My heart quickened on the word wife. This was Bill. Single at last, and me – was I single too? I couldn’t think about that.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Three

‘I’m so sorry.’

I thought of how often I’d heard that phrase in the last week. Police, doctors, lawyers. They were sorry, but professionally so. They saw this all the time, lives ruined, screeching off their pathways and mangled to bits against walls. It didn’t really matter to them, not really, if Mike never woke up or if he did wake up and went to jail for something he hadn’t done. They would still go home and sleep at night.

This doctor was the young female one, with a piercing through her upper ear that I’d seen Cassie admiring. Short, scrubbed nails. Practical hands. How I envied her, watching her bustle around. The certainty of knowing you had skills, you could save someone. Pushing aside much older people to insert needles and tubes and read machines and pump life back into patients through their chests. Why hadn’t I steered Cassie to the sciences? Why had I let her drag along the bottom in school, spending more time on her eyeliner than her work?

‘Mrs Morris?’

‘Yes. Sorry.’ I did not want Child Doctor to think badly of me. ‘You were saying?’

‘His liver isn’t doing so well. You understand what this means?’

I would have snapped back that I had a degree, I went to Oxford, except I really didn’t understand. The words were going into my ears but my brain was rejecting them. ‘He’s not getting better?’

‘Not as fast as we’d like. The liver can regenerate when it suffers trauma, but the damage was extensive. If there’s no improvement in the next few days, we’ll have to put him on the transplant list for a donor organ.’

Waiting for someone else’s life to crash, in other words. A shudder ran through me, thinking of those accidents and deaths still to come.

‘I think it would be wise to push ahead with matching tissue types within the family, also. It’s possible to donate a small section of liver, which can then grow to full size in the other person. You yourself are unlikely to match, and your son is – ten, yes? So too young. But your daughter might be a candidate, if she matched. She’s sixteen?’

‘Fifteen.’ She’d be sixteen in a matter of weeks – young for her school year – and that was another thing I had to think about. How could I give her a birthday with all this going on?

The doctor was frowning. ‘It’s young. But if you consented, and she was willing, that might work.’