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

cats were prowling elsewhere tonight. She had a feeling not just of aloneness, but of nothingness. Like existing in a vacuum. She wanted to cry but couldn’t. She wanted to sleep but couldn’t. She wanted to run away but couldn’t. Not quite yet anyway . . . There was another day to get through, somehow.

She closed her eyes as the physical memory of the small blade pressing her finger reasserted itself. She thought she would always feel it now, when her thumb pressed that particular part of her finger pad – this statistical loss not just part of her clinical record now, but her body.

She still couldn’t work out how it had happened. The nurse had counted the implements into the sharps bag, all present and correct. If she had only noticed the blade was missing, there would have been time to go back into that tiny body and fish for it. Instead with every move, every breath, every peristaltic squeeze, it had cut the child a little deeper, a little longer until there were too many to count. Quite literally, it had been death by a thousand cuts.

Tara wanted to blame someone else – to believe it was the nurse’s fault, or the scalpel manufacturer’s – but she knew it was hers. As the consultant on duty, the buck stopped with her. That was what it meant to be the boss, her father had always told her that. ‘You take the rough with the smooth, Piglet.’ A child had died because of her negligence and she would have to live with that knowledge.

She turned to get back into bed. Her shift started at nine and it was now four. Somehow, she needed to find rest, go hunting for it. She picked her way carefully over the plush carpet, her hand brushing the evening dress that now lay carefully draped over the back of a bedroom chair. Rory’s dinner suit was equally considerately folded and laid out. Surgeons, by nature, weren’t messy types – they liked order, knowing exactly where everything was, so that the hands could move and the brain could work automatically. On autopilot. She was good at that.

She slid down the sheet and pulled the covers back over her. She looked at Rory asleep. He looked younger, his features almost toddler-soft as his lips slackened, a flush in his cheeks. She wondered why she hadn’t told him about her day and the trauma it contained. She had simply come down to the taxi and greeted him with a smile, her ‘face done’, as her mother would have said and the new dress on. Perhaps if it had mattered less, she might have been more inclined to share. They usually talked about their days and what they’d done; he was a doctor, after all, he got it. People died all the time, it was part of the job. But this felt different, like she’d failed. Because to lose a child . . . There was nothing in this world worse than that.

Chapter Eleven

Holly’s hand gripped Tara’s arm tightly as she came and joined her in the terminal building. Tara was standing stiffly in front of the large window, blindly watching the pilot run through checks for the plane that was going to take them away from here. It was eight on the nose and, as feared, Holly had come straight from the hospital, albeit scrubs off and back in the clothes she had rolled out of bed and picked up off the floor this morning. Her trainers thankfully no longer had specks of someone’s regurgitated carrots on them.

‘I heard about the girl.’

Tara felt the lump in her throat swell again as she stared out over the runway with studied intensity, her muscles rigid. She had called in sick for the first time in her career. She knew the disruption it would bring, her colleagues forced to cover for her, another consultant drafted in on call, her patients waking to find themselves with a new doctor – but to work after a night of no sleep at all would have been as bad as operating drunk or high. She was used to broken sleep, but seven hours of staring at the ceiling was another level altogether and she had spent the day on the sofa, exhausted and unable to rest. Sleep fluttered around her head like an angry crow, diving at her but never quite making contact. Every time she closed her eyes . . . And now her glands were up and her head felt clamped in a vice that was being ratcheted ever tighter. A holiday had never been more needed.

‘It’s always worse when it’s a kid,’ Holly murmured, getting it.

Tara nodded again, her reply needing a few more seconds of focus before the word could be formed. ‘Yes.’ If she could only erase the sight of that small, punished body on her operating table, if she could only forget that stinging sharpness against her blood-soaked fingertips.

‘I remember my first. Mohammad Parveneh; seven and a half. Hit and run.’ Holly’s voice cracked on ‘run’. ‘They caught up with the bastard within the hour. He got three years for careless driving, was out in half that.’ She swallowed. ‘It really made me question whether I was cut out for it; I didn’t think I could hack it. Sometimes this job makes you feel like you only see the worst of people—’

‘Mum!’

They both turned as the drumbeat of trainered feet rolled down the tile floor.

‘Most excellent boy!’ Holly grinned, instantly sinking to her heels, her arms outstretched just in time for a skinny, long-legged, dark-haired, ultra-fast torpedo to spin into them. Her nightmare cast off by a dream.

Tara smiled as she watched Holly kiss Jimmy’s head, tousling his silky hair as if to rough it up.

Dev brought up the rear, towing two large suitcases and Jimmy’s enormous Liverpool holdall strapped across his body. He hadn’t put on a pound in ten years and looked like he might crumple in half from the weight of his load, his glasses slipping