Hijacked Honeymoon

alive.

Sam was alive.

‘You want a trolley?’ Ted asked her dubiously, eyeing her huge white leg, and Abbey shook her head.

‘No, but a wheelchair would be good. And a hand backwards out of this car.’

‘No sooner said than done.’ A minute later Abbey’s wheelchair was spinning down the corridor to Intensive Care.

Sam was definitely still alive.

Ted pushed the ward door open and Abbey looked in with some trepidation, to find Sam Henry looking to see who’d just entered. When Sam saw Abbey his face puckered into a white-faced smile.

‘Hey, Abbey… ’

‘Sam.’ Abbey shoved the wheels of her chair down to push herself over to the bed. She took Sam’s hand in hers. It was clammy and cold but he was alive, and for the moment that was all that mattered.

In the last few years Abbey had leaned heavily on Sam Henry for advice and friendship. In fact, Sam had become almost as important to Abbey as his son had once been.

‘What on earth are you doing to us now?’ she asked gently.

‘Damned heart,’ Sam whispered, ‘but Ryan’s here.’ The old man looked up at Ryan, standing beside his bed, and there was no mistaking the pride and love in his voice.

Abbey looked up too, and saw Ryan’s face set. Ryan had heard it, then. The love and the pride. The ties that went far beyond duty letters. And Abbey saw in his face that Ryan was feeling just dreadful.

The old Ryan wasn’t completely gone.

OK. She’d let Ryan off the hook. Take the blame herself. Let Sam keep on thinking that his son was wonderful.

‘I’m so sorry.’ Abbey squeezed Sam’s hand. ‘Did Ryan tell you it was all my fault he was late? First I smashed my bike into him. Then I demanded he put my dislocated knee back into place, and finally he had to milk my cows. And all the time you were waiting and not knowing he was even in the district. I’m so sorry.’

‘There’s no damage.’ There was damage, Abbey knew. Sam’s voice was a weak whisper, but there was no way he’d conceded anything to his dicky heart in the past. He wasn’t about to start now. ‘I might have known Ryan was needed. He wouldn’t have been late otherwise. My Ryan’s a great boy.’

‘He is, too.’ Abbey ventured a smile up at Ryan and found his face still looked as if it were carved in stone. Pain was washing over her in waves. Soundlessly Ryan held out the ECG reading. Abbey checked it carefully, and nodded.

‘It’s OK, Ryan,’ she told him. ‘Not much different to last time.’ A little worse. Not much.

‘What the hell…?’ Ryan’s voice was full of pent-up emotion. ‘Dad… you’ve got a heart that’s as dicky as this and you haven’t even told me?’

‘Now hardly seems the time to yell at him for being a bad letter-writer,’ Abbey said mildly. She smiled affectionately at Sam. ‘I’ll yell at you in the morning, if you like. For now I’ll ring Janet and let her know you’re OK. She’ll be worried so I’ll thank you kindly to stop scaring her. If Ryan’s done all he needs maybe you should get some sleep.’

‘I don’t need all these wires,’ Sam said fretfully, and Abbey fixed him with a look.

‘Yes, you do.’

‘Why?’

‘Because they keep your son happy,’ Abbey told him. ‘Also they tell us that your heart’s still beating, and if Ted out there doesn’t have positive proof of a beating heart every few minutes or so he has a nice little slab down in the mortuary that’s just your size.’

Silence. Ryan’s eyebrows hit his hairline.

But, to her satisfaction, Sam gave a weak chuckle. ‘You always did have such a persuasive way with you, young Abbey,’ he whispered. ‘OK, then. I’ll wear your dratted wires. Now get off with you and let a man get to sleep.’

‘Do you always gain patient compliance by threatening them with the mortuary?’ Ryan asked as he wheeled Abbey back into the corridor. His voice sounded drained and weary, but also calmer. The electrodes attached to Sam’s chest were giving a cautiously optimistic message. A nurse was sitting beside Sam’s bed and there was every reason to hope he’d live a bit longer. Live to be persuaded to have his by-pass…

‘I use it all the time.’ Abbey chuckled. ‘Works a treat. Especially since Ted started taking guided tours of his underground room.’

‘Ted…’ Ryan frowned. ‘Is that the ghoul I saw, stalking the hospital corridors, as I came in?’

‘If he looked like a ghoul it was definitely Ted.’

Ryan frowned. ‘He looks familiar. Do I… did I know him?’

‘Probably,’ Abbey told him, ‘but I wouldn’t imagine you were on close terms. He’s Ted Hammond.’

The wheelchair came to an abrupt halt. Ryan stared down in incredulity. ‘Abbey, Ted Hammond was a derelict when I was a kid. How-?’

‘He wasn’t a derelict,’ Abbey said. ‘He was just bored and lonely. He was out of work and didn’t know how to fill in his time. Ted came back from the war to find his wife and kids had left him. He had one leg shorter than the other and he had nerve damage. So… he drifted on the streets and he stayed there. Then…’

‘Yeah, tell me what happened then.’ Ryan straightened and started walking again-and Abbey frowned. It was a strange sensation, being wheeled by Ryan Henry.

Concentrate on Ted…

‘Well, a couple of months after the hospital opened we had an awful car crash down near the beach,’ Abbey told him. ‘Ted was first on the scene. When I got there with the ambulance Ted had hauled a couple of kids clear before the car burst into flames. There were a couple of others dead inside. Ted coped-in fact, he coped a lot better than I or the ambulance officers did. And I saw a side that he’d kept hidden for years behind a wall of misery. So I offered him a job.’

‘Abbey, he was a street bum…’

‘No. He was a lonely old man without friends and family and without an aim,’ Abbey said roundly. ‘People like your mother classified him as a bum while he was ill and desperate, and the label just stuck. Ted didn’t drink. He just didn’t know what else to do with himself but sit on park benches and look desolate. And if he looked unkempt it was because he couldn’t see the point of being anything else. He’s not unkempt now.’

Silence.

Oh, dear. Abbey bit her lip. She’d just criticised Ryan’s mother-again. She and Ryan were doomed not to be friends any more, Abbey thought miserably. Then she looked up as the night sister approached.

‘Sister?’

‘I was just wondering,’ the nurse said, and smiled shyly up at Ryan. ‘Dr Henry, are you going home?’

‘I thought I’d check our jellyfish victim once more, then take Dr Wittner home and go on to sleep at my father’s,’ Ryan said brusquely, still mulling over Abbey’s words. He motioned to the phone on his belt. ‘Call me if you need me.’

The nurse hesitated. ‘But…’

‘Ryan, when I have someone in hospital with heart problems I don’t go home,’ Abbey interjected. ‘And the jellyfish toxin is still a risk, despite the antivenom. So, as you’re now doctor in lieu of me…’

‘Abbey…’

‘Ryan, I don’t know whether you realise what you’ve let yourself in for here,’ Abbey told him. ‘You’re it. There’s no resident or intern backing you up. If your father goes into cardiac arrest then there’s only you.’

Ryan frowned. Sleep at the hospital? He’d never thought of doing that.

But if he didn’t? If his father went into cardiac arrest? Trained nurses could start emergency procedures but…

Abbey was right. To drive the five minutes to take Abbey home was one thing. To be fifteen minutes out of range at his father’s house…

He hardly had a choice here. But if he had to stay at the hospital for the entire week… well, Felicity would not be pleased.

‘What do you do with your little boy when you need to stay here?’ he asked, and Abbey shrugged.

‘If I can, I bring Jack with me and settle him into the children’s ward. That’s possible if I have warning but