HELLO HEAVEN 2

Welcome to Hello Heaven 2. 🖤

If you’ve just come from chapter 200 — welcome back. Thank you for following them here. We’re picking up exactly where we left off: the morning after the longest night of their lives, and a hospital in London where everyone is still waiting.

And if you’ve found this book first — hello, and welcome. This is the second part of the story. Please start with Hello Heaven (Book 1) on my profile, or none of this will make sense — and trust me, you’ll want to be there from the very first night in Sydney.

Take a breath. Hold onto her. Let’s go.

Dom’s POV

I don’t sleep.

Not one minute. I sit in that chair till the light’s full in the room and there’s traffic going past outside, and a bin lorry, and somebody laughing in the street. The whole world starting up again like nowt’s happened.

At eight, there’s a knock. Tom.

He takes one look at me. At the chair. At the wall, and the long brown line down it, and the glass on the carpet.

He doesn’t say owt about it. He just says, “Shower. Five minutes. Breakfast downstairs.”

We all eat breakfast. Or we all sit in front of it. Tom’s got a private room off the side of the restaurant, with the blinds down, and there’s toast and eggs and coffee, and I get half a slice of toast into me because Tom stands over me till I do. Jess doesn’t talk. Her eyes are gone to nothing from crying. Alex looks like he’s been hit by a bus, and part of that’s me.

Nobody slept. You can see it. Nobody bothers pretending.

At twenty to nine we’re in the car.

Tom’s in the front. He turns round in his seat to look at us.

Same shirt as last night. He’s not slept either — you can see it round his eyes. He’s been on that phone the whole time we were in them rooms. Sorting things. So none of us had to.

“I rang the unit at half seven,” he says. “She’s still with us. The nurse said the doctor did some tests on her early this morning, and he wants to talk to us properly when the results are back. They should be back by the time we get there.” A beat. “She said somebody’s been sat with her all night. She’s not been on her own.”

Me stomach goes.

“Filip’s on the plane,” he says. “With Alice and Suzanne. They took off from Athens two hours ago, so they’ll land at London City around half ten. It’s twenty minutes from the hospital. I’ve got a driver meeting them, and I’ve booked them rooms five minutes’ walk from the hospital.” He looks at Alex. “He’s never been to London. I didn’t want him working out taxis on his own. The driver’s bringing them straight to the hospital. I thought they’d want to see her first.”

Alex nods. He can’t talk. I see him try.

“And the press.” Tom breathes out. “I’ve been on the phone half the night with the hospital and the police. The front of the hospital — the steps, the forecourt — that’s the hospital’s own ground. They’ve moved every one of them off it. They’re across the road now, behind barriers. Nobody can move them off a public pavement, so they’ll still get their pictures. But they won’t be in your faces. And the hospital’s putting out one short statement at eleven, and that’s all anyone gets.” He looks at each of us. “You’ve had enough for one night. All of you.”

That’s Tom. Clipped. Everything in its place. But I’ve known him long enough to know what the red round his eyes means.

“We walk in the front door,” he says. “Like anybody else.”

Like anybody else.

“Thanks, Tom,” Jess says. First thing she’s said all mornin’.

He just nods and turns back round.

And he’s right. When we pull up, they’re across the road. A long row of ’em behind metal barriers, and the telly vans with their masts up, and all the lenses turning toward us at once like sunflowers. You can hear the shutters, even from here. But it’s far off. It’s across a road with buses going down it.

We walk in the front door.

We go up.

James is there when the lift opens. Sat on a plastic chair right outside the doors to the unit, as close to her as they’ll let him get, in the same clothes as last night, his arms folded. He’s got the look of a man who hasn’t moved off that chair since we left.

He stands up when he sees us. He takes one look at Tom, and he shakes his head. Small.

“The nurse came out to me twice,” he says. Low. “She said it’s been a hard night. That she’s holding on.” He looks at Tom. “She wouldn’t give me more than that. She said the consultant wants to talk to all of you together, properly, when the results are back.”

A hard night.

Me legs go cold.

At the doors to the unit there’s a buzzer, and a camera, and a sign about washing your hands. Tom presses it. A voice comes out of the little speaker, and Tom gives her name, and the doors click.

The woman behind the desk knows who we are. You can see it in her face — she’s seen the news, same as everybody. But she doesn’t let it show for more than a second.

“The consultant’s just finishing the ward round,” she says. “He knows you’re here. If you’d like to wait in the relatives’ room, he’ll come and see you as soon as he can.”

She shows us down a short corridor to a little room.

I know rooms like this now. I didn’t this time yesterday. Four soft chairs and a sofa, all the same blue. A box of tissues on a low table. A rack on the wall full of leaflets. Coping with a loved one in intensive care. What happens after a cardiac arrest. A painting of some boats on a beach, the kind nobody’s ever actually looked at. A window that doesn’t open.

Nobody sits down.

Then we do, ’cause our legs make us.

And we wait.

I don’t know how long. Ten minutes. Twenty. Tom’s leg’s going. Jess has got her hands wrapped round her own wrists. Alex is looking at the door and he doesn’t blink.

Then the door opens.

It’s him. The surgeon from last night. He’s in clean blue scrubs, and he’s shaved, but it doesn’t hide it. He looks like he hasn’t slept either.

And behind him, her. The registrar. The woman with the level voice.

We’re all on our feet.

He shuts the door behind them. He doesn’t sit down. Then he does, on the edge of the chair across from us, and she stays standing by the door, and I know from that. I know from the way he sits down that this in’t going to be a short one.

“Good morning,” he says. “I’m sorry you’ve had to wait. I’ve just come from the ward round with the intensive care consultant, and I wanted to speak to you myself, because I operated on Julia and I know her injuries best.” He looks at each of us. “My colleague assisted me in the operation last night, and she’s been involved in Julia’s care since.”

The registrar nods at us.

“I’m going to be honest with you. As I was last night,” he says. “Julia got through the night. I want to say that first, because I know you’ve been waiting to hear it.”

She’s alive.

Me knees nearly go. Jess grabs me arm.

“But it was a difficult night,” he says. “At around half past four this morning, Julia had a seizure. And she had a second one shortly before six.”

Seizure.

The word just sits there. I don’t know what to do with it.

“A seizure is a sudden burst of abnormal electrical activity in the brain,” he says. “It can make the body shake, or stiffen. In Julia’s case, the nurse caring for her noticed jerking movements in her face and in her arms. Each one lasted around two minutes. We gave her medication, and both times they stopped. We’ve also started her on a regular anti-seizure medicine, to try to stop them coming back.”

Half four.

We were still here. In this building. Downstairs.

Before six.

And I were sat in a hotel armchair with a glass of whisky in me hand.

“Seizures are something we watch for very closely after a cardiac arrest,” he goes on. “They can happen because the brain has been starved of oxygen — and they can also do more harm to the brain themselves, so we treat them quickly, every time. Because she’s so heavily sedated, her body can’t always show us when one’s happening. So we’ve put her on continuous brain monitoring — it’s called an EEG. You’ll see small wires on her head, attached to a monitor. It lets us see the electrical activity of her brain all the time, even when she’s completely still.”

Wires on her head. On top of all of it. On top of everything else.

“Because of the seizures, and because it’s standard at this stage, we did a series of tests at six o’clock this morning. Blood tests. A chest X-ray. And a CT scan of her head.” He stops. “I’ll take you through them one at a time.”

Nobody breathes.

“First, the things that are a little better.” He says it careful. Like he doesn’t want us to hold it too tight. “There’s a substance in the blood called lactate. The body makes it when its organs aren’t getting enough oxygen. Last night Julia’s level was very high. This morning it’s come down by more than half. That tells us her blood’s reaching her organs better than it was. We’ve also been able to reduce the medication that’s holding up her blood pressure — not by a lot, but a little. And her blood count has held steady since the early hours. She hasn’t needed any more blood since two o’clock this morning. And the suction on the dressing over her abdomen isn’t showing any fresh bleeding. That’s what we wanted to see.”

“So it’s stopped,” Tom says. “The bleeding.”

“For now, it appears to have stopped. Yes.”

Summat in me chest loosens. Just a thread of it.

“But,” he says.

And it tightens straight back up.

“The results overall are still not good. Her kidneys are struggling. They’ve been badly affected by the blood loss and by the time her heart was stopped. They’re making very little urine, and the waste products in her blood are rising. This morning we’ve started her on a kidney machine — a filter — which cleans her blood the way her kidneys normally would. You’ll see it by the bed. It’s common after injuries like hers, and in many patients the kidneys do recover. But it’s another organ that isn’t working on its own right now.”

Another one.

“Her lungs are still very stiff. The air we breathe is about twenty-one percent oxygen. Julia needs sixty percent through the ventilator to keep her oxygen levels where they need to be. That’s a lot. And her blood still isn’t clotting quite as well as we’d like, which matters for what I’m going to tell you next.”

He stops, and he looks at me. Then at Alex.

“Last night I told you we left her abdomen open, and that we hoped to take her back to surgery in a day or two, to remove the packs and close her. Julia isn’t strong enough for that yet.”

Jess makes that sound again. The small one.

“Taking her back to surgery means moving her, changing her anaesthetic, and opening everything up again. Right now, her blood pressure couldn’t cope with that safely. When we take the packs out from around her liver, we need her blood to be clotting properly, or it could start bleeding again. And her abdomen is still very swollen. If we closed it now, the pressure inside would rise too high — it would push up on her lungs, and squeeze her kidneys. It would make everything worse.”

“When, then?” Alex. Voice like gravel.

“That’s the question,” he says. “And I want you to understand why it matters, because it’s important. We don’t want to leave it too long. Ideally, we want to do it within the next two to three days. The packs can’t stay in indefinitely — the longer they’re in, the higher the risk of infection, and an infection in someone this unwell could be very serious. We also need to look again at the repairs we made to her bowel, to make sure they’re healing. And there’s something else. The longer an abdomen is left open, the more the muscles of the tummy wall start to pull back, out to the sides. Every day, it gets harder to bring the edges back together and close it properly.” He lets that settle. “So there’s a window. What we’re trying to do is get her strong enough, inside that window. Every hour she stays stable helps us.”

A window.

She’s got a window. Like a flight. Like a slot.

“And now,” he says, and his voice changes. Only a bit. But I hear it. “The brain.”

Me heart stops.

I mean it. It stops. For a whole second there’s nowt in me chest at all.

“I’m afraid I don’t have good news for you there,” he says. “But I don’t have definite bad news either. And I know that’s very hard to hear. Let me explain why.”

He leans forward, elbows on his knees.

“The CT scan this morning shows some swelling across her brain. After her heart was stopped for as long as it was, that’s something we expected to see. What the scan can’t tell us is whether there’s lasting damage, or how much. In some areas, the scan isn’t as clear as we’d like. On a CT, the grey matter and the white matter of the brain should look like two distinct shades. In places, the line between them is less clear than it should be. That can be an early sign of injury from lack of oxygen.” He stops. “It can also be swelling that settles over the next few days, and leaves nothing behind.”

Can be. Can also be.

“The honest answer is, it’s too early. This kind of injury often doesn’t show properly on a scan for a day or two — sometimes longer. A scan done this early can look better than things really are, or worse, or it can just be unclear, like this one is. The EEG shows the activity in her brain is slower than normal. But that can be the sedation, or it can be the injury, and right now we can’t separate the two. And because she’s so deeply sedated, we can’t examine her the way we’d need to. We can’t ask her to squeeze our hand. We can’t see if she’ll open her eyes.”

He looks at every one of us, one at a time.

“So we’re going to repeat the CT scan in twenty-four hours. Tomorrow morning. That will show us whether the swelling is going up or coming down, and whether those unclear areas are changing. And if she’s stable enough over the next few days, we’ll start to gently reduce her sedation — not before seventy-two hours — and see how she responds. When it’s safe to move her for longer, we may do an MRI, which shows much more detail. It’ll be a few days before we have a real picture.” He pauses. “I’m sorry. I know you want an answer. I’d give you one if I had it.”

Nobody says owt.

Then he sits up straight.

“What I want you to hear is this. It’s day one. It’s the first morning. She came through a night we genuinely didn’t know she’d come through. We are not giving up on her. Not for one second. Nobody on that unit is. We’re going to watch her every minute of every hour, and we’re going to do everything we can for her.” A beat. “When her brother arrives, I’d like to speak to him myself. As her family, he’ll need to know all of this too.”

I look at him.

And me heart just stops. Again. Like it’s done every time this man’s opened his mouth since last night. Stops, and sits there, and then starts again, ’cause it hasn’t got a choice.

And I haven’t even got it in me to cry. That’s the thing. I’ve cried it all out. Into a hotel armchair. There’s nowt left. I’m just stood there, empty, with me hands hanging at me sides.

Because what can I do?

Nothing. That’s what.

I’m not a doctor. I don’t know what a lactate is. I can’t make her kidneys work. I can’t make that swelling go down. I can’t put me hands on her brain and fix it. I can’t even sit with her through a seizure. The first one, I were downstairs. In the same building. Sat in a café with a cold coffee, while she were upstairs shaking in that bed with strangers holding her down. The second one, I were across London in a chair, throwing a glass at a wall. And both times I didn’t even know.

I’ve never felt so useless in me life.

The person I love more than owt on this earth is lying thirty feet away, fighting for every breath, and there’s not one single thing I can do to help her.

Except —

I just want to see her.

That’s all. I just need to see her. I open me mouth to ask —

“Can we see her?”

Alex. He gets there first. His voice breaks right in the middle of it.

The surgeon looks at us.

He doesn’t say owt at first. He looks at Alex’s face, all purple and yellow down one side. At me. At Jess, with her arms wrapped round herself. At Tom. And I watch him weigh it up. I can see him doing it.

“Normally,” he says slowly, “at this stage, we keep visits in intensive care to an absolute minimum. She’s still very unstable. Every time there’s activity in the room, her blood pressure moves, and so does the pressure inside her head, and that’s the thing we most need to keep still. And there’s a great deal being done for her — the nurses need that room to work in.”

He stops.

“But I’ve been doing this job a long time. Long enough to know that sometimes a familiar voice matters. We don’t know how much patients can hear when they’re like this. We really don’t. But I’ve seen enough to know it doesn’t do them any harm. And sometimes —” He stops again. Like he’s deciding whether to say it. “Sometimes I think it helps.”

He looks at the registrar. She gives him the smallest nod.

“You can see her,” he says. “Not all together. One at a time, the same as last night — gloves, apron, mask, gel. And not for long. I’ll give each of you ten minutes.”

Ten minutes.

“If the nurse asks you to step out — for any reason — please go straight away. It won’t be because you’ve done anything wrong. It’ll be because she needs something.” He stands. “Keep your voices low. You can hold her hand. Please don’t touch the wires on her head, or any of the lines.”

I look at him.

Ten minutes.

Last night it were five. Five minutes, and I spent every one of ’em crying on her hand.

Now I’ve got ten.

Ten minutes to hold her hand.

Ten minutes to show her I’m here. That I came back. That I’m not going anywhere, not ever.

Ten minutes to beg her to stay. To fight. To get better.

Ten minutes to beg her not to leave me.

A few words, from me to you —

There’s a kind of pain nobody warns you about. Not the fear. The uselessness.

When someone you love is fighting for their life, you want to do something. You want to carry it for them, or fix it, or at least stand guard. And the truth is, most of the time, there’s nothing your hands can do. You’re not the doctor. You can’t make a kidney work or a scan come back clear. You wait in a small room with a painting nobody looks at, and you hold your breath every time the door opens.

If you’ve ever been there — in a waiting room, by a phone, in a hotel room at dawn — I want you to know you weren’t useless. Showing up counts. Coming back at nine counts. Holding a hand that can’t squeeze back counts. Being the familiar voice counts. Love doesn’t always look like saving someone. Sometimes it just looks like being there, again and again, when you can’t change a single thing.

There’s a kind of love that has nothing left to give but its presence — and gives it anyway. 🖤

Next chapter: one door, and ten minutes on the other side of it.

Chapter 202 is coming. 🖤