The Secret in His Heart

‘My room.’

He didn’t volunteer anything else, didn’t offer to show it to her, and she didn’t ask. She didn’t want to enter his personal space. Not under the circumstances. Not after her earlier speculation about his love life. The last thing she needed was to see the bed he slept in. So she didn’t ask, just followed him downstairs, got her walking boots out of the car and put them on.

‘In your own time, Slater,’ she said lightly, and he gave her one of those wry smiles of his and got off the steps and led her and Saffy out of the gate.

CHAPTER THREE

SHE PUT SAFFY on a lead because she didn’t really want to spend half the evening looking for her if she ran off, but the dog attached herself to James like glue and trotted by his side, the lead hanging rather pointlessly across the gap between her and Connie.

Faithless hound.

‘So, where are we going?’ she asked, falling in beside them.

‘I thought we could go along by the river, then cut inland on the other side of the marshes and pick up the lane. It’ll bring us out on the sea wall from the other direction. It’s about three miles. Is that OK?’

‘Sounds good.’

The path narrowed on top of the river wall, and she dropped back behind him, Saffy still glued to his heels, and in the end she gave him the lead.

‘You seem to have a new friend,’ she said drily, and he glanced down at the dog and threw her a grin over his shoulder.

‘Looks like it. Is that a problem?’

‘No, of course not,’ she said promptly. ‘I’m glad she likes you. She does seem to like men, I expect because she’s been used to them looking after her out in Helmand, but she’ll have to get over it when we go home tomorrow. I hope it won’t unsettle her.’

‘Do you think it might?’

‘I don’t know. I hope not. She’s doing so well.’

‘Apart from the thieving,’ he said drily, and she gave a guilty chuckle.

‘Yeah, well. Apart from that.’

They walked in silence for a while by the muddy shallows at the edge of the river, and then as they turned inland and headed uphill, he dropped back beside her and said, ‘So, how was Afghanistan? You haven’t really told me anything about it.’

‘No. It was a bit strange really. A bit surreal, but I’m glad I went. The facilities at Camp Bastion are fantastic. The things they do, what they achieve—for a field hospital it’s unbelievable. Did you know it’s got the busiest trauma unit in the world?’

‘I’m not surprised. Most of them aren’t in an area that has conflict.’

‘No. No, they aren’t. And I found that aspect really difficult.’

‘Because of Joe?’

She nodded. ‘Sort of. Because of all of them, really. I had second thoughts about going, after he died. I didn’t know how I’d feel facing the stark reality of it, but I realised when the first wave of grief receded that I still wanted to go. There was so much I wanted to try and understand, such as why it was necessary, why he’d gone in the first place, what he’d been trying to achieve.’

‘And did you?’

‘No. No, I still don’t understand, not really. I don’t think I ever will and I’m not sure I want to. People killing each other, maiming each other—it all seems so pointless and destructive. There must be a better way than all this senseless violence.’

‘It must have been really hard for you, Connie,’ he said, his voice gentle. ‘Very close to home.’

She nodded slowly, remembering the shock of seeing the first casualties come in, the realisation that this was it, this was what really happened out there. ‘It was. I’d seen videos, had training, but I hadn’t really understood what it was like for him until then. Seeing the injured lads there, though, fighting so hard to save them—it brought it all home to me, what he’d gone through, the threat he’d faced every day, never knowing when or if it might happen to him. That was tough.’

‘I’m sure. He mentioned you were talking about going. I got the feeling he didn’t like it much.’

‘No, he didn’t. I don’t think he wanted to be worrying about me while he was trying to do his job, and he’d tried to put me off when I joined the Territorial Army as a volunteer doctor four years ago, but I thought, if Joe can do it, so can I. Not in the same way, but to do something, to do some good—and I’m glad I did, even though it was tough, because it’s an incredible experience as a doctor.’

They fell silent for a while, then she went on, ‘It’s amazing what they can do there, you know, saving people that in civilian medicine we simply couldn’t save because we just don’t get to them fast enough or treat them aggressively enough when we do.’

He followed her lead and switched the conversation to practical medical aspects. ‘So what would you change about the way we do things here?’

‘Speed. Blood loss. That’s the real killer out there, so stopping that fast is key, and transfusions. Massive transfusions. We gave one guy a hundred and fifty units of whole blood, plasma, platelets—you name it. No mucking about with saline and colloids, it’s straight in with the blood products. And total body scans, the second they’re stable enough to go, so they can see exactly what’s wrong and treat it. We should really be doing that with multiple trauma, because it’s so easy to miss something when there’s loads going on.’

He nodded. ‘If only we could, but we just don’t have the resources. And as for the time issue—we lose people so often because they just get to us too slowly.’

‘Oh, they do. We have the golden hour. They have the platinum ten minutes—they fly out a consultant-led team, scoop them up and bring them back and they’re treating them aggressively before the helicopter’s even airborne. Every soldier carries a tourniquet and is trained to use it in an emergency, and it’s made so much difference. They save ninety per cent of multiple trauma patients, where in the rest of the world we save about twenty per cent. And I realised that if Joe died despite everything they were able to throw at him, it was because he was unsaveable. That was quite cathartic.’

He nodded slowly. ‘I can imagine it would be. So, will you go again?’

‘No,’ she said softly. ‘I’m glad I went, because it helped me let go of Joe, but I’ve done it now, and I’ve said goodbye and I’ve left the TA. I need to move on. I have other goals now.’

A baby, for one.

He went quiet for a while, then turned his head and looked at her searchingly.

‘So how come you aren’t working at the moment?’

She gave him a fleeting smile and looked away again. ‘I wondered if you’d ask that. I could blame it on Saffy, say she’d taken a lot of time, a lot of training, and in a way it’s true, but really she’s just an excuse. I guess I was—I don’t know … Taking time out to regroup, maybe? I worked solidly for the first year after he died, and I didn’t give myself time to think, and then I went off to Afghanistan and put even more pressure on myself. That was a mistake, and by the time I got back after Christmas I was wiped. I needed time just to breathe a bit and work out where I go from here. A bit of a gap year, in a way. So I took it—or a few months, anyway. Just to try and make some sense of it.’

She made herself meet his eyes again, and found a gentle understanding in them.’ Yeah. I did that after Cathy died. Took a gap year and grabbed the world by the throat, trying to make sense of it.’

‘Did it help?’

He thought back to the aching emptiness, the people he’d met who’d scarcely registered in the haze of grief that had surrounded him. ‘No. I don’t know. Maybe.

Maybe not. It took me away from it, but when I came back it was still there, lurking in wait. The grief, the loneliness.’

It was the closest he’d ever got to talking about Cathy, so she pushed a little more, to see if he’d open up further.

‘She had cancer, didn’t she?’

The shadows in his eyes darkened. ‘Yes. One minute she was fine, the next she was dying.’

Connie felt her heart ache for him. ‘Oh, James. It must have been dreadful watching that.’

He could see her now, the image crystal clear, pale as a ghost against the crisp white sheets, trying to smile at him, the small, neat curve of her doomed pregnancy so prominent in that thin frame.

‘It was,’ he said simply.