Page 32 of Lessons in Love at the Cornish Country Hospital

‘If you even try to lick the sausage rolls before I get my share, I swear to God I’ll put this fork right through the back of your hand, and Danni will have to come off maternity leave straight away to save you.’ Amy shot Aidan a look that suggested she meant business.

‘Are you going to miss all of this bickering?’ Isla smiled as she looked at Danni, and for a moment all she could was nod in response, the emotion she’d been so worried would overwhelm her threatening to do just that. Finally, she found her voice.

‘You’ve got no idea how much I’m going to miss it, but I am coming back.’

‘Yes, you bloody well are, even if we have to come and drag you back to work.’ Esther put an arm around her waist. ‘Now let’s get this party started before Aidan and Amy get so hangry they decide to fight to the death over who gets the biggest sausage roll.’

‘Good idea.’ Danni leant into her friend for a moment, looking around the table at all the people who’d made the effort to come and celebrate with her, many of them at the end of a very long day. If it took a village to raise a child, she already had it in the friendships she’d made, and suddenly it was far easier to push that frisson of fear that had been in danger of coming back up the surface, back down where it belonged.

Wendy’s heart sank as she scraped the food off Chloe’s abandoned plate and into the bin. She’d finally agreed to join them for dinner, instead of hiding out in her room, where she’d been holed up for almost twenty-four hours a day since she’d come home from the hospital. Wendy had hoped that joining them for dinner would be a tiny step towards Chloe making some kind of recovery from what had happened. She’d never just ‘get over it’, no one ever did when they lost a child, but Chloe would have to find a way to learn to live with it and Wendy was willing to do whatever it took to help her. She’d read everything she could about child loss, in the hope it would stop her from accidentally saying the wrong thing, and most of the sites said the pain would eventually lessen, but that it would take a long time and that Chloe would almost certainly need some help to work through her feelings. She’d been referred to a specialist counsellor, but she hadn’t made the call to set up the first appointment. She’d also said she didn’t feel ready to arrange Beau’s funeral yet, even though she’d been told that the hospital’s rules meant he couldn’t stay in the mortuary for more than twenty-one days, and Wendy had wondered at that point if she should contact Mike. But it wasn’t her place, so instead all she could do was to be ready to listen and help in whatever way Chloe needed. That didn’t make it any easier for Wendy not to worry herself sick about the desperately sad young woman who’d sat silently at the dinner table, pushing her food around her plate. She’d always been very slim, but she was beginning to look painfully thin. And, knowing her history, that terrified Wendy too.

‘What are we going to do? She’s not eating anything.’ Tears burned at the back of Wendy’s eyes as she looked at Gary. It was concerning enough how little Zara ate, and she was still watching her daughter much more closely than she wanted to. Now she had two of them to worry about, and Chloe’s disinterest in food seemed far more extreme.

‘I don’t know, sweetheart, but she looks so pale. I’m really worried.’

‘Me too. Do you think we should try and force her to eat? I know it sounds stupid, but maybe if we said she has to eat something if she wants to stay. I don’t want to resort to that but?—’

‘That’s the worst thing you could possibly do.’ Zara suddenly appeared in the kitchen, her eyes wide as she turned towards her mother. ‘It’ll just make things worse; she needs help, but that’s not it.’

Wendy caught her breath. Zara was still her little girl in some ways, even at seventeen, but at that moment she seemed older and wiser than Wendy had ever felt. ‘I know you’re right, but we’re really worried about her.’

‘I am too and it’s weird because she was the one who helped me.’ Zara swallowed so hard it was audible. ‘She noticed I was skipping meals, and telling you and Dad that I’d already eaten, when it was obvious to her that I hadn’t. Clo told me that she went through the same as a teenager. I denied it at first, but I started to talk to her about it a lot more a few weeks before Beau died.’

‘Oh sweetheart.’ Wendy wanted to tell Zara that she’d known too, and that she’d even talked to Chloe about it, but that would just have muddied the waters and this wasn’t about her. It must have been huge for Zara to admit this, and it was clear she’d done it out of her own concern for Chloe. So, if Wendy really wanted to help both of them, she had to avoid saying anythingthat would make Zara shut down again. ‘Is there anything you can think of that she said, which might help us to support her?’

‘It’s not about the food, it’s about having something you can control. When I talked to her about it, I realised that was something we had in common. She was struggling at home when she stopped eating as a teenager…’ Zara looked at her mother again, and it was as if Wendy had been punched in the gut.

‘And you were too?’ She was desperate not to cry, or to put her own feelings at the centre of all of this, but the tears welling up in her eyes were completely out of her control. She’d cried more in the last few weeks than she could ever remember doing in her life, even when Mike had left, but her heart felt like it had been broken over and over again just lately.

‘I wasn’t struggling here, with you and Gary. But with Dad, it was like he’d forgotten I existed most of the time, once he’d left, and I don’t think me and Alice would have seen anything of him if it hadn’t been for Clo. I couldn’t do anything about how he was acting, and it made me feel useless, like I didn’t have any control over a huge part of my own life.’ The maturity in Zara’s words was breathtaking, and Wendy knew that a lot of that must have come from her daughter’s conversations with Chloe. They had a shared experience which had allowed Zara to gain more insight than Wendy could ever have given her, but it turned out there was more to come. ‘The only thing I could control was what I was eating, but I didn’t even realise that’s why I was doing it, until Clo told me that she’d done it too. It was because of her that I agreed to go to the support group at the hospital.’

‘I had no idea you were going.’ A few weeks before, this revelation would almost certainly have angered Wendy; the idea that Chloe would overstep the mark like that and not even tell Wendy what was going on, acting like she was Zara’s mother instead. But all Wendy felt now was an overwhelming gratitudetowards Chloe, and another one of those waves of affection for her crashed over Wendy like a tsunami.

‘I didn’t want to worry you, and I’ve been making progress.’ Zara straightened her shoulders. ‘It’s not a quick fix, the counsellor told us that and Clo knows it too. Things can trigger an eating disorder and make it come back, and I think that’s what’s happening to her. So the best way I can think of to help her, is to tell her I need her to come with me to the support group and that I can’t face going any more if she doesn’t. She offered before, but I wanted to go by myself. I’ll just tell her I’ve changed my mind and that I’m struggling doing it on my own.’

‘Do you think she’ll go for it?’ Wendy held her breath, until her daughter nodded. ‘I’m so proud of you, sweetheart, you do know that, don’t you?’

‘I always have.’ Zara suddenly closed the gap between them, wrapping her arms around her mother. ‘I’m so lucky I’ve got you and Gary, but Clo hasn’t really got anyone.’

‘Yes she has, she’s got all of us and we’ll do whatever it takes to help her get well again.’ Gary’s tone was resolute, as he put his arms around the two of them. Chloe might not realise it yet, but she had a family now who weren’t going to give up on her. Wendy just hoped that Zara’s hunch was right, and that they already held the key to getting her the help she so badly needed, because the alternative was too scary to even think about.

19

Wendy had done her best to back off from trying to fix Chloe’s relationship with food, since Zara had made her realise it went way beyond her skill set, and that her eating disorder was so deeply embedded she needed the kind of professional help the support group could offer. But that still didn’t make it possible to stop worrying about Chloe almost constantly. She seemed glued to her phone a lot of the time and, when Wendy had gently suggested that a walk on the beach and a break from her phone might be good for her, she’d reluctantly agreed, but only if Wendy went with her. She’d said she couldn’t do it alone and that just the thought of being outside by herself made her feel panicky. Wendy had been more than happy to accompany her and, in the research she’d done about how best to support Chloe, panic attacks were listed as a fairly common response to the kind of trauma she’d been through. So the last thing she wanted was to push Chloe too hard. Thankfully being out on the beach had seemed to be doing her some good, but less than ten minutes into the walk she’d started to get twitchy.

‘I wish I’d brought my phone.’ Chloe had started pulling at her clothes as she spoke, and moving in the kind of jerky waythat suggested she couldn’t have kept still even if she’d wanted to, almost like an addict waiting for their next fix. The moment they’d got home, she’d grabbed her phone, frantically scrolling like her life depended on it.

‘Are you messaging Mike?’ Wendy had tried to keep her tone level, doing her best not to sound like she was making a judgement. It would hardly have been surprising if Chloe was talking to him. There was a funeral to arrange for Beau after all, but whenever Wendy had tried to broach the subject with Chloe, she’d just said she wasn’t ready. Wendy understood why she couldn’t face saying her final goodbyes to her baby, but Chloe couldn’t put it off indefinitely. If she didn’t organise a funeral herself, Beau would be cremated without her even being there. Talking to Mike about that might even have helped her feel ready, but what worried Wendy was if Chloe was talking to him for other reasons, especially if that meant she might end up back with him. Chloe deserved so much more than he could offer her, but Mike was excellent at playing on people’s deepest fears and insecurities to get what he wanted, all of which could make talking to him a recipe for disaster.

But Chloe’s response to Wendy’s question had been determined. ‘I never want to talk to him again.’

She hadn’t doubted for a moment that Chloe meant what she said, relief washing over her that Mike hadn’t managed to manipulate the situation. ‘I’m spending a lot of time on a forum for women who’ve suffered a stillbirth or neonatal loss, that’s all. It’s really helping me to talk to other people who’ve been through something similar. If I’m honest, it’s the only thing getting me through the days right now.’

Chloe’s eyes had filled with tears then, and Wendy had wrapped her arms around her, as relief flooded through her again. At least she was talking to people who understood, and like the eating disorders support group she’d turned to for help,that understanding was what Chloe needed more than anything right now. Wendy had tried not to worry after that about just how much time Chloe spent on her phone, and how disengaged she was from everyone and everything else. But there was still a nagging feeling inside of her that there must be something moreshecould do.

Wendy had been at the latest get-together of the Miss Adventures club for all of about fifteen minutes, before she’d asked the others for advice.

‘How do you support the women you care for when they’ve lost a baby?’ She blurted the question out to Frankie, just as the waiter who’d brought over their tray of drinks disappeared from view. They were at a new cocktail bar in Port Tremellien, Merlin’s Cauldron, where all the drinks came with some kind of special effect, from glowing, to smoking, and even changing colour. When Caroline had suggested they give it a go, it was the kind of adventure that had been easy for Wendy to get on board with.

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