"Do you really think that's prudent, given the circumstances?" Mr Thompson stepped towards her desk, as she sat down and began to thumb through a patient's file. The man had been hounding her all day. She was sick of the sight of him.
"Get out." She muttered. She could feel his gaze burning into her forehead, and she didn't like it. She strained to keep her eyes on the file, to resist looking at him, because she knew that one glance at his anxious, clumsy, well-meaning face would leave her dissolving into a puddle of tears.
Mr T backed away from the desk. The man had experienced enough encounters with Jac Naylor to know that resistance was futile. On her head be it, he thought, as he yanked open the door with as much force as he dared.
Jac raised her eyes and watched him leave. His neck was a startling shade of crimson, and if Jac hadn't been feeling so downright miserable, she'd have found it funny how the skin clashed with his inoffensive, standard-issue blue shirt. Instead, she felt her face burn up to the same crimson shade, as she stared across the room to the sofa, blinking away the tears that had pooled in the corners of her eyes.
Not only had that man been on her case all day, popping up left right and centre to pester her about scans and surgery, and reminding her blatantly and loudly that it was quite likely that her cyst was cancerous, but he had then had the nerve to swan into her office, invading her own safe space, and rip away the one shred of good news Jac had been served today.
She wasn't pregnant.
There was nothing Jac could do about the tears now. She let them flow freely down her cheeks, drip from the end of her nose, and land on her shaking hands.
She wasn't pregnant.
That morning, Jac recalled, she'd looked at her calendar and noticed the little dots in the corners of the box that marked when she needed to start taking her meds to combat her endometriosis pain. She uncovered the meds box in the drawer of her bedside table, and ripped it open to discover that it was well and truly empty. The only thing in it was the prescription label, with the date that showed she'd picked up the meds 6 months ago. The tablets lasted 4 months. Jac had dropped down to the floor, crossing her legs, and had leant herself against the bed to think. The tablets finished 2 months ago. And it was with that feeling of utter dread, where the stomach flips, and the heart sinks down inside the chest, that Jac realised she could not recall having needed the meds since then.
2 months late.
It was as she was waiting for Boots to open at 5 to 9 that morning that she started to think about what having another baby would be like. A little brother or sister for Emma might be nice, she had thought. Jonny would be excited; co-parenting had so far been entirely successful with Emma, so why shouldn't it work with a second child? Jac remembered the feeling of being pregnant last time, of having a tiny person living inside you, of bonding with Emma before she was born. It was a feeling she loved. She'd thrived while pregnant. And despite Emma's complications, despite the difficulty Jac had bonding with her new-born, despite the vicious custody battle that ensued: everything had worked out perfectly.
It was the thought of those same complications and that same custody battle that empowered Jac to step into the drugstore and physically purchase the test. A little part of her, the part she kept tucked away until it was needed, the part which allowed her to giggle when drunk, tickle her daughter, and get her hopes up about things, wanted to skip the test. She was sure she was pregnant. A mother knows, right? But it was overwhelmed by her sensible side, the strong, authoritative consultant side, and so Jac had bought the test, and taken five minutes, albeit interrupted by the idiotic Rossini, to wait for the result.
It was positive. As she'd expected.
But then along came Mr T, bumbling gynaecologist and general useless prat, to shit all over Jac's dreams. Jac's cosy ideal of another baby, with those tiny little fingernails and a snuffly little button nose, was shattered.
Of all the things to say to break the news. "Perhaps the cysts are producing HCG."
Jac could have coped with that, she knew. She could have moved on quickly and easily, popping that little bubble of hope as brutally as possible, but then the stupid, foolish man had taken it five steps too far.
"You were unlucky. Or lucky I suppose, depends which way you look at it."
Jac had wanted to lean across his desk and rip his throat out there and then. She'd settled for an aggressive "What's that supposed to mean?" but her retort had done absolutely nothing to stem her fury.
How dare he tell her she was lucky? Lucky people find £10 notes in their coat pockets that they'd forgotten about. Lucky people make the train, even though they're running late. Lucky people get given parking tickets with time left on them by kind strangers.
Lucky people do not get told that the symptoms they had attributed to pregnancy were actually caused by a potentially cancerous cyst.
The cyst she could have coped with. The cyst was causing her pain, but it was the sort of pain Jac could deal with. But the cyst coupled with the lack of pregnancy? Jac was a wreck.
And so here the wreck was. Sat at her desk, dripping hot, salty tears over a file, trying as hard as she could to pull herself together. Willing herself to stop crying, push all baby thoughts to the back of her mind, and start prepping for theatre.
Jac reached for the tissue box on Mo's desk, wiped her eyes delicately, and picked her compact out from the depths of her handbag. Her eyes were pink, her cheeks tear-stained, and her under-eye bags were having a field day. Jac fumbled about in her bag again, retrieving a tube of concealer, and covered up as much as she could. Eye-bags, gone. Tear stains, mostly gone. She couldn't do much about the pink eyes, but she reasoned she could probably pass it off as the beginning of a cold.
Leaning back in her seat and sliding away from the desk, Jac ran a hand through her poker-straight copper locks, stood up, shook her head to clear her thoughts, grabbed the file, and strode out of the office with as much confidence as she could muster.
Don't you dare crumble, Naylor, she thought to herself as she headed through the ward. Don't you fucking dare.