Questions Of Trust: A Medical Romance Read Online Free PDF Page B

was pale, sweat springing in tiny beads on his forehead.
    ‘Is it still bad?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Will you be all right to stay here with Jake for a few minutes? While I go to the chemist?’
    He nodded.
    There was an all-night pharmacy fifteen minutes’ walk from the house. Chloe returned to find Mark’s features contorted in a grimace of agony, an expression he tried to suppress as she walked in.
    Mark took the pills, pronounced the pain a little easier after ten minutes, and went to bed.
    He never woke up.
    As the summer morning light slanted through a crack in the curtains, Chloe, lying beside her husband, stretched an arm across his chest, felt him cold and unresponsive. She sat up in panic, saw his eyes closed, his lips slightly parted.
    No rise and fall of his chest.
    She called his name, slapped her fingers against his cheeks, shook him increasingly frantically. Then she backed across the bed, groping behind her for the phone on the bedside table, her stare fixed on her motionless husband, her knuckles crammed into her mouth to stifle the scream that was building in her chest.
    The coroner’s report was straightforward. The immediate cause of death was a cerebral haemorrhage resulting from a ruptured berry aneurysm. Unbeknown to Mark, he’d had a tiny swelling in one of the vessels in his brain where the wall was weakened. The piercing headaches he’d been getting were caused by minute leaks of blood as the vessel wall was breached, a fraction of a millimetre at a time. The tipping point came on the day the headaches had become constant. At some time in the night, the vessel had burst completely.
    Could the damaged vessel have been repaired in time to save his life? Possibly, decided the coroner. But while the misdiagnosis of migraine was unfortunate, it didn’t, in the coroner’s view, represent medical negligence. A regrettable but forgivable error had been made.
    Forgivable. Well, not to Chloe. In the white heat of grief and fury she’d lived through for the first few weeks after Mark’s death, she’d explored legal action against the doctor who’d attended Mark. Her lawyer, a friend and colleague of her late husband’s, had in the end persuaded her not to go through with it.
    ‘He’s a rotten doctor, Chloe. You know it, and I know it. And he probably knows it, too. But I’ve looked into this. The signs and symptoms of migraine are diverse enough that he’ll just about get away with saying he made a not unreasonable error. Plus, there’s the coroner’s ruling. You won’t win this, Chloe. I’d take on the case for free if I thought we had a chance. But we don’t. You’ll just prolong the pain you’re already going through, and be faced with the added burden of disappointment at the end.’
    So she’d dropped it, and concentrated her energy on Jake, who despite being only a year old was clearly bewildered by what was going on, and by the sudden absence of his daddy. She’d gone back to work after a reasonable absence, but couldn’t pick up the threads again, couldn’t return in the evenings to the townhouse without a feeling not just of sadness and regret but of profound horror at how utterly wrong a turn their lives had taken. Her decision to move, to start a new life with Jake outside the city, had followed quickly.
    Sitting alone in the stillness of the cottage, Chloe became aware her neck was wet, and realised the tears had been coursing down her face, as fresh and as stinging as if they were the first ones. When? she wondered. When does it start to get easier?
    On her way to bed, she caught sight of George, the toy monkey, which after all the drama earlier had now been left on the dining room table. Dr Carlyle’s image came into her mind. It had been good of him to return the toy.
    He was a likeable man, and clearly great with kids. And he was a charmer, there was no doubt about that. Charming to women.
    But underneath it all, he was one of them. One of the arrogant, self-righteous