AllFreeNovel
Share Us
‘Tomorrow morning. The charity can do without me for a couple of weeks, and I’ll be staying up in London full time.’
Anna nodded. Another little shard of warmth, something concrete to hold onto.
‘If you’d like, you can use my office to work in while you’re here. I’ll mention it to my boss but I doubt he’ll have any problem with the idea. You work with us on an informal basis anyway.’
‘You’re keeping me here for as long as you can?’ Jamie flashed her a smile.
‘That’s the general idea.’ She smiled back. Honesty was one of Anna’s more endearing traits.
‘Thanks. That would be really helpful and... I should spend as much time as I can with Jon, but it would be nice to have a bolthole as well.’
‘I thought that might be the case.’ Anna leaned back in her chair, regarding him thoughtfully. ‘So what’s with the reading?’
She didn’t know that either. It was no secret, but Jamie’s habit was to compensate for his dyslexia as much as possible when he was working. ‘I have mild dyslexia. When we were kids, Jon used to read to me. It was usually comics then, he used to do different voices and act things out.’
‘Ah. So that explains the planner on your office wall, then.’ She smiled at him. ‘And your diary. I thought you were just terrifyingly organised.’
Both his diary and his calendar were colour coded, allowing Jamie to see what was most important at a glance. It was one of the many small techniques he employed that most people didn’t even notice, even if they knew about his dyslexia.
‘Yeah, I find that colour coding makes things a bit easier. Although I wouldn’t want to dissuade you from your belief in my organisational skills.’
‘Okay. I’ll remain suitably terrified.’ She shot him a smile. ‘Jon says that you both made music together when you were young as well.’
Jamie knew exactly what Anna was doing. She was gently probing, getting him to talk in much the same way as she got all her patients and their families to. Soon he’d find himself tempted to tell her about his darkest fears, the way they did.
He’d meet that problem when he came to it. Jamie wondered if Anna knew that he’d been concentrating on the things they’d shared before the bust-up as a way of reconnecting with his brother, and decided that she’d probably already worked that out.
‘Yeah. He was always the showman, though. The one who liked to get up and sing.’
‘He told me that you wrote “Everywhere”. It’s one of my favourite songs.’
Her smile made his heart beat a little faster. Maybe Anna had let his words into her life, as she’d sung along to them on the radio... The thought made his hand tremble.
‘I...um...was at a bit of a turning point in my life when I wrote it. I’d applied to medical school and they’d accepted me, despite the dyslexia. It was a dream I never thought I’d be able to accomplish, but I was also a bit concerned about how I might cope.’
Anna nodded her head. ‘That’s what I like about the song. It seems to me to be all about hope and accomplishing your dreams. Maybe not in the way you thought you would, but doing it anyway. Suddenly your charity makes a lot more sense.’
Jamie dragged his thoughts from wondering where she’d first heard ‘Everywhere’ and what she’d been doing, and focussed his mind on his charity. That usually gave him a bit of clarity.
‘The charity only exists because of the royalties from the song.’
‘And you and Jon did that together.’ She gave a little nod of approval.
Much as he liked the feeling of having made a connection with Anna, Jamie couldn’t think about it any more. In retrospect, ‘Everywhere’ had been the beginning of the end for him and Jon. It had blasted his brother into the stratosphere of fame and set their paths on an ever-diverging trajectory.
‘Yeah, look... I’d like to see Jon’s notes.’
Anna pursed her lips. Maybe she was about to give him the lecture about stepping on her toes and leaving her to get on with treating her own patients. Jamie flashed her an apologetic look.
‘You’re asking as a doctor? Or as his brother?’
That was the nub of it. Jamie had always imagined himself a doctor first, beyond anything. ‘His brother.’
‘Fair enough. I’ll have to check with Jon first, of course.’
‘Of course.’
‘Right, then.’ Anna got to her feet, and Jamie took the hint. He should be going now. But when he started to rise from his seat she waved him back down again. ‘Stay there. I won’t be a minute.’
