She grinned at him. ‘I am.’
5
Kate
Kate woke up with a jolt. She’d been lying awake for so long that she hadn’t even realised she’d dropped off. She must have only been out of it for half an hour or so. She turned to look at Lily, lying next to her, her leg encased in a cast and propped up by pillows. She was dead to the world, sleeping soundly in a way that only children can.
The previous day had been one horrendousness after the next. One minute she was trying to come to terms with her marriage crisis and the next she was rushing into A&E and being ushered into a cubicle where poor Lily was sitting, her little face pale with shock, tears running down her cheeks. Kate enveloped her into a hug and showered her with kisses, desperate to carry the pain for both of them.
‘What on earth happened?’ she asked Lily’s teacher, Mrs Jones, who was sitting with her, keeping her company until Kate arrived.
‘She just slipped and fell,’ the poor woman explained, visibly shaken. ‘We thought she’d twisted her ankle at first but then it started swelling up like a balloon and she couldn’t walk on it at all. She’s already had her X-rays and we’re waiting for the results.’
‘Thanks, I can take it from here,’ Kate told her. The teacher stood up, patted Kate’s arm and then reached over and gave Lily a hug. ‘I hope you feel better soon, Lily. Everyone will be thinking of you and looking forward to seeing you back at school.’
After she left, Kate sat next to her daughter, putting her arm around her and pressing her body close to her. She kept thinking that she needed to call Pete, to tell him what had happened, before remembering that she couldn’t. She felt alone in the world. Even if they’d had a row or were cross with each other, she had always known that she could call him if she needed to. Now she was totally on her own and she was terrified. How had it come to this?
A nurse appeared, breaking her out of her thoughts, and told them that the consultant was ready to see them. She helped Lily into a wheelchair and pushed her slowly down the corridor and into a room, where the doctor was waiting. He smiled at them warmly. ‘Well, Lily, you’ve been in the wars, haven’t you?’ He turned to Kate. ‘So Lily has broken her tibia, one of the long bones in her lower leg. The good news is that the bones are still aligned so she doesn’t need surgery. However, she’ll need to wear a cast for six weeks and she won’t be able to put any weight on her leg. She’ll need to use crutches.’
He saw the shock on Kate’s face and added reassuringly: ‘It’s a fairly common injury in children, and she’ll be running around again before you know it. They tend to cope pretty well with crutches – better than most adults at any rate.’ He chuckled and turned to Lily: ‘You’ll get to wear a lovely cast and all of your friends are going to want to see it. You can even choose what colour you’d like it to be.’
‘Pink,’ Lily decided immediately, already warming to the idea of being the centre of attention. The doctor smiled at her. ‘Pink it is then.’
They’d managed to get her home in one piece, where Erin was waiting with Maggie to greet them. Lily was shattered and her earlier bravado evaporated as quickly as it had arrived, so Kate had helped her up the stairs and into her nightclothes.
‘Where’s Daddy?’ the little girl had asked, looking at Kate with wide, tearful eyes. ‘I want to see Daddy.’
‘I know, sweetheart,’ Kate told her daughter, ‘but Daddy’s gone on a business trip.’
‘Can we FaceTime him?’
‘I’m afraid not, darling, Daddy is working and he won’t have his phone on.’ God, she felt absolutely awful. How was she going to keep this up? How long would she have to keep it up for? Suddenly she felt a desperate need to compensate for Pete’s absence.
‘I tell you what, why don’t you sleep in Mummy and Daddy’s bed tonight?’ she suggested. Lily’s eyes lit up. The girls were never allowed to sleep in their parents’ bed. Kate had helped her into bed and the little girl had been asleep before her head even hit the pillow.
Unfortunately, Kate couldn’t say the same for herself and so here she was at 3am, lying next to her sleeping daughter and feeling wretched. Thoughts, fears and anxieties infiltrated her mind from every angle. How was she going to cope without Pete? How was she going to carry on as normal? What on earth was going to happen long term? Why had this happened? Could she have stopped it?
As if yesterday hadn’t been awful enough, the accident had totally thrown her. Lily was going to need her parents now more than ever and she didn’t know if she had the strength to get through this and act like everything was fine. She just couldn’t process all the different emotions that she was feeling – overwhelming anger at Pete, worry about what lay ahead, and guilt that she was to blame. She was a failure of a wife. At the back of her mind she’d known for a long time that she needed to make more of an effort in their marriage but she simply hadn’t been able to find the energy to do anything about it. Soon, she’d thought. I’ll fix it soon. But soon never came. Still, until now she hadn’t realised things had got this bad.
She was glad when the sun
