Chapter 221

• ‘HOW are you feeling?’ Ally asked her sister, delighted in the change in her appearance. Gone was the gaunt, hollow-eyed look of before, and in its place was a freshness of complexion. Her deep blue eyes were now clear and full of hope, instead of dark and empty with despair. She had even put on a tiny bit of weight. Not much, but enough to fill out her cheekbones, giving her a healthier look overall.
• ‘I am feeling much better,’ Alex said. ‘The counselling has been so helpful, and this new medication is making me feel much more normal. I will probably always feel bad about—’ She choked up for a moment before going on, ‘About the baby. But the counsellor has helped me accept it wasn’t my fault I had a miscarriage. It was nothing I did or didn’t do. The doctor told me one in four pregnancies ends in a miscarriage, but I don’t think I really heard him at the time. I would never have gone through with the abortion, but when I lost my baby I lost all hope of getting Rocco back. And yet now I can’t believe how dumb I was to imagine myself in love with someone so selfish.’
• Ally’s gaze went to the door of her sister’s room, where a young man in a wheelchair was waiting patiently to spend time with Alex. Apparently they had struck up quite a relationship in the time Alex had been in the clinic. Andrew Claxton, a fellow Australian, had been injured in a road accident in which his best friend had died. Alex, in these last few days, had been one of his mainstays of support, putting her pain aside to help him cope with the slow climb back to reclaiming life.