Was it possible that she still believed he had any doubts about her trustworthiness?
Peter was saying something about records needing to be meticulous. About the work he was having to do to try and go through patient notes and match the drugs administered with what had been recorded as being taken from the locked cabinet. Andrew wasn’t listening.
He’d left it too long to say something to Alice, hadn’t he? With the best of intentions, Andrew had tried to prove his trust in another way, but in that tiny moment of eye contact across the crowded staff room he knew, without a shadow of doubt, that he’d been wrong.
That he was in trouble.
For the first time since they’d got into the routine of this shared care for Emmy, Alice didn’t stay to eat the dinner she’d prepared.
‘I’ve got too much to catch up on,’ she’d excused herself the moment Andrew came through the door. ‘Washing and emails and…you know…domestic stuff.’
And she’d fled, without giving him time to say anything. The way she had after that staff meeting this afternoon. Alice really did need some time to herself. In her little cottage, with Jake for company and a lovely, deep hot bath to soak in.
Time to try and deal with the fact that, after so many blissful weeks, her life was unravelling yet again. Totally. At home and at work, which made this the most difficult crisis she had ever had to face.
Was somebody really stealing drugs in their department? Maybe it would turn out to be a storm in a teacup and someone had just been slack about doing the paperwork. It certainly wasn’t her. Ever since her time in London, Alice had been paranoid about the regulations to do with handling restricted drugs. She checked and double-checked absolutely everything and always got someone else to repeat the checks and sign off what she’d done.
She’d still been the first person Andrew had looked at, though, hadn’t she?
The mud was still sticking and no amount of soaking in comforting, hot baths was going to wash it out of her life. Just a flicker of suspicion was all it took. Alice was never going to escape the past.
Neither was Andrew, although he didn’t realise it yet. He’d know soon enough when Alice confessed and she had to tell him soon because any window of justifying denial was definitely over.
Tomorrow, she decided. She’d tell him tomorrow.
But Alice was working the following day and Andrew had a day off. He took Emmy to a movie in the afternoon and they stayed in town for dinner. Then Alice had an early start and Andrew had a shift that started mid-afternoon and went through till midnight.
She slept in the spare room that night. The one she’d used when they’d first put this plan into action. The bed felt cold and unused. It hadn’t been used since she and Andrew had started sharing his bed. Alice heard him come in in the early hours of the morning. She heard him call her name very softly from the door.
She pretended to be soundly asleep, hoping that Andrew would come in anyway and get into her bed and hold her. Maybe then she could tell him and maybe—just maybe—they could work through it.
Andrew stood there for a long moment. And then she heard his steps on the wooden floorboards as he made his way to his own room.
The longer she waited, the more nervous Alice became. So nervous that when she and Andrew were working the same shift together a couple of days later, she could barely concentrate on her work.
She dropped things. She bumped into a trolley and sent supplies crashing to the floor. She felt ridiculously close to tears for most of the day. It was no great surprise when Peter quietly asked her to come and see him in his office. Alice knew that Andrew was watching her walk away with the head of department but she couldn’t look back. She didn’t want to be given sympathy or reassurance she really didn’t deserve.
Peter didn’t waste any time coming to the point.
‘What on earth’s wrong today, Alice? You’re not yourself at all.’
Alice couldn’t deny the accusation. ‘I…I’m sorry, Peter.’
‘Are you sick?’
She shook her head. ‘I’ve just got…something on my mind.’
‘Hmm. I had that impression quite a few days ago. You’ve been…I don’t know…kind of edgy.’
‘Sorry. I’ll get it sorted.’
‘Anything I can do to help?’
Alice shook her head again. ‘It’s got nothing to do with work.’
‘Are you sure?’
Alice blinked. Was he asking her whether this had something to do with her relationship with one of his consultants? Did everybody know about her and Andrew now? She couldn’t tell him, though. Not before she’d told Andrew.
‘It doesn’t have anything to do with the issue we’ve got with missing drugs, does it?’
Alice sucked in her breath. ‘What do you mean?’
Peter sighed. ‘I know about London, Alice. About why you had to resign from the job you had there.’
Alice gaped at him. ‘Who told you about that?’
There was only one possible suspect she could think of and that was so painful she wanted to curl up and die. The ultimate betrayal. She didn’t want to know but she had to.
‘Was it Andrew Barrett?’
‘No.’
It wasn’t Peter who answered the question. Alice jerked her head around to find Andrew standing in the doorway of the office. He stepped inside. ‘I most certainly didn’t say anything. In fact, I’m as interested as you are to find out who did.’
They both looked at Peter who looked away from Alice to Andrew. ‘You replaced Dave when you took on your position here.’
‘That’s correct.’
‘You worked with him years ago, yes?’
‘Also correct. I don’t really see what this has to do with Alice.’
Peter’s tone was bland. He was delivering facts here, not an opinion. ‘He made some enquiries from mutual associates before he approached you. He spoke to quite a few people and they invariably recommended you very highly. One doctor told him about the New Zealand nurse who’d come under suspicion for stealing drugs. Told him how well you’d dealt with a potentially damaging situation in your department. Dave felt obliged to pass the information on to me when he learned that the nurse spoken about was back working here again.’
‘You never said anything to me,’ Alice said quietly. ‘Why not?’
‘You’ve never done anything to make me think there was anything I needed to say.’
‘Until now? Until drugs started to go missing?’
‘Until now,’ Peter agreed. ‘When something’s obviously upsetting you so much you’re unable to do your job with the kind of competency I’ve come to rely on.’
‘Alice had nothing to do with the drugs in London going missing.’
Andrew spoke with such conviction that both Alice and Peter stared at him.
‘You sound like you found out who did,’ Peter said.
‘I did. And it wasn’t Alice.’
‘Who was it?’ The query came from Peter but he was voicing what was filling her mind, along with so much else she couldn’t collect the words, let alone say them.
He’d known? She’d thought he’d given her the gift of trust but he’d never had a reason to mistrust her. It had been an empty gift.
A sham.
Andrew hadn’t answered Peter’s query because at that same moment, his pager had gone off with a strident alarm that signalled an urgent call. He glanced down to where it was clipped to his belt, turning it enough to read the display.
‘Arrest,’ he snapped. ‘Resus 1.’
Peter was going to accompany him. Both men were moving fast.
‘Who was it?’ Alice had to ask as they passed. ‘Who did take those drugs, Andrew?’
He spared her only a graze of eye contact.
‘Melissa.’
CHAPTER NINE
SHOCK gave way to anger.
No. Make that cold fury.
All this time, Alice had been so grateful to be given a chance to
prove herself. To win Andrew’s trust, despite any reason he might have had for doubting her.
And he’d never had that reason. He’d known she was innocent. He could have cleared her name years and years ago and saved her the haunting aftermath of that shameful incident. In fact, hadn’t she handed him the perfect opportunity to do exactly that?
You still believe I took those drugs, don’t you?
He could have told her then. He should have told her then. Instead, he’d simply denied ever saying it. And when she’d reminded him that he’d said he couldn’t trust her, she could see that the statement still held truth. That was why she had set out to prove herself.
He’d lied to her. By omission maybe, but that didn’t make it any more forgivable.
Especially when she had trusted him so absolutely, even though she was aware he was keeping an important part of his life a secret. His whole marriage. Emmy’s infancy. She’d colluded in sweeping it under the mat but there was no way she would have done that if she’d known how huge that secret was. Or that it directly affected her. She’d had a right to that information. As much as Andrew had a right to know she was carrying his baby.
Oh…God! What a mess!
The bottom line was that Andrew hadn’t trusted her. For whatever reason—and, whatever it was, it wouldn’t be good enough—he’d lied to her.
And she’d really believed that there was a future for them?
Talk about being blinded by love.
Right now, her vision was clouded more by fury and the pain of betrayal.
Having paced Peter’s office for goodness knew how long, with her arms wrapped tightly around her body, her head spinning and the pain of grief already closing a vice-like grip around her heart, Alice finally let go of herself, lifted her chin, gritted her teeth and moved.
The cardiac arrest scenario in Resus 1 was obviously not going very well. Through curtains that hadn’t been fully closed, Alice could see the flat line running across the monitor where ECG spikes should have been. She could see the crowd of staff around the bed. Jo was doing chest compressions. A registrar stood to one side holding a bag-mask unit and another was drawing up fresh drugs. Andrew, grim-faced, was in the process of intubating what looked to be a fairly young man.
He would be doing everything he possibly could to save that life but Alice didn’t have room in her heart to applaud his skill or dedication. If she went down that track she might start trying to understand why he’d betrayed her. To make excuses for him because she so desperately wanted this not to be ending.
But it was. It had to. She couldn’t stay with a man she couldn’t trust. A man who didn’t trust her. She had to deal with it and move on.
Another nurse was recording everything that was happening in the resuscitation effort and yet more staff stood close by. Ready to assist if needed but, for the moment, there was nothing they could do. Peter was one of those extras and he was standing right beside the gap in the curtains. Alice went up to him.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said quietly. ‘I know I haven’t been doing my job properly but I’m going to sort it out, I promise.’
‘Good.’ But Peter was frowning in concern. ‘Maybe you should take the rest of today off. I’ll get cover arranged.’
‘Thank you. I’d appreciate that.’ Alice took a shaky inward breath. She could start that sorting out process immediately. ‘Could you also please tell Dr Barrett that he’ll have to make other arrangements to have his daughter collected from school. I won’t be available.’
Peter was still frowning but there was surprise on his face as well. He could see there was more to this than he’d realised. ‘Are you all right, Alice? Where are you going to be?’
‘I’m fine. Or I will be. I’m going home. I have some urgent business to take care of.’ Alice turned away to head for the locker room to collect her things. Urgent was the word for it, all right. How soon could she hope to find somewhere for Ben to go? That had to be the first priority. In a worst case scenario, she and Jake could survive in the truck for a few days but she couldn’t abandon her horse.
Could she abandon Emmy?
Andrew?
She had to. Before her heart recovered enough to start fighting her head. Before it found a way to make what he’d done somehow acceptable. It wasn’t and it never could be. She had to leave as quickly as she could manage and then get as far away as she possibly could.
Was she being a coward?
Yes, but there was only so much pain a person could front up for, wasn’t there? Emmy and Andrew had each other. Alice had only herself to look to for protection now.
The resuscitation just went on and on.
Drug therapy produced a shockable rhythm. Defibrillation produced a normal-looking rhythm but, within a minute or two, no matter what they did, it degenerated back to a flat line.
Again and again, they shocked the heart but after nearly an hour they all knew that, even if they could get a rhythm capable of sustaining life, they would be saving someone who would be irreparably brain damaged from too long a period without a normal level of circulating oxygen.
‘Time of death,’ Andrew finally said in a tone resonant with defeat, ‘Fourteen-oh-seven.’
The man had been only forty-four. A health fanatic who’d gone out for a run in his lunch break only to collapse in an isolated park corner where it had taken passers-by too long to see him. He wasn’t that much older than Andrew, and that made it even harder to try and explain what had happened to his distraught wife and young children.
Having dealt with that gruelling interview, Andrew found Peter waiting for him with a message from Alice to say that he’d have to collect Emmy himself.
She wasn’t available. What the hell did that mean?
‘I’d better ring the school,’ he said. ‘I’ll arrange care for her until I finish at six.’
‘You could go early,’ Peter suggested. ‘I’m happy to cover for you.’
‘Did Alice say why she was leaving so early?’
‘She just said she had something urgent she needed to take care of at home.’ Peter’s gaze was very direct. ‘I must say, I’ve never seen her looking quite that upset.’
Of course she was upset. By telling her that it was Melissa who’d stolen those drugs, Andrew had opened a can of worms he’d wanted so much to keep tightly closed.
What if Alice thought he’d known all along? That he’d been protecting his girlfriend and leaving her to take the blame.
At least he could put her straight on that score.
‘I might just take you up on that offer to get away early,’ he told Peter.
If he rang the school, he could arrange the care for Emmy anyway and then he could go home alone. He could find Alice and see how much of the damage—if any—he could repair.
Peter was nodding. ‘When you see her,’ he said, ‘please apologise on my behalf for any insinuation I made. Someone came forward after that staff meeting the other day and told me about a messy time on a night shift recently. Multi-victim MVA and they were very short-staffed. I had someone looking into it and they’ve just told me that a total of seven ampoules of morphine were used that night and the nurse who had the key on that shift totally forgot to go back and sign them off in the cabinet logbook. The matter is closed as far as we’re concerned.’
It wouldn’t be for Alice, though, would it?
A short time later, with a face that was as grim as when he’d been trying to save the life of that heart attack victim, Andrew left the building.
Fear snapped at his heels. Or wheels. Thank heaven for his car’s turn of speed and fabulous road-handling ability.
Putting himself in Alice’s place, Andrew wouldn’t be surprised to get to his property and find she’d packed up her things and left. He couldn’t let that happen. He needed Alice in his life. So did Emmy.
He loved her and so did Emmy. He had to fight for both of them. For all of them, because they were a family.
Andrew didn’t dri
ve to his own house, he took the turn to the cottage and, thank God, her truck was there. Once on foot, it wasn’t hard to locate Alice. She was in Ben’s paddock, brushing him. Jake sat by the fence but he didn’t move to greet Andrew and Alice didn’t look up from what she was doing. Fear snapped again and managed to catch hold of his heart.
‘Please, Alice. Stop what you’re doing and talk to me.’
He got no response. Just a feeling of tension in the air that was a solid barrier. ‘At least look at me.’
But Alice kept brushing the damn horse. Ben was tied up near the water trough. Almost the exact spot both he and Alice had been that day he’d arrived home to discover that she was his tenant. A saddle hung over the fence behind the trough and Alice was bent over, brushing mud from Ben’s legs.
‘Alice.’
‘I can’t stop,’ she said. ‘I’ve got an awful lot to get done.’
‘Oh?’ Did she have no idea how important it was for them to talk? Andrew felt as if he was being dismissed. That they were being dismissed. She couldn’t be doing that so easily. That would make him wrong about so many things and he knew he wasn’t that wrong. ‘You can’t be that busy if you’re planning to go riding.’
Alice straightened at that and turned around. Andrew was shocked by the pain he could see in her eyes. It burned into him and he could feel it as his own pain.
‘I’m riding Ben to his new paddock,’ she said tonelessly. ‘That way, I’ve got the horse float free to pack my stuff into.’
‘Pack? You’re leaving?’ Even though the possibility had occurred to him, he hadn’t really believed it. Or maybe he just hadn’t known how hard it would hit him.
‘Yes.’
Such a tiny word to have such enormous repercussions. Unacceptable repercussions.
‘You can’t leave! I won’t let you.’
‘You can’t stop me.’
Andrew opened his mouth but then closed it again. What could he say? He knew Alice was upset. He could understand her being angry but to be walking out on him? On Emmy? He felt as though an enormous chasm was opening beneath his feet. He was in danger of falling and he couldn’t think of how to prevent it. Or how to stop Alice. She was right. He couldn’t stop her if she was as determined as she sounded. Not physically.
Single Dad Needs Nanny Page 26
