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‘Couldn’t you sell it?’
‘Yes. But it needs to be sold as a going concern.’ In truth, Greg hadn’t even considered selling up. ‘And it was so important to my father… ’
‘That’s the thing, isn’t it? It was the most important thing in his life and now he’s given it to you. And if you give it up, it’s like having to give him up all over again.’ She spoke quietly, no trace of accusation in her voice. All the same, the words were like shards of broken glass, slicing at his heart.
‘That’s as may be.’
‘Greg, tell me that you’re not thinking of leaving again.’
‘I don’t want to leave you, Jess, that’s not what all this is about.’
‘Not me. The hospital. Your job.’
‘I seem to have two jobs at the moment. I’m not sure how long I can sustain that.’
She just stared at him. Nothing could have hurt Greg more than her complete, speechless incomprehension. ‘Jess, you have to understand.’
‘I don’t, Greg.’ She brushed tears from her eyes. ‘But that doesn’t mean I won’t support you.’
That was something, at least. Perhaps when she’d thought about it a bit, or when she saw the house in Rome? The prospect was remote, but it was a possibility. ‘There is something I need some help with.’
She nodded, looking at him solemnly.
‘My father left a notebook. I didn’t see it when I was here visiting him, but my mother said he showed it to her and told her that it was for me. I can’t find it.’
‘And you think that it’s here somewhere?’
‘That’s what I’m hoping.’
She straightened, as if at last this was something that she could get to grips with. ‘I’ll help you look.’
The idea was outrageous. Unthinkable. Greg was far too good a doctor to just give it all up. He loved it too much. He’d never needed to say it, it was clear by the light in his eyes when he brought someone back from the edge. The child had a right to his father’s time. The man had a right to pursue his own destiny. It seemed that Greg’s father was going to take both of those rights from him.
She wanted to fight for him, but she didn’t know how, so she turned her energies to the journal. Leather bound, Greg said, about the size of a paperback book. When he took her into the large library, shelves reaching up to the grand, moulded plaster ceiling, that started to look like finding a needle in a haystack.
‘Okay. So why don’t you sort the papers that you need to take from here, and I’ll look through the books?’ She surveyed the task in front of her and swallowed hard.
‘You and whose superpowers, Jess?’
‘How hard can it be?’ She pulled the sleeves of her sweater up to her elbows and found herself suddenly crushed against his chest. ‘What’s
this for?’
‘For being too pig-headed to know when to give up.’
‘They’re only books.’ A lot of them. Many leatherbound. Jess wondered what it would be like to have had access to a library like this. No wonder Greg seemed to know so much about so many things.
‘And they don’t frighten you, eh?’ He was hugging her tight. Not the fevered embrace of a lover, just a man who seemed to need some warmth at the moment.
Nothing frightened Jess quite as much as the idea that Greg was thinking about tearing his life to shreds. ‘We could narrow it down a bit. If your father was ill, he probably couldn’t make it up to the top shelves.’ She eyed the tall library steps.
‘He could have asked someone to climb up there for him. We had carers here pretty much all the time. And there are the staff in the house, although my mother’s given pretty much all of them the third degree and no one seems to have seen the book.’
‘Hmm. Suppose I stand on top of the steps and you wheel them along so I don’t have to keep running up and down to move them? Would that work?’
‘Yeah, it’ll work.’ He grinned at her. ‘You’ll have to hang on.’
‘Done this before, have you?’
