Now, as he finished his orange juice, Oliver thought about the grief he had felt. Still felt. ‘I can’t imagine how you feel,’ he had told Anna but it was a lie. He knew how it felt to lose the person you love more than anyone else in the world. He had felt it too. He perhaps should have told her the truth.

He wanted to bring Anna the answers, the comfort, he himself once craved.

If only she would trust him.

Chapter Thirty-Four

Anna

‘I can’t imagine what you’re going through,’ Oliver had said to me when we met but he knew only too well. Why hadn’t he just been honest? Reading the article filled me with an overwhelming sorrow. His story was vastly different to mine and yet strikingly familiar. Love. Loss. The inconceivable pain of sitting beside someone’s bedside, willing them to come back to you. To recover. The helplessness. He had felt it too. All of it.

Had he and Clem planned a family? I placed my hands gently over my cramping stomach. My nan was fond of saying ‘You can’t miss what you never had’, but oh, she was wrong. Oliver must grieve for the future they had planned. In my mind he made the leap from scientist to man. No longer coming across as odd, just incredibly sad. Now I understood why he was so driven in his research. A picture formed in my mind of him sitting with Clem in the hospice, her physically in front of him but her mind somewhere else entirely, Oliver pushing his glasses onto the bridge of his nose as he tried to read her face. Her thoughts. Unable to know what she was thinking.

Feeling.

Wanting.

‘They look so happy together, don’t they?’ In a photograph from their wedding day, Oliver was barely recognizable, not from his lack of beard but because of his beaming smile. The sea glistening behind them, the breeze ruffling Clem’s long hair.

Nell scrolled down further. There was a picture of Clem’s funeral. Oliver was one of the pallbearers. Her coffin balanced on his left shoulder, devastation crumpling his face.

‘I think he might genuinely want to help,’ I said.

‘Maybe. I’m going to google that Japanese neuroscientist.’

Nell found an article about his work. She read far quicker than my tired eyes could.

‘God, it’s like something out of a film. There’s something that can actually decipher the images in someone’s mind. It’s crazy to think all this stuff goes on and people like you and I have no idea. It sounds so futuristic.’

‘I don’t think Dr Acevedo believes that there’s anything going on inside of Adam’s mind. I don’t think he believes Adam will ever wake up. He’s hardly the most positive of people.’

Nell opened YouTube and typed in ‘miracle waking from a coma’ and was flooded with results.