Page 1 of Welcome to the Cornish Country Hospital

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If Danni could have stopped it from happening, she would have. If she’d had any say at all, she would rather have hated her best friend’s fiancé on sight than spent the last seven years falling more and more in love with him. But life didn’t play fair like that and, by the end of the year, the only man she’d ever loved would be walking down the aisle with the woman Danni thought of as her sister.

‘This was supposed to be a fresh start.’ Danni muttered the words as she headed up the coastal path on the cliffs above Port Kara. Brenda didn’t answer, but then basset hounds weren’t exactly famed for their ability to give relationship advice. The only thing Brenda was famous for was leaving trails of slobber that no cleaning agent in existence could remove.

‘I’ve taken a job I didn’t even want and spent every penny I had buying a house on the opposite side of the country, and what do they do?’ Danni kicked a patch of loose gravel on the path ahead of her. ‘They both take jobs at St Piran’s Hospital and buy a house half a mile away. Half a bloody mile!’

Brenda looked up, the sudden movement sending some of her trademark slobber through the air as her jowls swung from side to side. She’d heard all this from Danni a hundred times before, but she still gave her owner the same look of sympathy she’d given her every other time, those soulful eyes seeming like they wanted to say so much. It was just as well Brenda couldn’t speak; she’d probably have told Danni to pull herself together and get a grip. God knows Danni had looked in the mirror and told herself that often enough.

She didn’t want to be this person, someone who’d wasted 2,500 days praying for a miracle that involved Esther falling for someone who made her far happier than Lucas ever had. That revelation would be followed by a short interval, the bare minimum that decency dictated, before Lucas finally realised it had been Danni he loved all along. Then they’d all get on with the rest of their brilliant lives, their old friendships completely intact and with none of the complications that having an ex hanging around so often brought. It was like Danni was trapped in a romcom, except somehow,she’d ended up as a supporting character in her own life story.

Taking the job in A&E at St Piran’s Hospital had felt like a huge step backwards in her career. The seven years she’d spent secretly loving Lucas had been the same seven years the two of them had spent undertaking specialist training at a teaching hospital in London. When they’d both been offered jobs in their chosen fields at the same hospital, Lucas as an associate specialist trauma surgeon and Danni as a consultant in A&E, it had felt like a dream come true. They’d be working in parallel some of the time, with part of Lucas’s role involving assessing trauma patients in A&E.

Danni had tried not to admit, even to herself, how relieved she’d been that they wouldn’t be working in different hospitals, and going out for a drink to celebrate the news had seemed the most natural thing in the world. It was the second bottle of champagne that had changed everything; she’d suddenly looked across at Lucas and realised that if she didn’t tell him now, she never would.

Halfway through that second bottle of champagne, she’d opened her mouth to say the words, but nothing came out. She sat there, not moving, with every fibre of her being screaming at her tojust say it, to tell him she loved him before she lost him for good. But even in a haze of Veuve Clicquot, she couldn’t do it to Esther. Not to the woman who’d sent a congratulations bouquet to Danni that was so big she could hardly see over it. Or who’d taken her call just days before, when there’d been a young patient Danni’s team couldn’t save and she’d woken herself up sobbing at 3a.m. Esther had let Danni cry on her shoulder so many times in the ten years they’d known one another and it was Esther who’d got Danni through when the training had felt like it was going to overwhelm her, or when her day had seemed tougher than she was.

Esther was the person Danni confided all her fears to, and all her secrets. All except one. Loving Lucas was something she hadn’t admitted to a soul. And, in that moment, staring across the table at him, in the corner of a noisy pub, she’d realised that she never would, because as much as she loved him, she loved Esther more. It was why she had to get away, because if she stayed she’d never be able to get over him. Any doubts she might have had disappeared when Esther had texted her later that night.

Oh my God, he’s finally asked me! Not like I’d imagined, but I don’t care. Apparently it was drinks with you that got him thinking and ‘the ring’ was something he made in the taxi on the way home, out of the wire from one of the bottles of champagne you two so rudely drank without me ?? He’s promised there will be an upgrade, but I don’t care about that either. Let me know when you can do lunch and I’ll fill you in on all the rest. I promise not to be a bridezilla and you can wear whatever dress you want! Love you xx

Danni had wanted to get in her car and leave the moment she’d read the text, to just keep going until she could outrun her feelings. Instead, she’d sat there staring into the darkness of her empty flat. It was like being torn in two, wanting to feel happy for the kindest, most generous person she’d ever met, but finding it impossible when her heart felt like it had been ripped out of her chest.

When she’d told Esther she was turning down the job in London to go back to the same stretch of Cornish coast where she’d grown up, it had been her best friend’s turn to be heartbroken. She couldn’t understand what on earth would make her want to leave, or to reject a job in one of the most prestigious hospitals in the country to go and work in a tiny Cornish hospital, an eight-hour drive away from the people who loved her most. Especially as Esther knew it didn’t even feel like home to Danni, not any more.

Danni had been ten years old when she’d decided to become a doctor. The same age she’d been when her father, Trevor, had died from a massive heart attack at work. There’d been no one around to save him and Danni had vowed, then and there, that she’d learn how to bring someone back from the brink of death, to stop other families going through what hers had been forced to endure. Her mother, Nicola, had never been the same after that. She’d coped by trying to find solutions to her problems at the bottom of a bottle of gin, and by sending Danni and her brother to boarding school so she didn’t have to try to be there for them. School had been Danni’s solace and losing herself in books had been a refuge from the real world. It didn’t matter if it was the textbooks she clung to during the day, or the novels she read under the covers at night – those books, as well as the snatched days she got to spend with her brother, Joe, when their mother reluctantly had them back for the holidays, had been the only things that had felt like home since losing her father. Until she met Esther.

Esther had been just two weeks into her first full-time nursing job the day that Danni had started a two-year foundation programme at the same hospital, straight after finishing medical school. They’d clicked straight away and within three months they’d been sharing a flat. By that time, Joe had settled in Australia, where he’d gone for his post-university gap year. Her mother was living on a houseboat in Bristol, with her boyfriend, Paul, who she’d met on an art therapy course, eight years after her husband’s death. These days, Danni’s mother seemed content to scratch a living as a part-time artist, selling the paintings she and Paul did from the back of their boat. Danni was glad her mother had found some level of happiness, but Nicola still couldn’t cope with anyone’s problems but her own, so their relationship consisted of superficial conversations and meet-ups over lunch every couple of months or so.

Meeting Esther really had felt like coming home for the first time in years, and through her she’d found a whole new family too. Esther’s parents and paternal grandparents had treated Danni as if she really was one of the family. Esther’s mother, Caroline, often told Danni she thought of her as another daughter. They were the family Danni had always wanted and, even if she didn’t love her best friend as much as she did, she’d rather have died than hurt any of them. Which was why she had to leave, and why she could never reveal the real reason for going.

‘Please stay. Nothing here is going to be the same without you. I know I’ve moved in with Lucas now, but he’s just a boy. I still need my girl around too.’ Esther had taken hold of both her hands. ‘I can’t for the life of me understand why you’d want to leave London and go down there. I know it’s beautiful, but there’s so much more scope for your career here. And, more importantly, you’ve got all of us.’

Everything Esther had said had made perfect sense, but she had no idea that seeing Lucas almost every day felt as if it was slowly killing Danni. She’d tried to tell herself at first that her feelings for him would pass and that the initial spark of attraction would die out. Then she’d got to know him and any hope she’d had that her feelings would just fizzle out had been lost. Danni and Lucas understood each other in a way no one else seemed to. They’d bonded during late-night shifts, sharing bleary-eyed conversations over hospital canteen coffee, cramming for assessments and talking about all the things they wanted to do with their careers. But most of all they’d bonded over both having lost parents at a young age, which no one else quite understood.

Sometimes, when the three of them were together, Danni wondered if Esther ever felt left out. If she did, she never showed it. She still invited Danni along to everything – meals out, movie nights, even on holiday, and the three of them laughed together over shared jokes no one outside their inner circle would have found funny. Despite the torture of watching Esther and Lucas’s relationship from the sidelines, Danni had accepted every invitation. Hoping that one day he’d show a side of himself that would make her fall out of love with him. But she was still waiting…

‘Cornwall is where all of my memories of Dad are.’ Danni’s eyes had filled with tears, but only partly because it had been true. ‘I need to be there for a while and work through some stuff that seems to be coming to the surface just lately. I buried it all when Dad died and just threw myself into schoolwork, then medicine. I need to do this, Essie, but I’m going to miss you all more than you’ll ever know.’

It had been one of the hardest conversations Danni had ever had and her throat had been raw with the effort of trying not to cry. The tears had come when she’d started packing up her stuff, photo frames where all her memories seemed to feature Esther and Lucas. She’d had a wobble the day before she’d been due to exchange contracts on the purchase of the cottage in Port Kara. When the former holiday cottage where they’d spent their last family break together, before her father had died, had come up for sale, Danni had been sure it was a sign. The cottage was in such an idyllic spot it couldn’t have felt more magical. It had also been the last place she remembered feeling happy, before her whole world had come crashing down.

But on the night before she was due to sign the final paperwork, and hand over almost every penny of the inheritance her father had left her, she’d felt nausea grip her stomach at the mere thought of leaving London. Danni didn’t want to go; she was suddenly as certain of that as she’d previously been about needing to leave. And then came the knock at the door.

‘Lucas.’ His name had caught in her throat, as he stood in the exact same spot he’d been standing on the first day they’d met, when he’d come to collect Esther for their date. She’d been terrified of her feelings for him even back then, but the impact of those feelings had turned out to be far worse than she’d ever have thought.

‘Don’t go, please. I’ve come to beg you not to.’ He’d moved past her, catching hold of her arms and spinning her around to look at him. Those dark eyes of his that were so often smiling, more serious than she’d ever seen them.

‘Did Esther send you?’ Danni had struggled to keep breathing and her whole body had felt as though it was pulsing with longing.

‘She doesn’t even know I’m here.’

In that moment, when he’d looked at Danni, she’d known for certain that she hadn’t been imagining it. The feelings she had for him didn’t go just one way and, if she’d moved even a fraction, he’d have kissed her. God knows what would have happened after that, because she’d have been powerless to stop it. So, instead, she’d stayed rooted to the spot; the only movement she made at all was to shake her head.

‘I’ve got to go, Lucas, you know I do.’ Even then, part of her had been desperate for him to touch her, seven years of pent-up emotion pounding in her chest, but somehow she’d taken a step back. ‘You need to leave.’

‘If things had been different, we could have been—’

‘Don’t!’ She’d pushed him then, out of the door, slamming it behind him and leaning against it for good measure. It was only when she’d finally heard his footsteps as he walked away that she’d allowed herself to sink to the floor and the tears had come.

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