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

had to find the point of egress quickly. She was opening up that little body for the second time in nine hours, a little body that should, right now, be playing in a garden in the sunshine or splashing in a pool or eating cake. She was even more vulnerable now than the first surgery, even weaker, and Tara knew there was a precarious tipping point when the interventions made to save her would become the intrusions that endangered her: hands shouldn’t be inside a chest cavity no bigger than a ball, that healthy growing heart shouldn’t need to be assisted by a ventilator . . .

She blinked hard once, banishing all emotion and pushed the door with the back of her shoulder, rejoining the team in theatre. Their small patient had been prepped but Tara knew the crash was still coming. It was a race against time.

She stood motionless and took a steadying breath, feeling her mind clear.

‘Scalpel.’ The word was a command, like the first note of a song. She held out her hand and the nurse placed the instrument carefully in her palm.

The incision was clean and decisive, the blood dark and thick, telling her at a single glance that her patient’s oxygen levels were low. Her world narrowed further. It was like looking through a telescope, her field of vision trained solely on the radial field immediately before her. There was order in what she saw; it was one of the reasons why she loved medicine – the fundamentals were always identical, it was just disease and trauma that needed to be rooted out as anomalies. But she was blind here. Blood was filling everything, too quickly, a glistening dark red sea flooding around organs. The suction pump could only do so much.

She didn’t panic. She trusted in the training she had had at the side of the world’s best. She trusted in her abilities. Even with a mortality rate as inevitably high as ICU’s, she had never had a child die on her table and this four-year-old girl, utterly alone, was not going to be her first.

She put her hands in, making minute movements with her fingers and feeling for the tiny tear that could wreak such devastation, her fingers pressing lightly against tender tissue, brushing against the proud neat and tidy stitches she had put in herself early this morning.

The monitors were screaming at her in an orderly manner, telling her – as if she didn’t already know – that she was losing the race, running out of time, not good enough.

‘BP fifty-four over thirty-five.’

She felt the team’s eyes upon her as the tension tightened. She worked faster, her fingers deft, trying to ‘see’ where her eyes could not. She was known for her calm under pressure, her ability to rise above a crisis and do what needed to be done. But she wasn’t rising right now and she felt the first shot of panic, like a fluttering frill around the periphery of her vision. There was so much blood. This couldn’t be from a single breach, surely? Where was it? What . . .?

What was it?

What was that?

There was something, hidden below the scarlet surface; as thin as a hair but the tip sharp enough to prick against the pad of her index finger—

‘Suction.’ She directed the nozzle herself and saw it – a flash of silver embedded in tender tissue. Tara felt the walls press in, the ceiling drop an inch.

A blade?

In the next blink, it was hidden from sight again, blood refilling the cavity, that strong little heart doing its job too well. It was her own that was struggling to beat. She felt completely blindsided by the discovery, her mind racing to find explanations even as her hands moved automatically, fingers blindly probing for the tiny metal shaving again.

She found it, and started to stitch, but her time was up. The charts on the vital signs screen – already wailing and flashing red – were interrupted suddenly by a steady bold line that raced from left to right, like some early 1980s computer racing game. Flatline.

‘She’s crashing!’ the nurse said.

‘Moving to one hundred per cent oxygen,’ the anaesthetist said.

Tara removed her hands as they began manual massage. She stared down in a disassociated state at the tiny body, bright white and dark red. It felt like the world had stopped spinning, the tiny scalpel blade glinting jewel-like in the kidney dish. She felt frozen in time, holding her bloodied hands up like spiked crowns, as the drama played out towards an inevitable end, telling a single story.

This was all her fault.

Chapter Ten

Her dress swished as she walked, a long black taffeta column with a flat bow that looped at a jaunty angle across the shoulders, and her hair swept up in a bun that would have had a prima ballerina wincing. She was grateful the hotel had a carpeted lobby; it made walking in heels so much easier after a bottle and a half of red. She reminded herself to keep putting one foot in front of the other. That was all she had to do. Just get through tonight. Keep walking, keep smiling . . .

‘Tremain.’

The man stopped in front of her, handsome in black tie – and aware of it.

‘Charles! Goodness, I didn’t know you were here.’ Her voice was composed, but it had a hollow ring to it, like she was speaking into a barrel. ‘How are you? It’s been a long time.’

‘I know. What – five years? Six?’

She shrugged. ‘Something like that.’ Their relationship – if it could be called that – had been more stop than start. She tried to remember the name of his wife. ‘. . . How’s Caroline?’

‘Great. Great. Expecting number two.’

‘Two? Wow. Congratulations.’ Every other person she met was pregnant these days, it seemed.

‘Thanks.’ His eyes crinkled at the sides when he smiled now, and he looked tired. (Didn’t they all?) ‘And I hear congratulations are due to you too?’

Her smile slipped, all the way to the floor. ‘Sorry?’

‘I heard you