the corridor towards the Critical Care ward. The doctor used her security card to let them in and led them past a busy-looking nurses’ station. They strode by a shared ward with four beds in it, relatives surrounding some of the patients, who were hooked up to various life-saving machines, some conscious, others not. There was a young girl on one of the beds, just eighteen or so, and Melissa imagined Lilly or Grace lying there. The woman sitting by her bed looked up, catching Melissa’s eye, and Melissa could see the despair in her eyes.
She hurried on until they got to the end ward. This was much like the first one, curtains drawn around two of the beds. The exposed beds across from them were home to an elderly woman and a large man in his fifties who seemed happy enough, reading a magazine.
‘Patrick’s here,’ the doctor said quietly, going to the back of the ward and drawing away the blue curtain to reveal Patrick lying in a bed.
Melissa barely recognised her husband.
There was a tall machine next to him with a variety of tubes attached to his body, his heart and breathing constantly monitored. They’d shaved half his head to do the scan and the tube coming from his mouth made his face look lopsided.
Her fingers touched her parted lips in shock and she felt her legs weaken. Bill put his hand on her back and the three of them walked up to Patrick. Melissa took his hand and stifled a sob. It was horrible to see a man so full of life, a man who rarely sat down, now so still and so tethered. He was always moving, whether it be on his bike, pedalling madly through the forest, or in the house, fixing something, playing with the kids, dancing, cooking. Even when they had their cinema nights, the five of them on the large corner sofa glued to the TV, Patrick would be getting up every few minutes to do something or another, wanting to perfect some DIY he’d done earlier in the day.
‘Sit down, for God’s sake, man,’ Lewis often joked, and Patrick would sigh, flopping down next to his son as Melissa laughed.
Melissa took the seat next to Patrick, and Bill and Rosemary sat opposite her.
‘I’ll leave you now,’ the doctor said in a low voice. ‘Stay as long as you like.’
When she walked away, Rosemary burst into tears, grasping her son’s hand and leaning her cheek against it.
‘Who would do this to you? Who?’
Melissa took a deep breath to stop her own tears coming.
Who had done this to Patrick?
Melissa sat with Patrick a few hours later, the skies now dark, the view of Forest Grove from the window of the ward shrouded in night. She felt her heart yearn for the village, for her home, for nights curled up under thick blankets with her family around her, no blood, no secrets, just the sway of pines outside.
She’d been in the room for five hours now, just sitting and holding Patrick’s hand, trying to wrap her head around what had happened as her phone lit up again and again with unread messages from well-wishers. Bill was getting a coffee in the café downstairs after giving Rosemary a lift home. Rosemary had her own health problems, having suffered a severe urine infection a few months before that saw her in hospital for a week, so they’d convinced her to go back home and look after the kids, Melissa promising to return in the early hours so Rosemary could come back after she had had some rest.
Melissa smoothed her fingers over her husband’s bandaged head now, curling a dark strand of hair around her finger. He’d hate the fact that half his hair had been shaved off but he’d cover that by making a joke of it, say he ought to come to the hospital more often for a shave. She laughed to herself, but then the laugh turned into a sob. She leaned her forehead on his blanketed thigh, tears wetting the wool, feeling the bump of a tube underneath. It was the first thing she’d noticed as she’d glimpsed him through the trees all those years ago: his thatch of wavy hair. He was breathtakingly handsome, even then. She’d never really been into Disney films as a child, but she imagined he was how a Disney prince would look, with that thick dark hair, those broad shoulders and that dimpled chin.
‘Looks like a right