This Could Change Everything(96)

‘We’re calling her Superwoman,’ one of the ward nurses chimed in, beaming as she passed them in the corridor.

‘See?’ Conor gave Essie a reassuring nudge. ‘No need to feel bad.’

But Essie still did.

Zillah was out of bed, wrapped in her red silk dressing gown, and sitting like a queen in the high-backed chair beside it. Her glossy black hair was carefully combed over the site of the burr hole in her skull through which the subdural haematoma had been extracted. Her dark eyes were kohl-lined and as bright as they’d ever been, her skin was velvety and her mouth was its customary shade of glossy scarlet.

‘Hang on, you asked me to bring your make-up in for you!’ Essie held up the bag containing everything that had been on Zillah’s dressing table at home. Indignantly, she pointed to the expensive cosmetics clustered together on the bedside locker. ‘Where did you get all that?’

‘Oh I couldn’t bear to wait.’ Zillah reached up and kissed her on each cheek. ‘Ordered it online with same-day delivery. Isn’t technology marvellous?’

‘You look great,’ said Conor. ‘And you’re sounding better too. Your speech is back to normal.’

‘I know. Thank goodness!’ Zillah pulled a face. ‘I could hear myself slurring like a drunk before. All the side effects but none of the fun of actually getting to enjoy a few cocktails.’

Conor’s eyes were twinkling. ‘Your surgeon tells us you could be coming home in a few days. You’ll need to take things easy for a while. Concentrate on getting your strength back.’

‘Taking things easy is boring. Anyway, enough about me. How are you two getting on?’ Zillah observed them with avid interest; since hearing that their respective relationships with Paul and Belinda had broken up, her keenness for Essie and Conor to get together had resurfaced with a vengeance.

‘Me and Ess?’ said Conor. ‘We’re getting married.’

‘Really?’

‘No,’ Essie said firmly. ‘We aren’t.’

‘Well thanks for getting my hopes up,’ Zillah told Conor. ‘All I’m trying to do is sort out the failed love lives of two sad, lonely singletons. Could you consider it, at least?’

Essie rolled her eyes with amusement, because Zillah took directness to the next level. ‘Sorry, not going to happen.’

Later, when Conor had left them to go downstairs for a coffee, Zillah said, ‘You aren’t yourself, darling. Something’s wrong. Are you upset about Paul?’

How, how was she able to detect these things? Was it some kind of extrasensory radar? Evie could have sworn she was managing to keep her true feelings under wraps.

With a dismissive shrug, she said, ‘No, I’m really not. And I know you weren’t that keen on him either, so you don’t have to be polite.’

‘Oh darling, it’s not that I wasn’t keen. I’m sure he’s a nice enough person. I just didn’t think he was right for you.’

‘Well he’s gone now. Anyway.’ Changing the subject, Essie delved into her shoulder bag. ‘While Conor’s downstairs, I wanted to ask you about these.’

‘What are they?’ Zillah leaned forward to see the contents of the envelope.

‘I tidied up your bedroom, put all the photos back in the box. But there were these sheets of paper too, torn out of a notebook and scattered over the bed. You’d been trying to write a letter. Do you remember doing that?’

‘I’m not sure.’ Zillah frowned. ‘It’s all a bit hazy. I couldn’t work out what was really happening and what was a dream.’ ‘Well look, I wasn’t trying to be nosy but I couldn’t help noticing the name. It kind of jumped out at me. I don’t know why,’ said Essie, ‘but you were writing to Alice.’

‘Oh . . .’ Zillah took the sheaf of torn-out pages and nodded slowly. ‘That’s it, I remember now. Alice was there with me. Except I suppose she wasn’t, because how would she have got into the house? So that means it was a dream, but it felt real. And she was so . . . angry with me. And I couldn’t make her understand how sorry I was . . . I kept trying to tell her, but she wouldn’t listen . . .’

‘Don’t cry,’ Essie blurted out, because tears were running down Zillah’s immaculately powdered cheeks and crying surely couldn’t be good for someone who’d just had a bleed in their brain. What if it caused the mended blood vessel to explode? ‘You mustn’t cry! It wasn’t real, it didn’t happen!’

‘Let me read it, I want to see what I wrote.’ Wiping her eyes, Zillah reached for her reading glasses.

Essie watched her. She’d tried to put the pages in order, but the sentences had been disjointed, little more than random thoughts that Zillah had scribbled down as and when they’d occurred to her in her confused state. Clearly haunted by the past, she had been overcome with remorse and had felt the need to apologise:

All these years I’ve hated myself . . . You were so good and kind . . . and I was selfish . . .

Oh I’m so thirsty . . . Alice, you can shout at me, I deserve it. I’m a horrible person and I should die first . . . Please no slugs . . . And now I think I am dying . . . my head hurts so much. But I found the photo of you and . . .

Those were the last words Zillah had scrawled and it still turned Essie’s stomach over to think they could have been her last words ever.