‘How is she?’ I whispered. Amelia’s heart might be the one in trouble, but my own refused to beat until Mum answered that question.
‘She’s sleeping now. They’ve got her hooked up to all kinds of monitors and machines. Again.’
I hugged Mum tightly. ‘She got better before. She’ll do it once more,’ I said with a conviction I wished was real. ‘I’m so glad you didn’t have to wait here alone this time,’ I continued, shooting Tom a grateful smile.
‘Tom was here before I was,’ Mum said, turning to the fisherman with a look that told me more about their relationship than she’d yet revealed. ‘He came in the ambulance with Amelia. He refused to leave her.’
I crossed over to the elderly man and pressed a grateful kiss on to his weather-beaten cheek. ‘Thank you for that.’
He shook his head, looking embarrassed to be the focus of attention.
‘Can you tell me what happened?’ I asked.
Tom lowered himself stiffly on to one of the plastic chairs that lined the corridor.
‘She said she’d been feeling poorly all morning,’ he said, employing a euphemism that seemed woefully inadequate to describe a suspected heart attack. ‘She decided to get some fresh air, to see if it helped.’
He dropped his gaze to his gnarled hands, seeming surprised to find them trembling. ‘It didn’t,’ he said gruffly. ‘I found her on the pathway, panting and gasping like she’d been out running or something. Her phone was in her hand. She’d already called for an ambulance.’
I’m not sure what was worse – to hear that Amelia had to dial 999 herself, or that she’d had to go through the entire ordeal without a single member of her family beside her. I glanced up and saw a single tear roll down Tom’s cheek and realised I was wrong. My definition of ‘family’ had just expanded.
‘I didn’t know what to do to help her, so I put my jacket around her and sat down on the path beside her until the ambulance folk arrived.’
He looked across at Mum, as though apologising he’d not been able to do more. She shook her head with a teary smile, wordlessly telling him he’d done plenty.
‘It sounds like you did everything just right,’ I told him. ‘What time did all this happen?’
‘Just after three o’clock.’
It was the exact same time that I’d experienced the weird reluctance to catch my flight to New York. Amelia had been in trouble and, hundreds of miles away, I’d sensed it. She might claim to want me out of her life, but the ties that bound us were stronger than any argument. They’d pulled me back to her.
*
At just after midnight, they allowed Mum and me into the unit to see Amelia. Whatever sedative they’d given her was clearly doing its job for she seemed completely unaware that we were there, even when we held her hand or kissed her cheek. For us, just being able to see her, to watch the rise and fall of her chest and hear the reassuring blip of the heart monitor, gave enough comfort to last until morning.
A duty doctor, who frankly looked too young and tired to be the physician in charge of the ward, approached the bed.
‘Amelia is stable and comfortable,’ he said gently. ‘The best thing you can do for her now is to go home and try to get some sleep. The cardiologist will be able to give you a clearer picture of her condition tomorrow.’
I was about to protest, to insist that we stayed; then I caught the anxious glance the young medic had given Mum. He was right. A woman her age shouldn’t be spending the night on uncomfortable hospital chairs.
‘That sounds like a sensible idea,’ I said, slipping my arm through Mum’s and gently steering her away from her elder daughter’s bedside.
‘You can phone throughout the night for updates, but I’m confident Amelia will get a better night’s rest than either of you.’
He wasn’t wrong.
*
I pulled out of the virtually empty hospital multistorey and pointed the car in the direction of the beachside cottages. Mum sat beside me, looking like the dictionary definition of exhausted. I covertly glanced her way each time we travelled through a pool of light from a streetlamp. Not covertly enough, as it turned out.
‘Stop worrying about me, Lexi,’ Mum said, laying a hand on my arm. Her joints looked misshapen, and the skin was not as supple as it had been, but it was still the hand I’d held throughout my childhood.
‘I’m as strong as an ox,’ Mum declared. It was the first time I’d laughed in hours.
‘Sure. In a world where oxen are five foot nothing tall and as slight as a stick insect.’
She smiled wryly. ‘If you both didn’t look so much like your dad, I’d have thought they’d brought out the wrong Petri dish all those years ago,’ she joked.