Questions of Trust A Medical Romance - By Sam Archer Page 0,46
lies the paper had printed about Dr Tom Carlyle. And then she’d get to work investigating every single rumour, every sly distortion of the truth, and she would demolish them all. She’d bring down the paper and its editorial staff if need be.
She was one hundred per cent committed to proving Tom Carlyle’s innocence, because he was a decent man who was being made the target of a malicious smear. Because as far as she could tell, he had nobody else to stand by his side.
And because she loved him.
Yes, she’d admitted it to herself as she was driving back home to the cottage after the encounter with him outside the surgery that afternoon. The words had risen, unbidden, into her mind, and all of a sudden the world had shifted into pure, crystalline focus. For all Chloe’s constantly renewed commitment to self-honesty, she understood that she’d been living in a fog of self-delusion for the last few months, and most especially in the last week since their kiss.
She, Chloe Edwards, loved Tom Carlyle. The realisation, once out of the box, was never to be stuffed back in. And all of a sudden it didn’t matter that she’d been widowed for hardly longer than a year and therefore might be seen to be disloyal to the memory of her late, much-loved husband. It didn’t matter that Tom was a doctor, and that a doctor had allowed her husband to die.
She loved Tom Carlyle. And although she’d lost him, and he was going away, she owed it to him and to her love for him to clear his good name.
Lying in bed, Chloe thought it would be as well to focus on the negative feelings now, to give them free rein, the better to get them out the way so that they didn’t linger and distract her from what she needed to do in the coming days. Regret: that was one of the negative feelings, possible in the long run one of the most corrosive of all. In her case, the regret was for the way she’d allowed love, so potentially joyous and healing, to lie lonely and unrecognised under layers of guardedness and pride. And she had only herself to blame for it. She knew Tom was attracted to her; she didn’t know if he loved her. But if he did, or had, she couldn’t fault him for trying to get close to her in order to allow love to bloom. Chloe had been the stand-offish, cool one, always keeping him at arm’s length. He’d done his best, within the bounds of acceptable behaviour, to break through her reserve, and it was hardly his fault that he hadn’t been successful.
Another negative feeling was frustration, and this time the feeling was directed at Tom. How could he throw in the towel like this, planning to pack up and move away on the basis of a few scurrilous rumours? He’d sounded completely sincere when he said they were baseless, so why didn’t he stand his ground and fight for his name? Why was he giving in like this? Yes, the next few days and weeks were going to be highly unpleasant, and people were going to talk behind his back. His life in Pemberham, and his work, were going to be made exceedingly difficult. But people were decent and reasonable, on the whole, Chloe believed. Given time, and the evidence, the community would come to understand that Tom was the victim of an injustice, and would learn to trust him once more. Running away, as he was intending to do, would just make people more suspicious that he was guilty, that there was no smoke without fire.
The third negative feeling Chloe acknowledged within herself was anger: a slow, simmering fury that she’d last experienced in the months after Mark’s death, when the evidence had become clear to her of the incompetence of the doctor who’d misdiagnosed him. This time round her anger was less focused, directed towards a murky, unknown person who was bringing the allegations against Tom, and towards the Pember Valley News for taking part in this witchhunt. Of the negative emotions, this was probably the most useful. As long as she didn’t let it heat up to a point at which it affected her judgement, Chloe could use it to sustain her when things became difficult, as they no doubt would very quickly.
Her thoughts kept returning to the love she felt for Tom. Like a brilliant, multifaceted diamond it