to her and then abandoned her, callously leaving both her and their baby son without a backward glance when she found out she was dying from a brain tumour.

  I had not seen him since, and I was shocked how much he’d aged. What must he be now – thirty-eight? Thirty-nine? Even given the circumstances, he looked as if the years hadn’t been kind to him, and I recalled the drugs that were found in his system and his car. No change there, then. I thought of Hope, and I wondered if she was turning in her grave. I suspected she might be. So she could high-five the fates.

  I imagined her doing it. Saw her face – forever young – swimming back into focus. Heard her voice. Felt the almost feral quality of her rage. Because this was the man of whom she’d once said no revenge would be good enough. Said she’d cut off her right arm before letting him near their son again. Those words. Those very words. That she would cut off her right arm.