The Secret Path by Karen Swan (summer beach reads TXT) 📕

in the tuna sandwich, the scant evidence that she had had lunch today. Without even a sigh, she dropped it to the plate and pushed her chair back, her tired eyes meeting her friend’s.

‘Catch you later then, maybe,’ Holly nodded with a resigned expression. ‘Airport for eight thirty tomorrow, right?’

‘Eight,’ Tara corrected, knowing her friend knew the ETD perfectly well. ‘Sharp.’

Tara picked up her KeepCup and took a large swill of what passed as coffee here before breaking into a jog. She nodded at familiar faces as she ran with careful haste. She never usually ran; it panicked the patients to see doctors sprinting. But as her pager went off once, twice, three times more, she sped up through the too-familiar corridors and tore up the stairwells; there was no time for lifts.

She could have run it blindfolded, knowing the layout of the hospital better than her own home. She could locate swabs from the tiniest store cupboard or grab the defibrillator on any ward; she knew which vending machines were tricky, the nicest porters to ask for help, but she had no idea of the names of her neighbours or where the stopcock was in her Pimlico flat, and Rory had pointed out to her only last week that the protective blue film was still stuck to the front of her fridge; she had thought it was supposed to look like that. She’d had it for eighteen months.

She was there in under three minutes, flashing her ID card against the ICU entry screen, waiting impatiently for the two seconds it took for the doors to swing back with a brushed whisper. Her heart plummeted as she saw one of her F2 team duck her head out of Room Three with a wild-eyed expression, as though looking for someone. Looking for her.

‘Talk to me,’ she said, automatically reaching for the stethoscope around her neck as she walked in, the other juniors straightening up and moving back slightly from the bed, revealing the tiny, crushed form of a four-year-old girl. In spite of her training always to be objective, her usually implacable mask slipped and she inwardly reacted with shock and horror again at the sight of the child. No one should endure what that little body had: sixteen broken bones. A ruptured spleen. Fractured skull. Hearing loss.

‘BP crashed. Sixty over forty. Fluid, stat!’

What? Tara’s eyes scanned the monitors, making sense of the digits that told her an accelerating story, a subplot to the simple Happy Ever After Tara had thought she’d given her in theatre nine hours ago. Everything had been fine all day, but now her blood pressure was 60/40, far too low; her oxygen saturation levels were 85; and her pulse was 140 and rising as her heart desperately tried to pump enough blood and oxygen to her organs. She was going to crash again, her system insistently shutting down, her tiny body wildly swinging towards death like a monkey looping between the trees.

Tara frowned, trying to make sense of the riddle. Something was glitching inside that little body – but what? What was she missing? The surgery had been a success. Admitted just after 6 a.m. – her parents now in custody – the scans had been unambiguous, her stitches had been clean and neat. It had been a textbook procedure, the girl had come through without any complications; Tara had done her job well. She’d been anticipating a quiet day and night’s rest for her small patient and then a move to the paediatric ward tomorrow morning, followed by the inevitable visit from social services. She hadn’t been worried about her prognosis, though it had broken her heart to think that no one, absolutely no one, was sitting in the waiting area, tearful and pacing, desperate to hear how that little girl was doing. Surviving? Dying? No one cared. She was four years old and as alone in this world as anyone could ever be.

Tara put her hand on the slender arm, feeling the small girl’s warmth, her flickering aliveness like a candle in the breeze. What chance did she have? Born to parents that never wanted her, parents barely more than kids themselves, parents who only knew the rule of the fist and the escape of the bottle. She felt the familiar groundswell of dismay – guilt – rise up in her that she should have so much and others so little, but she drew herself up an inch, reminding herself this was what she lived for. This was how she made the difference and gave back. She could do this, at least.

The child’s body stiffened suddenly beneath her touch, then relaxed, monitors beginning to blink and flash, numbers to shout at her.

‘Call theatre,’ Tara said, her voice setting hard as logic, fact and a rigorous education took over. Sentiment wouldn’t save the child. Only medicine. Only calm. Her eyes tracked the changing stats, deciphering now the meaning behind the digits and converting them to flesh and blood catastrophe. ‘She’s haemorrhaging. We need to get her back on the table. Now.’ She must have missed something when she went in the first time. She must have done.

One of the nurses ran out of the room to make the call as the sides of the bed were raised up and the brakes taken off. Tara blocked it all out – the noise, the flashing colours, the adrenaline like a metallic tang in the air. She felt held in a cloud where the world beyond its feathered edges ceased to exist, where she ceased to be or feel. Her feet moved automatically, lift doors were closing but she could see only what was in front of her. A child, dying.

‘Stay with me, Lucy,’ she said, squeezing the tiny forearm. ‘You’re safe. We’re going to look after you.’

She moved instinctively into the surgical theatre, walking arms-first into her outheld scrubs and soaping her hands rhythmically, methodically, her brain scanning through for the most likely areas of breach. She