‘Eve,’ she cried and she jumped up and pulled Eve into a hug.
‘It’s terrible,’ she said. ‘He’s on life support but they don’t think he will make it.’
Eve sat on the sofa. Any hope she held on the train had dissipated the moment the words came from Hil’s mouth. What had she done? She had wasted time, precious time, worrying about her career and Serena and past lovers. All so ridiculous now she looked back on it. And how would she tell the children their mother was gone and would take their father with them?
No, it wasn’t going to happen. Not while she was here.
She stood up and walked out of the room and found a nurse who was wheeling an empty wheelchair along the hallway.
‘I’m here to see Edward Priest – he’s in ICU. Can you take me?’
The nurse looked at Eve with surprise.
‘I can take you to ICU but I don’t know if they’ll let you in yet. They’re still working on trying to get him settled.’
Eve shook her head. ‘I’ll wait for as long as it takes,’ she said. ‘I’m not going anywhere.’
44
For the first three days Eve didn’t leave Edward’s side.
The children came to see him at the hospital and Eve told them that their mum had died in the fire.
‘What about Christmas?’ asked Flora, as though Eve hadn’t mentioned her mother had just died.
Eve looked at her mum who leaned forward.
‘I don’t know about Christmas, darling. She was a little kitten and all that smoke would have been hard for her.’
‘Did Mom start the fire?’ asked Myles, as ever, straight with a punch to the gut.
‘I don’t know – the police are looking into it,’ Eve lied but she knew Myles could tell she was skirting around the truth.
‘We will need to bury Christmas,’ Flora said, her bottom lip trembling. ‘It’s not nice for her to be alone in the house.’
Myles reached out and pulled Flora to him.
‘They will find her, Flors, I promise. And I’ll call them and tell them to give her a proper funeral, okay?’
Flora started to sob and she buried her face into Myles’s shoulder. Eve saw his tears and felt her own as they sat together in the family room.
She looked at Myles and shook her head. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said to him. ‘I wish this had a different ending for your mum and your dad.’
‘Maybe if you hadn’t left then this wouldn’t have happened,’ he hissed at her.
Eve felt Donna bristle but she nodded.
‘I know, I thought about that also. But maybe you and Flora would have been in the house and me – or none of us. It’s impossible to know anything other than where we are now, which is here and we have to stay connected and kind to each other while your dad tries to get better.’
Myles looked out the window over the car park.
‘He’s not my dad,’ he said almost to himself.
Flora pulled away and held his face in her tiny hands.
‘But he is your dad,’ she said. Eve could see her eyes searching Myles’s.
‘He loves you; you make him laugh. He said you were the sort of person he wished he was as a kid. He called you cool and said he would never be cool. He told me he thinks you will do something amazing one day. He told me when you were little you used to sit on his lap and read his palm. He told me that you used to say that the line down the middle was the road you had to walk to find each other.’
