The moment only lasted a heartbeat. Flora’s eyes drifted shut again as the door to the room opened and the medical staff came in to crowd around the bed. It didn’t matter that Christophe could no longer see Fiona. He was watching and listening to the doctors. Looking at the recordings of blood tests and the function of his grandmother’s heart shown by theECGand an echocardiogram. Moving to put his arm around his mother as they asked questions to help them understand what it was they were being asked to give consent to for the next stage of her emergency treatment for a heart attack.
And then there were more people in the room and they barely had time to lean in and place gentle kisses on Flora’s forehead before the bed, all the monitoring equipment around it and the old woman lying with her eyes closed on top of it were being moved. Taken away as one unit. Maria kept walking behind the bed until it reached the swing doors at the end of the ward and she wasn’t allowed to go any further. Christophe stood at the door and watched.
Then he turned back into the room.
‘They are taking her to a laboratory,’ he told Fi. ‘To do something called an angiography. She has a blockage in an artery in her heart and it has caused a heart attack and is now making her very unwell. If they can’t open the artery and let the blood flow again, she will die.’
His voice broke on the word and Christophe squeezed his eyes shut to stave off tears. He felt Fiona coming close to him. Touching his arm but then, a little tentatively maybe, she lifted her arms to offer him a hug. Or maybe she was responding to him moving closer? Had he initiated this gesture of comfort?
‘They’re doing everything they can,’ she said softly, so close to his ear that he could feel the puff of her breath. ‘Don’t lose hope.’
Christophe swallowed around the lump in his throat. The softness and warmth of Fiona’s body offered an unexpectedly powerful solace but something told him not to sink into it too far. To step back a moment later before it became something it wasn’t intended to be.
‘I don’t know how long this will take,’ he warned. ‘If they can’t open the arteries with the… I’ve forgotten the word – the little metal cages?’
Fi shook her head. She didn’t know.
‘Well, if they don’t work, they will have to do surgery. Open her chest and operate directly on her heart to do a bypass, but even then…’ He swallowed hard. ‘They seem to think she has a good chance to survive.’
Fi nodded this time. ‘I couldn’t understand what they were saying but I couldfeelthat.’
Her smile was so hopeful, the expression in her eyes so sympathetic, that Christophe decided it didn’t matter that she might be here under false pretences. He was very glad that shewashere.
* * *
Waiting was never easy.
Waiting for news that could potentially be devastating for a family she was not connected to in any meaningful way felt awkward.
The windows of this side of the cardiology ward looked down on some of the parking areas outside the hospital, and Fi scanned the distinctive shapes of the pine trees that looked like umbrellas until she found where Christophe had parked his car.
‘Would Heidi like to go for a walk, do you think?’ she asked, turning back from the window to where Christophe was sitting on a chair beside his mother, holding tightly to her hand.
He looked so disconcerted Fi kicked herself mentally. It made her feel like giving him another hug by way of apology. ‘I can take her,’ she added swiftly. ‘You need to stay here with your mum.’
Already, it felt like the tension in this small room had eased a fraction.
‘She’d love that,’ Christophe said. ‘Her harness and lead are in the back of the car.’ He pulled out his keys. ‘Don’t go too far, though. I don’t want you to get lost.’
‘I’ve got a map of the entire world on my phone,’ Fi said. ‘I won’t get lost.’ She smiled. ‘I’m sure Heidi would find her way back to you from wherever she was, anyway. I would only need to follow her.’
Heidi was, indeed, delighted at being let out of the car. When Fi opened the map on her phone she found it was only a ten-minute walk to the beach. Then she did a search and discovered a dog-friendly section of the coast that was half an hour’s walk away. Finding that Heidi was very well-mannered on her leash, it was a pleasure to walk through a park with a children’s playground at the end, down some narrow one-way streets and onto the wide footpath that stretched along the coast. She stood for a moment to breathe in the sea air and admire the view of a very calm Mediterranean Sea with only tiny waves lapping the pebbles of the beach and several small boats moored near a breakwater of massive flat blocks of stone.
She felt guilty being a tourist, however. Should she even be here supporting a family that wasn’t her own when the Gilchrists were dealing with the fallout from their own crisis?
Was this another possible case of jumping from a frying pan into a fire, in fact?
Had Maria Brabant believed her son when he’d told her that Fi wasn’t his girlfriend and they were not on some romantic picnic in the forest? The way she’d hugged her at the hospital had felt more like a welcome into Christophe’s family and, for just a heartbeat, it had also felt like that moment when Ellie had found her in the olive grove with the donkeys.
As if she’d found what she had been missing for what felt like forever.
Family.
And home.
But was that wishful thinking on her part? Was it a form of justification for what she’d been doing for too many years – running away from the difficult things in life instead of trying to deal with them?
She’d given up on her university degree.
