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‘I never thought.’ He looked distraught. ‘I just wanted to catch her before she hit the floor.’
‘Of course you did,’ she soothed. ‘Can you tell me about the knife, Vern? Was it a long knife? A serrated knife?’
‘About this big...’ He gestured again with his hands.
‘Dot has a two-centimetre laceration on her right side, just above the iliac crest, and you can see the knife still in situ. We didn’t want to turn her over because this was the position she was in when we arrived, but I’m sure there are no wounds to the front. Dot isn’t on any medication, and there’s no volume issues.’
‘Thanks,’ Mattie acknowledged. ‘Vern, sir, would you like someone to bring you a tea or a coffee whilst we just check on your wife?’
A and E might be bustling, but it was going to be far easier to examine Dot if her husband wasn’t hovering. Which wasn’t to say that she didn’t feel for him, he was clearly worried, but she could do with ten minutes without him there.
‘All right, Dot,’ Mattie told her patient when Vern had finally been led across the room and her team could get on with their job. ‘We’re going to roll you over now, just to check there are no injuries elsewhere, and get you across to the bed. We’ll be as careful as we can be, but I need you to try to stay still, all right? Good. That’s good.’
Mattie glanced at her team.
‘Okay, ready, steady...’
And perhaps it was the twisted way a medical mind seemed to work, looking at life in a skewed way from the rest of the world, but when she looked at the older couple—with the bizarreness of their situation juxtaposed with the sheer banality of the fact the accident had occurred when they’d simply been making a meal together in domestic harmony—all Mattie could remember was the time when she’d thought she and Kane would grow old together like this couple. And how much it had hurt when he’d walked away from her without a second thought.
Seven years of practically back-to-back tours in multiple war zones, seeing atrocities that the average person couldn’t even have imagined—the human body ripped apart in ways she hadn’t even known it was possible to survive—and that experience still ranked as one of the worst days of her life.
Which was why, tonight she was going to meet her friends to celebrate her upcoming promotion, and Kane Wheeler wasn’t going to take up another moment inside her brain.
And if she could even pretend that was the case, she was making progress.
* * *
‘My little sister, Major Mathilda Brigham, soon-to-be Lieutenant-Colonel Mathilda Brigham.’ Hayden Brigham raised his glass proudly, his rich voice just about heard over the deep pulse of the music’s bass line. ‘To Mattie.’
‘To Mattie,’ the handful of close friends chorused loudly, before each taking a drink.
Tucked away as they were in a booth in the quieter part of the club, Mattie was still trying to convince herself that Kane didn’t deserve another moment’s thought. But it wasn’t that easy. He lingered around the peripheries of her mind and if she was being entirely honest, despite her pep talk to herself erlier, she hadn’t exactly been chasing him off.
And it doesn’t matter how much you shake your head like that, a little voice whispered in her ear, it isn’t going to shake him off.
It wasn’t as if she’d never moved on with her life these past fourteen years—because she had. She’d dated, even got engaged. It was just that ultimately no other man had made her want to want to bend in her dream career as army doctor, the way that Kane had when they’d been kids.
Even George. She’d been prepared to give up the army because it had been expected of her, because she’d known that if it had been the other way around George would have given up anything for her, and possibly because she’d wanted to prove to herself that she had well and truly moved on from Kane.
In short, all the wrong reasons. Which meant her marriage to George would probably have unravelled at some point anyway, even if she hadn’t seen Kane—or had imagined that she’d seen him—at her wedding rehearsal.
It also meant that she’d vowed to herself that she would never give up either part of her career for any man again. And yet... The encounter yesterday, and the way she’d reacted so viscerally, had only proved to her that she had never quite exorcised Kane Wheeler. Some might say she’d never had closure, others might say that she had always been looking at her youth through a rose-tinted rear-view mirror.
Either way, maybe yesterday had been her chance to knock both on the head. Maybe going for a coffee with Kane would have allowed her to see that she’d built that typical youthful first love into something far greater than it had ever really been. Maybe she’d have seen Kane in a different light—one that wasn’t tinged with the adoring glow of a teenager.
And maybe she was lying to herself all over again.
‘Mattie?’ Hayden’s concerned voice penetrated her musing. ‘Everything okay?’
She blinked. Forced a smile.
‘Everything’s great.’
‘You just wish Mum was still alive to see this? She’d have been so proud of you, Mattie.’
She swallowed hard. Her head had been so full of Kane that she hadn’t even stopped to think about her mum. Her sudden death eight years ago had been so devastating to them all, but perhaps to their father most of all. He’d held it together, of course, with his proud stiff upper lip, but Mattie wouldn’t have been surprised if that was where it had all started to unravel for him.
As much as he had been a brigadier, her mum had been the real rock of the family. Had trying to suppress his own grief to appear strong for her and Hayden been too much? Was that when his Alzheimer’s had started?
