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I just ran, because I knew that was how I was going to live.
chapter 26
millie
Stacey Porter: (No Subject)
I stare at the email on my phone. I don’t click on it, because I already know what it contains. Once I open it there’ll be no going back.
I haven’t told Tom what Stacey has asked me to do. He’ll tell me she’s using me: that I’m the one who’ll be taking all the risk.Even if you’re right, he says,even if Felix is abusing her, what happens when she goes back to him? Because youknowshe’ll go back, Millie. Women like her always do.
After the terrible night when Tom rescued me from my father and we fled the house, after everything that happened afterwards, I thought that now,surely, my mother would find the courage to leave him. But in the end the gravitational pull back to him was just too intense. I wasn’t strong enough to drag her free.
She went back because she was addicted to him: to the cycle of abuse and remorse. When he beat her, he was in control, but when he was sorry and filled with apology and regret,shewas the one in charge. She thought she could save him. She thought she couldrescuehim. The abuse actually made her feel special and wanted: she was convinced if she could just prove to him how much she loved him, she’d be able to fix him.
Gracie was your mother’s responsibility,Tom says.She’s the one who should’ve saved her. She’s the one who put her in jeopardy in the first place.
But I was her big sister: it was my job to look out for her.
I left her behind.
She was just four years old.
Stacey Porter: (No Subject).
My thumb hovers over the subject line. I understand now what Marilla meant when she said,I need to atone.
My secretary buzzes in my next patient, and I put my phone away, the email unread.
I pull up the patient’s chart on my computer. She’s a fifty-two-year-old woman who came to me five months ago complaining of dizziness and shortness of breath, neither of which were surprising given she was at least forty pounds overweight. Unlike many of my colleagues, I don’t see obesity as a moral failing. But as a heart surgeon I know there’s no such thing asfat but fiteither. Healthy obesity is a myth propagated by a laudable body positivity culture that’s unfortunately missing the point: fitness is the body’s ability – and specifically the ability of lean tissue, or muscle – to take in and use oxygen. Which means it’s really all about your heart and lungs. You may get away with those extra rolls around your waist at thirty, but by fifty, your heart is exhausted from all the extra work it has to do.
The first time this patient came to me, I told her to come back when she’d lost three stone. She cried, and complained to the hospital she’d been ‘fat-shamed’. And then she went home and lost the weight.
I tell my patient that I’m proud of her, and ask my secretary to schedule her surgery. She’s my last appointment of the day: for once I’m only running a few minutes late. I’ll be home in time to have dinner with Tom and the children.
‘Liz,’ I say, putting my head around the door to my waiting room, ‘what date was that board meeting with the trustees again?’
‘The eleventh,’ she says. ‘And there’s someone here to see you, Ms Lennox. She doesn’t have an appointment. I told her you were busy, but she insisted she’d wait—’
‘It won’t take long,’ Harper says, rising to her feet.
I’m not even slightly surprised to see the woman at my hospital. She clearly has issues with boundaries, as she proved when she gatecrashed my gala.
‘Thanks, Liz,’ I tell my secretary. ‘You can go home now. I’ve got this.’
Harper follows me into my office. I shut the door, and take my seat behind my desk. She has no choice but to sit opposite me in one of my patients’ chairs: deliberately lower, so the occupant has no choice but to look up to me. It has nothing to do with ego: it’s an effective psychological trick, because a patient who respects their surgeon is more likely to do as they say pre- and post-op and thus achieve a better surgical outcome.
I’ve been waiting for this shoe to drop since we told the Conways the sale was off. She’ll have gone to Tom first, and he’ll have given her tea and sympathy andthere’ll be other houses. It was only a matter of time before she came to me.
‘I assume this is about the house,’ I say.
‘Ourforever home,’ Harper says, pressing both hands to her heart. ‘Kyle and me feel like the bottom’sliterallyfallen out of our world—’
‘You can drop the act, Harper. There aren’t any cameras here.’
She hesitates a moment, and then suddenly her face transforms from vapid to shrewd like someone’s shaken an Etch A Sketch.
‘Look, we’ve got a contract with our sponsors,’ she says briskly. ‘This move has got to happen ASAP or we’re going to go broke, and I know you’re not going to sell to us unless you get the Glass House.’
