Thank you so much to everyone who has reviewed. I'm so grateful you have all taken the time to read and respond to Snowdrops and for the support you are all offering for me updating this every day. Extra special thanks to Anny, Meggi and Megan as always :)

Here is part 2 of 7.

Snowdrops

Chapter 2

The woman staring back at Sam from the mirror in the ladies toilets appeared to be a lot drunker than she had anticipated her being earlier that evening. It had been a long time since she had been on a night out quite like this and whilst the bar may well have been called Heaven, Sam felt that hell was a far more accurate description of her current location.

As she reviewed her reflection the doctor inside her noted many classic signs of someone who'd had too much to drink. She was overheating and clammy, her eyes were unfocused and her normally immaculate hair had fallen messily over her face and shoulders. She saw patients like this every nightshift in the E.D. and usually they were the ones who ended up vomiting uncontrollably over the beds, floor and unfortunate medical professionals who happened to be in the vicinity.

She knew from that experience it was a bad sign that the room had started to spin somewhat and her brain felt like it was pounding against the inside of her skull, so she moved to sit down on the floor inside a cubicle hoping that the mixture of pain and dizziness would soon subside. She brought her knees up to her chest and gently placed her head down, closing her eyes in an effort to block out the world around her for long enough to sober up.

Unfortunately Sam's respite from the situation was only fleeting, as the moment her eyes shut the darkness was filled with a very vivid image of her husband, grumpy expression and all. A forceful urge to be physically sick suddenly overwhelmed her so she moved quickly to lift the toilet seat before she wretched into the bowl.

As her feeling of sickness diminished, she leant back against the partition wall of the cubicle and scrunched her eyes tightly shut. Sam had only ever felt this disgusted with herself once before and then, as now, it was over a broken promise to her former husband. She knew the weight of disappointment Dylan would feel if he could see her at this moment and for the first time she felt grateful he was not even in the locality of Holby that night. Even in her hazy thought processes Sam could recognise the irony in her now being thankful he was away with Zoe, but the thought of him seeing her in this drunken mess was more than she could bear.

She was incredibly angry at herself for having weakened to drink that much alcohol in the first place. Sam had never been a particularly sociable creature, preferring to think of herself more as a lone wolf than a member of the pack, but over the years she had grown used to the drinking culture that was prevalent amongst both medical students and her army comrades. Yet she had withdrawn from that lifestyle just as quickly as she had entered it and had never had the desire to return to it, well until tonight anyway.

She recalled that she had only agreed to join her colleagues in the bar because she knew it would irritate Dylan and remind him that she was fully capable of having a life without him, regardless of how untrue that may be. A small, perhaps selfish, part of her had hoped that her dismissive behaviour would play on his mind and keep his focus away from Zoe on their long drive to London. However at the same time she was comforted by the warm welcome her colleagues had extended to her in their invitation to join them and had willingly walked away from her ex-husband's grasp.

It had become apparent to her very early on in the evening that some of her colleagues, including Linda, Lenny and the paramedics, liked a drink more than she had expected and the vast quantities of spirits, beer and wine that had been consumed by their table within the first two hours had been eye opening to her. She had never been able to comprehend why qualified medical professionals would think it either safe or appropriate to drink so many units in one binge session, but had chosen not to query this out loud as she had inferred it was a fairly regular occurrence for the particular group she was with.

Sam had managed to resist the allure of alcoholic beverages for the first few rounds which she identified had caused raised eyebrows from a few of her harder drinking colleagues. However when she had overheard Lenny speculating about Zoe and Dylan sharing accommodation for the weekend, her reluctance to join the others in getting spectacularly drunk had been removed. She had known that her husband and Zoe would have arrived at their hotel by the point she downed her first bottle of beer and it was the thought of them alone together that had driven her to continue accepting drinks from her colleagues for some time afterwards.

Sam had soon discovered that one of the side effects of her high alcohol consumption was that she struggled to focus on conversations happening around her. She didn't know most of her colleagues well enough to have an interest in their personal circumstances, meaning she had found significant chunks of the discussion either uninteresting or inconsequential to her, although she had managed to glean that relationships and affairs between colleagues were commonplace in the department and had been furnished on Zoe and Nick's history. Yet the majority of people that had been analysed by the group had long since left Holby and therefore Sam had continued to drink mainly to prevent herself from outwardly showing boredom with the topic.

Her lack of engagement hadn't been helped by the fact that key members of the group sitting with her had accents that became stronger as their blood alcohol level increased, which she found especially true of Lenny and Linda. She had initially been grateful for their company, as their banter had been a distraction from her own thoughts, yet as the evening went on she had struggled to follow the trail of their animated discussion and couldn't quell her feelings of being the odd one out in this group of like-minded individuals. From the moment it must have become apparent to them that even a drunken Sam was not going to reveal the deepest, darkest secrets of her marriage, she had noted that Linda and Lenny's attention had turned away from her and onto each other. She usually paid little attention to other people's relationships but it had been easy for her to pick up on their flirtation with each other when sandwiched between them at the table. The fact that she had been unable to understand what either of them was saying had just added to her general wish to get away from it all.

She had excused herself to head towards the toilets, but as a haze descended around her she had all but fallen into Jeff's lap. He had helped steady her back upright and she had made her way to the ladies without further incident, albeit a little shaky on her own feet. It was on entering the toilets that she had made eye contact with her own reflection in the mirror and triggered the events that led to her now being seated on a cold, tiled floor in a scruffy looking bathroom.

With the thought of disappointing Dylan still weighing heavily on her mind she recalled the exact day she had last consumed any alcohol. Her husband's decision to cease drinking three years previously had caused her to rethink her own relationship with the demon drink. It hadn't been her with the problem but at the point when Dylan finally acknowledged his own issues with alcohol, she had recognised how similar their addictive tendencies were. She had made the decision to support her husband by joining him in alcohol abstinence with little conscious thought, yet that decision became a pledge to him that had come to mean as much to both of them as their wedding vows had done.

Sam had to make a determined effort in that moment to blink back her tears at the thought of a long line of broken promises she had clocked up since getting married. From her affair to drinking again to the anniversary this very weekend, she knew her behaviour had impacted on every aspect of his life. The only coherent thought that she could hold onto in her semi-drunken state was that if she had ever loved Dylan then she would need to allow him to move on. She mused that it would have been better for her sanity if him moving on was not involving Dr Hanna, as she was sure that woman was soon to become the bane of her existence. Yet Sam had to acknowledge that if it hurt her to watch Dylan grow comfortable in Zoe's company it was purely a self-inflicted pain on her part.

With that thought at the forefront of her mind Sam dragged herself up from the floor and headed towards the sink. She splashed her face with cold water in an attempt to shake the misty feeling behind her eyes, retied her hair back neatly and straightened herself up before heading back to her colleagues in the bar.

"I was about to come in and see if you needed rescuing Princess," Jeff stated jokingly as she returned and Sam realised that quite some time must have passed since she'd excused herself. In fact since her departure it appeared that Lenny and Linda's flirtation had moved forwards several steps, as the two of them were now locked together in a passionate embrace and Sam tried to keep the evident disdain she had for public displays of affection from her face as she attempted to return Jeff's smile.

On looking down and checking her watch Sam realised that it was almost 10:30pm and despite her assurances to Dylan she had forgotten her promise to take care of Dervla. The toxic mixture of the guilt she felt at abandoning their beloved dog to fend for itself and her alcohol intake added a sense of desperation to her already worsening mood so she forcefully pushed past the kissing couple she had been sitting with earlier to grab her coat and bag.

Her colleagues broke apart to look at her questioningly, to which she responded, "I have to look after Dylan's dog," before retreating away from them, recognising as she did so that her communication skills were no more developed than those her husband had demonstrated earlier in the day.

"Will you be alright getting home?" Jeff's voice carried after her causing her to turn round and find both him and Dixie watching her leave. Their shared experiences on her first day in the ambulance with them seemed to have encouraged them to develop a soft spot for her and their concern at that point over her welfare was more welcome to her than Sam would ever want to admit out loud.

"I'm in the army," she replied, trying to give the same jovial tone to her voice that Jeff had demonstrated just seconds before. "I could kill a man with my bare hands, so I think I'll be fine," she concluded before exiting the bar as quickly as she could.

The cold winter air hit Sam's face the moment she stepped outside and she had to breathe deeply to stop the awful ill feeling from resurfacing. She bundled her hands deeply into her pockets and started off in the direction of Dylan's home. The iciness in the air appeared to be having the effect of sobering her up slightly for which she was eternally grateful. The thought of facing Dylan's boat and that damned dopey dog this weekend of all weekends was stirring long buried feelings of sadness deep inside her but as this was likely to be her only opportunity to spend time in her husband's personal space ever again, she wanted to be able to savour and remember every single second.

The walk to the boat was longer than she remembered, but she noted that her judgement of distance and time may still be impinged by the diminishing levels of alcohol in her system. It was a route that was almost second nature to her, as she had based her regular running routine on travelling past Dylan's home on a daily basis. The timing of her run was dependant on their shared shift pattern, but whether it be an early morning sprint or a late night exercise burst she always slowed down as she reached his mooring in the vain hope of him seeing her running past and inviting her in.

Sam remembered that she had silently bid him good morning or good night every day since her arrival in town until the recent cold spell had made the path almost impassable to runners. She had known she would have had difficulty in convincing him that running past his boat was accidental at the best of times, but if she had broken her ankle in the icy conditions he would have questioned her stalker typed behaviour. Her husband did after all have a habit of stating the obvious.

Sam rounded the corner to where his familiar boat had been moored since before own arrival in Holby and stopped dead in her tracks. The boat that she had grown to know over the past few months was no longer present and instead had been replaced by a slightly more modern equivalent. In fact for a moment or two Sam was unsure if Dylan's own boat had been stolen, if he'd forgotten to mention a change of moorings or as she admitted to herself was more likely, that she had walked past his home on her drunken trek through the darkness.

However she soon identified that there were certain aspects of this boat that were familiar to her, despite her never having seen it before. The dog lead and boots that were lined up at the exit point of the boat, as if they were waiting for said dog and it's master to make use of them, were a dead giveaway that this vessel belonged to a certain Dr Dylan Keogh. She could only begin to wonder why he had felt the need to upgrade his boat given how little he liked change or why he hadn't mentioned it to her, either at the point of it occurring or when he'd arranged for her to take on Dervla for the weekend.

It was at times like this that Sam wondered whether she still knew her husband at all.

Thank you once again for reading. Reviews, as always, are welcome.
Part 3 will be uploaded tomorrow. Callie x