TEN

      Izzie, Anneliese and Brendan sat at the kitchen table around untouched cups of tea. The tea made Izzie realise she was home, for sure: only in her birthplace was everybody convinced that, when all else failed, making tea helped.

      Her father sat opposite her, looking much older than he had the last time. She hadn’t been home in over a year – how was it that time between visits home seemed to expand the longer you lived abroad?

      The plus of emigration was that you never spent long enough at home to be irritated by all your family’s annoying little idiosyncrasies, stuff that niggled when you were in close contact. The minus was that your family aged so much in your absence.

      Every time she came home, she had that feeling of watching another frame in a speeded-up piece of film.

      Dad was sixty-seven and when she said it fast, it didn’t sound old at all, until they’d embraced in the hospital and she felt that he was no longer her solid father, just skinny, diminished and older. But then, she was older too.

      Older, just not much wiser, she thought with bitterness. Joe had left two messages on her phone. She’d listened to his voice and wished she had the strength to erase the messages without having to hear all of them. But she couldn’t do that. Like an addict, she had to hear his voice, just in case he said what she longed to hear above all else:

      I love you and need you. I’m coming to be with you, Izzie.

      But that wasn’t what he’d said. Instead, he’d gone for a safe message that managed to say nothing:

      ‘I know you’re upset, but please call me back, I hate to think of you away with us not talking, call me.’

      Call me.

      Izzie knew what she wanted to hear him say: I was wrong, I love you, I totally understand what you want from me and I was stalling for time in New York.

      But even when she’d gone away from him, saying she didn’t want to see him again, he hadn’t said those words.

      For the first time, she began to link up the two Joes – the one she loved, who was funny, warm and sexy; and the business version, who obviously hadn’t become wealthy and powerful by being Mr Pushover. Had she made the classic female mistake of thinking that underneath the tough businessman was a teddy bear only she could see? And all along, the only thing underneath the tough businessman façade was a tough man.

      ‘I do love you, but it’s not that simple,’ he’d said.

      She’d known it wasn’t simple. And she’d done her best to block that out because the lightning strike of love was so strong that it had seemed it must be their destiny to be together. This wasn’t a scheming, sex-fuelled fling: it was the real thing. True love trumped a marriage that was a marriage in name only, surely? Or so she’d assumed.

      Assume makes an ass out of me and u, as somebody once said.

      Izzie Silver might be a dumb broad, but nobody was going to make an ass out of her twice.

      ‘I’ve been thinking,’ said her father, clearly desperate to break the silence round the kitchen table. ‘Is it possible Jamie is a brother of Lily’s, somebody who died when she was young and that’s why we’ve never heard of him? Infant mortality was terrible eighty and ninety years ago. If Jamie was her little brother, it would all make sense…’ Brendan’s voice trailed off. ‘Maybe Edward knows, or maybe there’s something in the family records.’

      Even in her exhausted, jet-lagged state, Izzie was astute enough to sense Anneliese sitting up uncomfortably when Brendan spoke. It was the mention of her uncle Edward’s name that had done it, Izzie decided.

      Dad had said something when he phoned her in New York about Edward seeming oddly reticent about speaking to his wife. Dad hadn’t known what was going on, but Izzie knew now, without anybody telling her in words, that there was something wrong between her aunt and uncle.

      ‘If Edward knew about another uncle who’d died, he’d have told us years ago,’ she said now, and again she could sense Anneliese relax a little. ‘You know how close Gran and I were. She’d have told me about a little brother who died, wouldn’t she? There was just her and Tommy, I’m sure of it.’

      ‘Well,’ said Anneliese glumly, ‘we don’t know who this Jamie person is, so maybe we don’t know as much as we thought we did. Even when you know people terribly well, you can discover they have secrets from you.’

      ‘True,’ agreed Izzie, thinking of Joe and how she’d been deceived by him. Or maybe he hadn’t deceived her. Maybe she’d wanted to be with him so much that she’d been blind to reality.

      Still, it was harder to know people than you thought. And for whatever reason, dear Anneliese clearly felt the same way.

      ‘Do you think Lily will ever come back to us?’ Anneliese said listlessly.

      ‘Nobody knows, love,’ Dad said. ‘It’s up to God now.’

      The three of them had stayed in the hospital for an hour with her grandmother and after that brief moment of lucidity when Lily had cried: ‘Jamie!’, there had been nothing else, just her grandmother lying there, still absent. She hadn’t opened her eyes or moved or said anything. All the hope that Izzie had felt on the flight over had melted away.

      The young doctor who’d talked to them really hadn’t known what to say.

      ‘Sorry, there are no straightforward answers right now.’

      At least she was being frank, Izzie thought. The young woman’s honesty was preferable to the ‘I am the doctor, I know everything’ mode of communication.

      ‘We’ve done a CT scan, she’s on heparin to arrest progression or prevent recurrence of further strokes, but I’m afraid there has been a considerable bleed in your grandmother’s brain. And when there’s coma following a stroke, it does present an unfavourable prognosis. It’s not all doom and gloom, there might well be spontaneous neurological recovery, but we really don’t know if that will happen. It’s a matter of waiting now, I’m afraid.

      ‘The added problem is that, because of your grandmother’s age, there are other risks now, including heart problems and pneumonia. And I’m afraid her heart activity has been a little erratic in the past twenty-four hours. That’s our primary concern.’

      ‘There’s a problem with her heart too?’ Izzie buried her face in her hands. It kept getting worse. ‘I thought, because she talked, that she might come out of this. It’s got to be a good sign, hasn’t it? It means she’s coming back, right?’

      ‘I’m sorry, it’s not that simple,’ the doctor said. ‘Who knows what your grandmother is seeing or believing right now? People in her position can respond in some way to voices, so it is perfectly natural that your voice sparked something in her, but as to what she was thinking, I don’t know. As to whether she will ever come out again, we don’t know that either. We’re monitoring her and trying to keep her vitals stable.’

      ‘And if she doesn’t come round properly?’ Anneliese asked what Izzie couldn’t bear to.

      ‘Every case is different. If a person in her condition hasn’t recovered in some neurological way within the first three weeks to a month, then it doesn’t look good, I’ll be honest with you. We’ll have to wait and see. Right now, we want to keep her stable and see what happens next.’

      The first three weeks to a month? Izzie felt ill at the thought of watching her beloved gran fade away over a month. When they left the hospital, she was conscious of a sensation of emptiness in the