St Matthew's Passion - By Sam Archer Page 0,53

his chest beneath the cover as the ventilator breathed for him. The monitor returned to its steady beeping.

‘But more than the department,’ Deborah continued, ‘I wanted to protect Fin.’

‘Fin? Why would he need protecting?’

‘Because he’s my friend. He’s been deeply hurt, and I didn’t want to see it happen again.’

Melissa had started to warm towards the other woman, but now she felt the old anger coming back. Deborah’s words sounded like a lyric from a cheesy love song. ‘Oh, come on. Fin’s a grown man. So he’s been unlucky in love before. Who hasn’t? It doesn’t make him some fragile flower that needs to be kept sheltered from the world. He can make his own choices about his emotional life. You’ve no right to decide what he ought to do, what’s best for him.’

Even more gently than before, Deborah said, ‘It’s a lot more complicated than you realise.’

And Melissa listened as Deborah told her everything: how Fin’s wife hadn’t divorced him but had been killed by a hit-and-run driver, how Fin had tried and failed to save her, how ever since he’d carried around the burden of his guilt like a cross on his back.

‘Ever since then, he’s believed he isn’t good enough,’ said Deborah. ‘He drives himself to crazy heights, out of a sense of failure. He believes that if he’d been a good enough doctor he would have saved Catherine. The fact that he let her die, as he believes he did, means he’s lacking in some fundamental way. And his life since then has been a continuous struggle to undo the past, which of course is impossible.’

Melissa listened in silence, a painful blend of feelings growing within her: increasing respect for this woman’s wisdom and above all her compassion, and an almost unbearable yearning to take Fin in her arms, kiss him awake, tell him that she understood, that he was good enough, the finest person she’d ever met, and that she loved him.

‘I suppose in a way I was trying to protect you, too, Melissa,’ said Deborah. ‘Fin had already let you get closer to him than any other woman since Catherine. He never talks about such things, but I know. Sooner or later he’d have had to make the decision whether or not to allow you into his life. And I believe at that point he’d decide he couldn’t do it, that it would be a betrayal of his late wife and of his vow to atone for her death by living for his work, and he’d have broken things off with you. It would have been agony for both of you. Neither of you might have recovered. So I felt it was better that it was nipped in the bud, in order to limit the damage.’

Melissa couldn’t speak for a few seconds. Then she said, her voice barely more than a whisper: ‘Why are you telling me this now?’

Deborah took her hand. ‘Because you have a right to know. You love him – it isn’t mere infatuation, I can see that – and he may not…’ She swallowed, and continued in an even quieter voice. ‘He may not wake up again.’

Tears sprang into Melissa’s eyes. She didn’t try to suppress them, didn’t turn away; she just let them burst forth and course down her cheeks. She began to sob, great shuddering breaths wracking her body. Deborah’s arm slid around her shoulders and Melissa leaned against the other woman.

Don’t do this, Fin. Don’t leave.

When her shaking had run its course, when the tears stopped coming and she was wiping her face with tissue paper Deborah had handed her and blowing her nose, she shook her head, avoiding eye contact.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Nothing to be sorry for,’ said the nurse, giving her shoulders another squeeze.

The two women sat in silence for a few minutes, watching Fin, the quiet clinical noises around them somehow reassuring. After a while Melissa said, ‘Do you mind if I ask you something?’

‘Of course.’

‘Something a bit personal.’

‘Fire away.’

‘Did you and Fin – I mean were you ever…?’ Melissa let the question tail off, too embarrassed to complete it and wishing immediately that she hadn’t asked it. She glanced nervously at Deborah, but saw the nurse was smiling.

‘No. Not before Catherine, and not after. And, God forbid, certainly not while they were together. I’m a happily married woman, after all. Fin and I are just friends, and close colleagues.’

‘Didn’t you ever wonder?’

‘What it could be like… otherwise?’ Deborah shook her head firmly. ‘Absolutely not.’

‘Not even