Questions of Trust A Medical Romance - By Sam Archer Page 0,11

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 clique who’d allowed her husband, her Mark, the man to whom she’d pledged her life, to die. However unfair it was to him as an individual, while she could tolerate Dr Carlyle, she could never bring herself to trust him.

Chloe drew up the covers and hoped sleep would come soon. Her hopes were in vain.

Chapter Three

Chloe heard it through the open kitchen window, the awful harsh grinding of metal on tarmac. She’d just finished doing the breakfast dishes and was going to spend an hour reading to Jake before catching up with her emails and settling down to work.

It was Saturday morning, five days after she and Jake had arrived in the town and three days since she’d sent her article to the Pemberham Gazette. The editor-in-chief had replied the next day, the tone of his email brimming with enthusiasm. He’d loved the piece, thought she struck just the right balance between self-deprecating wit and shrewd observations of the differences in country versus city outlooks, and wanted to run the article in next Monday’s edition. Best of all, if it was received well by the paper’s readers, he’d give serious consideration to commissioning a regular series of columns from her.

Her own column! Chloe couldn’t help smiling in delight at the thought of it. Granted, it was a small-town weekly, not one of the big national papers. But it would be quite a feather in her cap, considering she’d been in town less than a week. And it would be a stepping stone to greater things. Already