PART 2
That afternoon I asked the nurses to move the flowers my colleagues had sent somewhere she would not see them.
Four arrangements. Large ones, the kind that come from offices rather than people.
One of them had a card on it from a chief justice.
I asked a nurse to put them in the family room down the corridor, and she looked at the card, and then she looked at me, and she did it without saying anything.
That is the single most expensive decision I made that week and it took me about four seconds.
I paid for that room myself, out of my own account. All I wanted was a few quiet hours while my husband drove home for the bag and the car seats we had forgotten.
Then the door opened and she walked in without knocking.
There is a sign on that door. It is a laminated card and it says that visitors should check at the station first, and the nurses had been enforcing it all afternoon with four other people.
Her eyes went round that room — the window, the sofa, the private bathroom — and settled on me.
She said: a VIP suite? My son works himself half to death and this is how you waste his money?
And then she kicked the side of the bed.
Not hard. I want to be accurate about it, because accuracy is the only thing I have been trained to do.
It was the sort of kick you give a tyre. There is no injury and there would be no photograph.
And she did it in a room with a woman who had been cut open five hours earlier, which she knew, because she had been told twice.
The impact went through the mattress and across my incision and I had to breathe through it with my eyes shut, which took about four seconds.
She showed no concern at all.
She did not pause. She did not say sorry, which people say automatically even when they mean nothing by it.
She watched me breathe through it and she waited for me to finish, the way you wait for somebody to stop coughing before you carry on talking.
She pulled several papers out of her handbag and dropped them on the bedside table.
She said: sign those. Karenza needs a son and you clearly can’t manage two. She’ll take the boy. You can keep the girl.
