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‘He’s going to be sleeping off the anaesthetic for the next few hours. But you’re welcome to stay here with him, if you like.’
If you like.The nurse had no idea. It would have taken an entire SWAT team to extract me from that room.
The nurse pulled a high-backed armchair closer to the bed. ‘It’s not the most comfy seat in the world, but maybe you can catch a few zeds while you wait for him to wake up.’
I took a step closer to the bed, suddenly scared of hurting him.
‘It’s okay to touch his face or hold his hand,’ the nurse said, her voice softer now as she read the longing and uncertainty in my eyes. ‘Just don’t go climbing into bed with him, eh? Although you wouldn’t be the first person to try it.’
She was still chuckling as she left the room.
For the first time in a week, it was now, finally, just Finn and me.
*
Even though I was exhausted and every single muscle in my body was begging for rest, sleep continued to elude me. I perched on the edge of the chair the nurse had given me, pulling it even closer to the left-hand side of Finn’s hospital bed. I wound my fingers through his, resting my face against the familiar warm skin of his forearm. The fine hair tickled my cheek, and I rubbed against it, like a cat.
I steered clear of the right-hand side of his body, with his wounded leg and broken arm, but my eyes kept going again and again to his injuries. How he’d managed to get out of the mangled car alive was nothing short of a miracle. I had no doubt that’s what they would be calling it on the internet and in the media tomorrow. ‘They’re going to say you must have had a guardian angel looking out for you,’ I whispered softly into the darkness. ‘But they’ll be wrong, because I think you had three of them: your dad, your mum’ – my hand came up to the diamond pendant hanging on its chain from my neck – ‘and my mum too.’
*
Throughout the rest of the night, nurses slipped quietly into the room to take Finn’s obs. I had only a layperson’s knowledge of what was normal, so I read their faces carefully as they took his temperature and blood pressure and read the monitors that bleeped constantly in the background.
‘Everything okay?’ I asked, more times than I could remember. Thankfully, the answer was always a reassuring ‘Yes’.
The kindness of the nursing staff wasn’t lost on me. Sometime before dawn, one of them brought me a cup of tea and a plate of hot buttery toast, which I was going to politely decline, until my stomach growled noisily in protest. But the best thing they brought me didn’t come on a tray from the ward kitchen; it was delivered in an opaque white plastic bag, like the ones I used to line my kitchen pedal bin.
I took the bag from the nurse, speaking in a whisper that was probably redundant, for Finn still showed no signs of waking up.
‘What’s this?’
‘It’s Finn’s clothing and personal belongings,’ the nurse advised me, watching as I carefully unknotted the bag. ‘I’m not sure if any of it will be salvageable. The paramedics had to cut off most of it before he got here. But his wallet and whatnot should all be in there too.’
I waited until she had left the room before delving into the bag. The clothes were all damp and less than fragrant. I held each item gingerly, noting with a shudder how many of them were covered in dark red bloodstains. Even his white trainers were now the colour of old rust, I saw, as I dropped them back into the bag. Absolutely everything was destined for the bin.
With a wrinkled nose, I removed Finn’s wallet and house keys from the pocket of the jeans and set them to one side. I very nearly didn’t bother checking anywhere else, but as I bundled his ruined jacket into the bag, I felt something stiff within the lining.
Like a reluctant pickpocket, I slid my hand into the garment and pulled out a slightly damp but still intact envelope. There was no addressee on the front, and the back flap was open. I had absolutely no intention of reading the contents of the envelope until I went to place it with Finn’s wallet and caught sight of a single handwritten line. It was a snippet of a sentence that I’d first seen four days earlier. Only then I’d been sitting on the lawn in Hannah’s sunny back garden, surrounded by the contents of Finn’s dustbin.
I’m sure there are people who would have been able to resist the tug of their curiosity; people who would have told themselves it was none of their business and who wouldn’t have dreamt of pulling that letter from the envelope. But I wasn’t one of them.
Gemma, this is without doubt the hardest thing I’ve ever had to write…
My heart began thumping crazily, in much the same way as it had done when I’d first read those words, in what I’d believed was a draft ‘Dear Jane’ letter. Only now I saw that I’d been wrong.
Gemma, this is without doubt the hardest thing I’ve ever had to write, because as much as I search for them, there are simply no words to express how happy I am today. I never thought I’d be fortunate enough to find someone as wonderful as you, and I still can’t believe that out of all the people in the world, I’m the lucky one you chose to be your husband.
A single tear trickled down my cheek as I realised this was no break-up letter, as Hannah and I had first thought; it was the exact opposite, in fact. This was Finn’s wedding speech.
I didn’t read it properly, because I hoped that one day, not too far away, he would have the chance to deliver it the way he had intended. But it was impossible not to skim the neatly written paragraphs for the phrases that had sent us off in totally the wrong direction.
‘Change of plans’ didn’t sound nearly so ominous when it was nestled within a sentence that read:
I thought I was destined to spend my life alone, but then one morning seven years ago two people tussled over a parking space and fate stepped in with a change of plans.
Seeing the underlined word ‘disappointment’ had filled me with dread when reading Finn’s draft, but far less so now, when read in context.
My greatest disappointment is that my parents, Peter and Amanda, and your mum, Catherine, can’t be with us today to share this wonderful occasion.
