As Jodie, Carol, fit paramedic number one and fit paramedic number two exited the premises, he’d stayed stock still on the trampled grass.
I can’t—
Jodie spent the drive to the hospital coming up with alternative endings to that uselessly vague remark, but none of them made sense.
Until she remembered something.
‘Carol,’ she said.
‘Yes, pet?’
‘You remember when I first got here and you told me I’d made Will hurt his hamstring and then abandoned him?’
‘Yes, pet.’
‘You said he had a problem with doctors and hospitals. Do you know why?’
Carol’s hand was in hers, and she was the one supposed to be doing the patting and the consoling, but her aunt managed to squeeze her hand and say gently, ‘You need to ask him that question, Jodie. Now for the love of God, would you stop talking? Because I think I’m in need of a little nap.’
Huh.
Jodie would have liked to have found the idea of a medical phobia shortsighted and ridiculous, but she was reminded of all the many shortsighted and ridiculous thoughtsshe’dbeen having all year. Like, life had no meaning. Like, every car journey was a death waiting to happen. Like, giving up the profession she loved and was good at and which kept food on the table was a totally normal thing to do after losing a friend—a lover—in a tragic accident.
Maybe she and Will had more in common than both of them knew.
Chapter 16
Will planned on being on the front steps of Carol’s house when Jodie returned from the hospital. He didn’t care how late it was—or how early—because night could roll into dawn, dawn through day and into night again, and December could roll on into the new bloody year … He wasn’t moving.
After an hour or so of waiting, he heard a meow in the bushes—not a weak meow, but more of a hunting meow. It was too dark to see in the shadows beside the house, so he switched on the torch app on his phone and stood up to investigate.
‘Well, hello, you,’ he said to the ginger cat.
It was eating something noxious that might have had a wiggling tail.
‘Don’t you like rump steak scraps from the pub kitchen?’ he said.
The cat looked at him unblinkingly before giving its face a cursory wipe with one paw, then sauntering off to hop over the low side fence and into the next garden.
‘It’s not as though I needed the company,’ Will called after it.
Eleven o’clock passed. Then midnight. He was slumped in a half-doze against the screen door when the rumble of engine noise roused him. He opened his eyes. Headlights were travelling up Lillypilly Street at a pace far too swift to have Jodie behind the wheel … but then, she hadn’t gone in her car, had she?
The taxi—because now he could see the glimmer of a logo on the car’s exterior—didn’t turn into the hotel-motel. It didn’t slow as it travelled through the small string of shops the locals fondly referred to as ‘downtown’. But it did slow when it reached the little section of footpath abutting Carol’s house.
He heard a car door slam. Footsteps. The creak of the gate.
And then Jodie was on the front path, looking at him.
She looked tired, and whatever hair tie had been holding her hair back earlier in the day must have been lost because she looked even more dishevelled than she had the day they’d gone swimming, and her hair had blown itself dry in the breeze through the window of her car as they’d driven home. He liked it. He liked everything, except perhaps that wary look she was giving him.
‘How’s Carol?’ he said.
But she didn’t answer. Not at first.
Instead, she dropped her bag to the ground and a brown paper sack that might have held—He didn’t know what and didn’t have the brain bandwidth for conjecture. Then she sat on the step next to him and rested her head on his shoulder.
The relief in his guts was instant.
