Those emotions broke through the mask of his face. ‘Talia, what the hell is going on? What on earth are you doing here?’ He swept an arm around the café’s interior.
Those stones were back in her eyes. ‘That isn’t your business, Luke. Nothing about me is your business.’
He took a step towards her, clasping her arms, emotions surging in him, hot and unbearable to endure. ‘Talia, talk to me—please. You owe me that, surely? After all we had together—’
Violently, she threw off his hands. ‘Don’t touch me!’ she cried.
And then suddenly, from behind the bar, where there was a door to the upstairs apartment, came another voice. ‘Get away from my daughter!’
Talia whirled around. Maxine was standing there, clutching her dressing gown to her thin body, her eyes sparking with fury. Two spots of colour burned in her cheeks.
‘Mum, it’s OK. He’s leaving. He’s leaving right now.’ She turned back to Luke. ‘Please go. Just go.’ She spun back to her mother. ‘Mum, please—it’s OK. Go back upstairs. I’m just shutting up here. I’ll be there in a minute. Please!’
But her mother was surging forward, bearing down on Luke where he stood, frozen.
‘Get away from my daughter!’ she cried again, her voice rising.
The cry was almost a shriek now, and Luke could see Talia’s mother hyperventilating, her colour mounting. Then, horribly, with a strangulated gasp, she put a shaking hand to her chest. Clawing frantically, as if in hideous slow motion, Maxine collapsed.
‘Mum!’ Talia’s voice was a scream, and then she was crouching down where her mother had folded, unconscious, onto the wet floor.
Luke pushed her aside. Talia gave another cry, but he thrust his mobile phone at her. ‘Get an ambulance! Now!’ he ordered.
Then he fell to work on her mother, lying mobile on the floor, seemingly lifeless.
He checked the pulse at her neck—no pulse!—then, ripping the lapels of the dressing gown aside, he found the end of her sternum and measured two fingers further up. He pressed one palm over the dorsum of his other hand and started a rhythmic pumping of Mrs Grantham’s stricken heart as memory flooded through him.
Suffocating memory of knifing fear and horror.
* * *
‘Is she going to make it?’ Talia’s stricken brain was trying to find the Spanish she needed. Whatever she’d said, the paramedics understood.
‘We’ll do our best,’ they said, and then the ambulance launched forward, siren wailing, down the street.
Talia had no idea where the hospital was, and it seemed to take for ever to get there. But her mother was hanging on—just. The paramedics, when they’d arrived, had taken over CPR from Luke, applying defibrillation, then got her on to a stretcher, attached her to monitors. And now they were getting her where her mother’s life might be saved.
And through that long, long night, as Talia sat by her mother’s bedside in Intensive Care, the thread of life held still—though it was as frail as Talia’s grip on her mother’s hand was strong.
In the morning the cardiologist visited and carried out a careful examination. Her mother was to be kept under sedation, but it seemed, Talia was told, and she felt a relief so profound she was weak with it, that she would live. The CPR, instantly and correctly carried out, had saved her.
As Talia walked out into the reception area, numb with relief and exhaustion, Luke got up from a bench.
‘How is she doing? They will tell me very little.’
Talia stared. ‘Have you been here all night?’
He looked haggard. A thick growth furred his jaw and his eyes were sunken.
‘What else could I do?’ He took a breath. ‘So, how is she?’
‘She’s pulling through,’ she said, her voice hollow. ‘She’ll be kept in for some time, while she recovers from the operation, and then they want her to have some time in a convalescent home.’
‘I’ll arrange it,’ Luke said.
Violently she shook her head. Her emotions were shot to pieces, in a thousand jagged fragments. ‘Luke, this is none of your concern.’
She made to move past him. She had to get to the café to start work.