Stargazing by Kate Glanville

Author:Kate Glanville
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Headline

Seren

‘You did what?’

‘Could you keep your voice down please,’ the nurse on the reception desk said icily.

Seren lowered her voice to a loud whisper. ‘I can’t believe you did that, Mum.’

Nesta touched her daughter’s arm, ‘I know, my love, and I’m sorry. I just didn’t think it was good for Griff not to see his grandad.’

‘And you think this is good for him?’ Seren gestured through the glass to where Griff was lying, waiting to be transferred up to the children’s ward.

‘It was an accident. It could have happened when you were in the park with him last weekend, or when I was there with him on Monday after school.’

‘No, Mum,’ Seren’s glare was fierce. ‘It happened because he was with Dad and he saw him with that woman.’ She turned to the window. ‘Look at him! He could have broken his back, or his neck. He could have died! How would you have felt then?’

‘Please Seren, don’t be like this. I don’t think you realise how much Griff was missing your dad. He lost Tom. I didn’t think he should lose his grandad, too.’

‘So you think you have a right to make decisions about my son, as if what I think doesn’t matter at all?’

‘Shhhh,’ the nurse came out from behind her desk. ‘If you can’t talk quietly I’m going to have to ask you to go outside.’

‘Sorry,’ said Nesta to the nurse. ‘Come on, Seren, why don’t we go and get a cup of tea. Griff is sleeping now.’ She touched Seren’s arm again but Seren shrugged her off.

‘No thanks. I’m going to sit with him in case he wakes up. He needs me.’

Seren sat down on the chair beside the bed and tried to steady her breathing. At least her father wasn’t loitering in the corridor anymore. When she’d last seen him he’d been heading towards the waiting room, back to Frankie or Francesca or whatever she was calling herself. Seren had seen her sitting beside Arlow looking pale and anxious, as though the accident had happened to her child. Seren wound her hair into a tight bun and sat back on the uncomfortable chair. Arlow? For the first time Seren properly registered that Arlow had been sitting in the waiting room, too. What on earth was he doing at the hospital?

Everything seemed to be turning upside down. Nothing in her life seemed predictable: her father, her mother, even her first boyfriend. They all seemed to be doing things that Seren couldn’t make sense of.

She took a long, deep breath and tried not to think about the expression on Daniel’s face when she berated him for putting Griff’s life at risk. Maybe she shouldn’t have said then that she knew for a fact that Frankie was married and that she’d heard she had been unstable and violent in the past. At the time she wanted to hurt Daniel as much as he'd hurt Griff, her mother, her. Now she thought perhaps she had gone too far.

Then Seren looked down at Griff’s poor bruised face and broken arm and she was glad she’d told him.

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