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There was food, real food, with meat in it, and water-soluble vitamins and fibre and stuff. I hadn’t eaten so well since I’d last been at home at Christmas. Angie sat across the table from me, poured extra cream on my crumble, and said,

“Tell me about your boyfriend.”

I felt myself colouring. After the way he’d kissed me in the car park, I wasn’t sure I could talk coherently about him, but I was willing to try.

Chapter Twenty Two

Henry stared at my office.

“Um, Dad,” he said. “If my bedroom looked like this, Mom would kill me.” He wrinkled his nose. “It smells funny in here.”

I pushed enough of the runaway paperwork aside to get the door open fully, then forced the window open. It did smell funny, and I knew exactly why. “Yep. And if I don’t clear this up, someone will come along and kill me, too.” I pushed the power button on my work PC and it lurched into life, then took the rubbish bin out to the janitor’s room to empty it.

“Give me a moment to log you in, then you can cruise around online. Just, please, try not to set off the net nanny,” I said when I came back.

“’K, Dad,” Henry said, and he stepped over the mess and clambered into my office chair. “Can I print stuff out?” he asked.

“Sure.” I leaned over him to type in my password. Once he was in and typing in a url, I turned my attention to the paperbomb that had gone off in my office.

Henry was safely occupied, going through every site that might have cheats for his favourite game, and I began to sort and stack the papers. There were coffee stains on some, from yesterday, but nothing important seemed to have been ruined. I really needed to sort this whole disaster out, because if I was fired on Monday, someone would have to deal with this, and I couldn’t just drop this on whoever replaced me.

It took a long time, long enough that Henry made two raids on the snack machine in the main hall, but eventually I had seven neat piles of papers on the floor, twelve coffee cups on the desk, and I’d completely filled the recycling bin that I’d dragged to my office door.

I filed the seven piles, ignoring the issue of cleaning out my filing system, washed the coffee cups up myself rather than leaving them for a janitor, and emptied my office rubbish bin again.

It was done; they could fire me now.

Henry looked up when I came back into the office carrying the rubbish bin and said, “You’re a slob, aren’t you, Dad?”

I sat down on my plastic chair. “So I’ve been told, though I’ve seen much worse,” I said, thinking of Matthew’s house.

“You finished? Want to follow me around on a quick round? I’ll stop any of the nurses from hugging you, I promise.”

“Sure, Dad, but you have to tell me what all the machines do, even the gross ones.”

Heidi was sitting up in bed when I found her room, and a woman who could only be her mother was brushing her hair.

They both looked up as Henry and I walked in. Heidi beamed at me and said, “Mum, this is Andrew.”

I smiled at Heidi and then turned to her mother. “Hi, I’m Dr. Andrew Maynard, and this is my son, Henry. I just dropped in to see how Heidi was going.”

Heidi held up her splinted arm, showing an impressive set of sutures, and Henry said, “Wow, can I see them?”

Heidi held out her arm proudly. “Thirty-six stitches on the outside, sixty-five on the inside.” Henry’s eyes grew wide and he leaned over to peer at the sutures. Next to chest tubes, he liked sutures best, and while I kept him well supplied with chest tubes, having shown him two already today, sutures were not something I had much to do with.

Heidi’s mom said, “I’m Angie. Thank you so much for what you did for Heidi. I met your nice boyfriend last night, made him a real dinner.”

Oh, fuck.

Henry almost fell off Heidi’s bed in his astonishment, so I hauled him back onto his feet. “Must rush, I’m needed on the ward. Glad Heidi’s better.” Henry towed me out into the corridor.

“Boyfriend!” he said. “You’ve got a boyfriend? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Ahh, good question,” I said. “Sorry, kiddo, I was planning on telling you. We only just got together.”

Henry looked disapproving. “You’re supposed to tell me these things, you know. Go on, I want details.”

“Not here,” I said, mindful of the nurses hovering around, including F’s bedwarmer, Lena.

She smiled knowingly at me as I strode out of the ward, Henry almost running to keep up with me.

I made Henry wait until we got into the car. “Well?” he demanded as I started the car. “What’s he like? Why didn’t you tell me? Is he another doctor?”

“He’s a medical student, one of my latest batch. His name’s Matthew. There, satisfied?”

“No way,” Henry said. I leaned out of the window and swiped my staff card through the exit gate at the car park. “I wanna know all about him. When am I going to meet him?”

“Not this weekend,” I said firmly. “Give me a chance here.”

Henry subsided into quiet glee in the front passenger seat.

I had no idea he’d be so pleased I was seeing someone. He’d hated my last boyfriend, so I’d kind of assumed that his malevolence would carry on to Matthew, but it hadn’t. Maybe he’d worked out I was lonely? I never knew what was going on in Henry’s head.

He bounced on to my bed that night, unbearably cute in his striped pajamas, suddenly young again. I looked up from the document I was scanning, highlighter pen in my mouth.

“He Hinny,” I said, then I took the pen out of my mouth and said, “Hey, Henry.”

“Dad?” Henry said. “Do you love Matthew? Because if you do, and you want him to stay here on the weekends, you could just close the bedroom door, and I wouldn’t walk in or anything.”

I smiled at him. “That’s very generous of you,” I said, touched more than I expected.

Henry bounced again, sitting cross-legged, and said,

“Well?”

I shook my head. “Give up, kiddo. I’m not going to talk to you about how I do or don’t feel about Matthew, not without talking to him first. For all I know, he’s going to run screaming from this obnoxious pre-pubescent child of mine.”

Henry chortled happily, obviously drawing conclusions of his own, and he flopped down beside me on the quilt. “I spotted his toothbrush and razor,” Henry said. “I must have been an idiot not to see them last night.” He wriggled a bit, digging into me with both a knee and an elbow at once. “You know, if he’s a med student, he’s probably not much older than me, is he?”

We both burst out laughing. “Go to bed, you little horror,”

I said.

“Good night, Dad,” he said, and he scrambled into my lap for a quick hug, crumpling all my papers.

“Good night, Henry,” I said, kissing his forehead.

He clambered off the bed and scooted out of the room. I picked up my papers, leaned back against the bed head, and closed my eyes.

I wasn’t sure how I felt. The rational bit of me was saying that I couldn’t possibly, after only a week, actually know Matthew well enough to be in love with him. But, if I turned that bit of my head off, I couldn’t think of him without a smile creeping across my face. Then there was that piece of foolscap paper, carefully stored in my wallet. It didn’t say much, just, ‘Dear Andrew, You spoke wonderfully, I was nearly in tears’. The writing trailed off part way through the next word, but it was enough that Matthew had actually tried to find me.

Then there was the way he’d kissed me.

If I wasn’t in love, it was a damn good facsimile of it.

Chapter Twenty Three

It was my usual weekend routine. I’d wake early, study for a good solid eight hours, when the house was at its quietest, then go down the pub mid-afternoon. I’d sink a few lagers, hopefully at someone else’s expense, and head back to the house to hit the books again.