The Nurse by J. Corrigan (list of ebook readers txt) 📕

35

25 April 2016

It’s 9.30 on Monday morning and Theo’s been up since four, thinking about Bella, Ed Madden, Hugo’s impending visit, his lack of money, his failure, Elliot, and Rose. Always these days thinking about Rose.

He logs on to his bank account, and as he studies his negative balance, he tries to figure out how he can possibly pay for the services of an interior designer for his poky flat. It’s untenable. A cold sweat breaks out and encompasses his whole body. He pulls his T-shirt from the waistband of his jeans and flaps it, the cool air circulating around his midriff. If, though, he’s able to extract information from Hugo, information that he suspects Bella wanted to share with Rose in her prison visit, he won’t have to follow through with work on the flat. He can easily pull out of the deal, whatever the outcome. He looks up and takes in the dingy room. He’d like to get something done though.

His landline rings out, bringing him away from his thoughts. Must be a cold caller; no one calls the landline.

Or rather, only one person these days.

He lurches around the flat looking for the phone, managing to get to it before it stops bleating. He returns to his study, the phone glued to his ear.

‘Theo. Glad you picked up. I have good news that I didn’t want to relay in an email.’

Yes, his editor. ‘I like good news, Greg. Go on.’

‘Acquisitions love your proposal for the Marlowe book.’

Theo’s heart is beating inside his throat. ‘That’s good.’

Love is always preferable to are interested in or like.

‘Two-book deal. This one and another non-fic.’

Greg is stringing it out, and although Theo is desperate, he’s also desperate not to appear so. He waits.

‘One hundred and fifty.’

‘Pounds?’

‘Stop dicking around, Theo. Thousand.’

Theo’s heart is now in his mouth. ‘Brilliant.’

‘You’re welcome. Publication date February 2017. Oh, and an outline for book two by the end of July this year. Non-negotiable.’

‘No problem.’

The image of Greg inside Theo’s head becomes less wolf and more owl, and he berates himself for swaying with the wind. His immediate financial problems are over. Maybe having Hugo, or someone like Hugo, revamp his flat is a possibility.

Does he really think he’ll get any info out of Hugo? Bella seems to think he can. He isn’t so sure, although if he did it would make him a more fulfilled man, and thinking of Rose, a happy man too. Elliot not dying would have made him happiest, but that isn’t on the cards. Elliot is gone. Forever.

Yes, Rose could make him happy, a woman he’s about to exploit. The beginning of a headache threatens; he rarely gets them these days and can guess why one is forming now. The advance. His bank balance. The conflict. Rose. Before anything else, before he tries to fix inside his head and make a decision about the way forward, he needs to find out the truth. The truth about Rose, the truth about Daniel Deane and his wife.

Having come back down to earth after Greg’s call, he opens the notebook containing Natasha’s information about Abe and carries on going through it.

At eighteen, Abe was desperate to get away from his parents, particularly his father, and made plans to pursue his medical studies in America. To the fair-haired young man, the dark-haired doctor turned businessman didn’t seem like a father at all. Sometimes when things were very bad, and his parents argued well into the night, he would smell the aroma of cigarettes pervading the house; the only time his mother smoked. In his darker moments, he would fantasise that he’d been adopted. These thoughts permeated the most during the long nights when he couldn’t sleep, when a jagged sense of something bothered him, although he looked just like his mother – everyone thought so.

His father didn’t support his desire to become a doctor, but luckily his grandfather did. Abe loved his grandfather, and all the more because he knew Zakaria loved him back. He adored the time he spent at his grandfather’s riad; sometimes his mother went with him to Morocco, and these were the happiest memories he possessed of her. She became a different person in the laid-back ambience of the North African country.

The determination to become a doctor lay in Abe’s genes, together with the aptitude to easily pass exams, and it was only in the depths of his depression that he questioned whether people thought him cleverer than he really was. That was when he plunged deeper into the abyss.

He felt like a fraud. He felt as if he didn’t belong.

He felt like an imposter in his own life.

He had believed his mother and Zakaria got on well enough, until the day – he would have been around eight – when during his afternoon nap in the bedroom that backed onto the courtyard of his grandfather’s riad, he heard raised voices. The shutters of his room were closed, but the sound was loud. He opened the shutters and listened to his grandfather and mother arguing, the sound echoing. He was never sure if he’d heard properly, but what he did hear imprinted in the depths of his mind. He tried to forget, and over time he did forget, or pushed it so far away that it became a dream. It wasn’t until he was expecting a child of his own with Natasha that the dream, the nightmare, came back.

When Abe fell in love with Natasha, it was only to his mother that he sent a photo. Your father will not be happy, she wrote back. But Abe married his love, only returning to England occasionally, and always alone.

Theo flips the pages, rereads, sits back in his chair and thinks. Was Abe adopted? It’s something to think about. And what sort of parents were the Deanes? Not particularly good ones, it would seem. Natasha told him that as soon as Abe started his medical studies in