Splintered Memory (30 page)

“That’s the real reason why she wasn’t shocked to see me at the wedding with Emily
?” He asked sounding choked, and Claire nodded.

“Why are you telling me this now
?” Matt demanded his emotion turning from shock to anger.

“Because I think Charlie’s making a huge mistake
,” Claire said.

“What mistake?
” Matt said loudly.

“Not telling you. She’s being
selfless, and sweet, and kind. She’s putting everyone else’s needs and feelings before her own. She wants you to be happy,” Claire said feeling her own anger rising; “and she’s scared to death of hurting you again, but she’s making herself miserable.”

“She’s miserable
?” Matt asked sounding concerned again and the anger in his voice ebbed away.

“Yes. She just works all the time or sits in her room alone. She won’t go out, and she refuses to try and move on with her life. She’s stopped
going on dates, and she refuses to accept my advice that she should come back here and fight for you! Instead she just bottles it all up,” Claire said; “and then she cries when she thinks I’m out or I can’t hear her.”

“You told her that she should come here and fight for me
?” Matt asked sounding genuinely surprised and smiling slightly.

Claire rolled her eyes but returned his smile. “Look. I’m actually quite a nice person, and believe it or believe it not she’s my best friend
. I’ve only ever wanted what’s best for her. It’s just taken me a long while to realise,” she said; “and then to accept, that you’re what’s best for her.”

Matt smiled but didn’t say anything
. Then after a few minutes of silence, in which Claire could have sworn that she’d seen numerous different emotions cross his face, he seemed to compose himself. He opened his desk drawer and took out the divorce papers again.

“Do you want me to give them back to Charlie
, tell her you won’t sign?” Claire asked him smiling.

“No
,” Matt said taking a pen from out the front of his coat pocket and opening up the papers.

“What are you doing
?” Claire asked sounding horrified as she watched him sign them.

“I’m giving Charlie what she wants in order to move on with her life
,” he said with no emotion in his voice or trace of expression on his face.

“You’re divorcing her
?” Claire asked.

“Well technically I believe she’s divorcing me
,” he said still without the slightest show of emotion in either his voice or in his face.

“But I just told you that Charlie,
your
Charlie has her memory back. How does that make it okay to divorce her? You were having doubts, but now that she’s all recovered you want out?” Claire asked feeling both confused and angry.

“She’s made a choice, and I’m choosing to respect that. I also have someone in my life now that I need to consider. I think it’s best that Charlie never know that I know th
ough. Once we’re divorced,” Matt said calmly; “I very much doubt that we’ll need to see each other again.”

“And you don’t care that she’s alone and miserable
?” Claire demanded rising up from her chair.

“Charlie won’t be alone forever
Claire, trust me. She’ll find someone who’ll make her happy, and he’ll be a lucky guy,” he said flatly handing Claire the divorce papers.

Claire grabbed them off him, picked up her bag from the floor, and headed over to the door. As she opened it, she turned back
around to look at the man that she’d so evidently misjudged.

“I can honestly say that I’ve never hated you, until now
that is. She seemed happy with you, but you really are a joke. I knew she should’ve stuck with Rich, but maybe when she finds hubby number two he’ll value her more than you do. Who knows I may even get along with him, it’ll help I suppose if he’s nothing like you,” she said irately before slamming the door behind her.

Claire walked down the corridor
, but when she reached the bottom she forgot which way she was supposed to go to get out. She all but screamed at a passing nurse for instructions, and then felt momentarily guilty that she might’ve just made an innocent stranger cry.

She
couldn’t believe that she’d risked her friendship with Charlie, but she’d done it because she’d believed that Matt would drop everything once he knew the truth. Yet he hadn’t, and now she felt like shit. Worse still, she was carrying Charlie’s divorce papers with no idea of how she was going to explain this to Charlie.

The only thing that she
knew for sure was that she wasn’t going to tell her that she’d been to see Matt. Charlie had been hurt enough, and she didn’t deserve to know that Matt had chosen Emily over her. She deserved instead to believe as Claire had done before today. She deserved to believe that Matt would come after her in a heartbeat the moment he knew about her memory.

One
of the lessons that Matt had found the hardest to learn when he’d been training to be a doctor, was how to deliver bad news to patients or to the families of a deceased, dying, or critically injured patient. Matt had struggled with this in his first year as a doctor, and he’d taken the emotional strains and stresses home with him.

Charlie had often sat up with him
, and she’d let him talk himself out about patients he’d lost. When she’d been able to see that the emotions of his shift were too raw or painful for him to want to speak about, she’d just sit and hold his hand or lie in his arms. As time had gone on though, he had become immune to the reactions of his patients and their families. He’d supposed that he’d grown hard hearted in a way, but it was understandable to some extent in his profession he’d thought.

He
’d learned to control his own emotions and not to let his face betray him by showing signs of concern, remorse, or sympathy. He’d found that his own emotion didn’t help the patients or the families of the patient, and he’d learned that many reactions would be prompted by his own. If he showed nothing, then often the reaction was either subdued or just one of silent shock.

As he sat there hearing the revela
tion about Charlie’s recovery his brain went into over drive. His first reaction had been one of relief. Finally his living nightmare could come to an end. He could get Charlie back, and his life could go back to how it had been before the accident. Yet as he’d thought this, he’d also thought about his betrayal of her.

He
’d pictured the moment when she’d come to find him to share her news with him, and she’d found him in the arms of another woman. The thought had turned his stomach, and alongside this thought was the knowledge that if they were to get back together he’d have to tell her the truth about everything. He’d have to tell her about his affair with Emily before she’d moved out, his drug addiction, his drinking, and all the one night stands that he’d had after she’d left him.

Matt was terrified that when she learnt the truth about the man that he’d been whilst she’d been recovering, she
’d no longer want him in her life. He couldn’t face the thought of her rejecting him, or of her looking at him any differently from how she’d always looked at him when she discovered the type of man that he’d been in her absence. He also knew that he needed to consider Emily. He couldn’t just abandon her. He owed her more than that. She’d saved him from himself when he’d been at his lowest, and she’d been by his side every day since then.

As the realities of the decisions that he needed to make
, ran through his head like a series of headlines on the bottom of a live news report. He knew that he didn’t need Claire to see his vulnerabilities. Whatever reaction he gave her he knew that she would feed it back to Charlie, and he couldn’t bear the thought of Charlie thinking that he’d chosen Emily over her.

Matt
knew that he needed to react so differently from anything that Claire could have been expecting from him, that he could be confident that she’d never tell Charlie what had been said between them. He never wanted Charlie to know that he was giving up a second chance to be with her, and he felt sure that if he could be cold, callous, and uncaring enough, then he could be certain that Claire would never tell Charlie that he knew the truth about her memory.

He knew what he had to do
, and he’d deal with the ramification of his own emotions afterwards. He took out the divorce papers that he’d been sent and he signed them, and as he’d expected Claire had reacted angrily. Yet he’d refused to bite, even when she thrown Rich’s name at him, and when she’d stormed out of his office he knew that she’d never tell Charlie the truth. Once she’d gone though he felt tears stinging in his eyes and a numbness settle in his heart, but he knew that this feeling would pass and that later it’d be replaced with pain.

This was the most desperate that he’d been for drugs since Rich’s wedding, and he fought the urge to find something to take or to write a script for himself. He knew that he needed to talk to someone, but unlike all the other times when he’d felt like this and
he’d turned to Emily he knew that this time he couldn’t do that. Right now, Emily was just about the last person in the world that he wanted to see.

He took off his white coat, and grabbed his black jacket that was hanging on the back of his door. He had to talk to someone or else he knew that he’d find something to take, and as he walked down the corridor he took his mobile out of his pocket and dialled the only number that he could think of.

“Rich? You in? Really need to talk to you if you are.” Matt said by way of message on Rich and Bex’s answer phone, hoping that they were in and just screening their calls as he knew they did.

“Matt
?” Bex asked.

“Is Rich in
?” He asked.

“Yeah
,” she said; “he’s just in the kitchen making a cup of tea. Hang on he’ll be in in a minute.”

“
Tell him I’m coming round,” Matt said hanging up and increasing the speed of his strides.

***

“What’s the emergency?” Rich asked as he opened the door to Matt.

“I don’t know where to start
,” Matt said as he walked straight down the hall and into the kitchen.

“Tea
,” Rich said.

“Got anything stronger
?” Matt asked.

Rich pulled out two bottles of beer from the fridge. 

“I just had a visit from Claire at the hospital,” Matt said flatly.

Rich nearly choked on his beer and coughed. “Oh yeah, what did she want
?” He asked nervously.

“To talk about Charlie
,” Matt said. Yet he was eyeing Rich suspiciously. He always knew when Rich was hiding something, and right now he could see that Rich was hiding something. He looked as guilty now as he had when they’d been sixteen, and he’d turned up at Matt’s house to tell him that he’d asked Charlie to go to the cinema with him on a date.

“What about Charlie
?” Rich asked trying to sound surprised but sounding more interrogatory.

“I think you know
,” Matt said suddenly feeling like he was the last one to find out a secret just as he had been back then.

“What did Claire say
?” Rich asked apprehensively.

Matt knew that Rich was in on it instant
ly, and he said accusatorially; “I think you already know what she said.”

“We agreed not to tell you
. We thought it was for the best,” Rich said defensively.

“The best for
who?” Matt demanded.

“For
you,” Rich said.

“How
do you know what’s best for me?” Matt asked loudly as Bex came into the kitchen to see what was going on, and what was causing the raised voices.

“We were there mate
. We watched you go through six months of hell. We watched your life crumble around you,” he said; “and then after Charlie left we watched you completely fall apart.”

“We watched you
put it about,” Bex added; “and take anything that made you not have to face reality. We watched as Emily picked you up, cleaned you down, and put you back together again.”

“
What you know as well?” Matt asked disbelievingly.

"I thought you were happy with Emily mate. If I’d have thought for the slightest moment that you weren’t,
” Rich said; “I’d have told you.”

“When did you find out
?” Matt asked.

“What?” Rich asked nervously.

“How long have you known Rich?” Matt asked.

Rich avoided looking at Matt and said; “a while. Claire showed up here about a week after Charlie went to London. She wanted to tell you then, but I persuaded her not to.”

Matt stood thinking for a second and then said; “so you knew at the wedding?

He already knew the answer. He just wanted
confirmation to add things up in his head.

Rich and Bex both nodded.

“That’s why you were so nervous when you told me that she’d arrived? That’s why you were so emotional when she was talking to you at the end of the night?” Matt asked piecing it all together.