Splintered Memory - By Natascha Holloway Page 0,91

who’ll make her happy, and he’ll be a lucky guy,” he said flatly handing Claire the divorce papers.

Claire grabbed them off him, picked up her bag from the floor, and headed over to the door. As she opened it, she turned back around to look at the man that she’d so evidently misjudged.

“I can honestly say that I’ve never hated you, until now that is. She seemed happy with you, but you really are a joke. I knew she should’ve stuck with Rich, but maybe when she finds hubby number two he’ll value her more than you do. Who knows I may even get along with him, it’ll help I suppose if he’s nothing like you,” she said irately before slamming the door behind her.

Claire walked down the corridor, but when she reached the bottom she forgot which way she was supposed to go to get out. She all but screamed at a passing nurse for instructions, and then felt momentarily guilty that she might’ve just made an innocent stranger cry.

She couldn’t believe that she’d risked her friendship with Charlie, but she’d done it because she’d believed that Matt would drop everything once he knew the truth. Yet he hadn’t, and now she felt like shit. Worse still, she was carrying Charlie’s divorce papers with no idea of how she was going to explain this to Charlie.

The only thing that she knew for sure was that she wasn’t going to tell her that she’d been to see Matt. Charlie had been hurt enough, and she didn’t deserve to know that Matt had chosen Emily over her. She deserved instead to believe as Claire had done before today. She deserved to believe that Matt would come after her in a heartbeat the moment he knew about her memory.

Matt

One of the lessons that Matt had found the hardest to learn when he’d been training to be a doctor, was how to deliver bad news to patients or to the families of a deceased, dying, or critically injured patient. Matt had struggled with this in his first year as a doctor, and he’d taken the emotional strains and stresses home with him.

Charlie had often sat up with him, and she’d let him talk himself out about patients he’d lost. When she’d been able to see that the emotions of his shift were too raw or painful for him to want to speak about, she’d just sit and hold his hand or lie in his arms. As time had gone on though, he had become immune to the reactions of his patients and their families. He’d supposed that he’d grown hard hearted in a way, but it was understandable to some extent in his profession he’d thought.

He’d learned to control his own emotions and not to let his face betray him by showing signs of concern, remorse, or sympathy. He’d found that his own emotion didn’t help the patients or the families of the patient, and he’d learned that many reactions would be prompted by his own. If he showed nothing, then often the reaction was either subdued or just one of silent shock.

As he sat there hearing the revelation about Charlie’s recovery his brain went into over drive. His first reaction had been one of relief. Finally his living nightmare could come to an end. He could get Charlie back, and his life could go back to how it had been before the accident. Yet as he’d thought this, he’d also thought about his betrayal of her.

He’d pictured the moment when she’d come to find him to share her news with him, and she’d found him in the arms of another woman. The thought had turned his stomach, and alongside this thought was the knowledge that if they were to get back together he’d have to tell her the truth about everything. He’d have to tell her about his affair with Emily before she’d moved out, his drug addiction, his drinking, and all the one night stands that he’d had after she’d left him.

Matt was terrified that when she learnt the truth about the man that he’d been whilst she’d been recovering, she’d no longer want him in her life. He couldn’t face the thought of her rejecting him, or of her looking at him any differently from how she’d always looked at him when she discovered the type of man that he’d been in her absence. He also knew that he needed to consider Emily. He couldn’t just abandon her. He owed