‘So, forget you’re a doctor for ten minutes and pretend you’re a patient like any other. Talk it through like any other patient would.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘You’re scared.’
She was going to argue, he could see it. Then she changed her mind.
‘I am scared, yes. My body’s antibodies are so high. The plasmapheresis is just to get me even close to being able to undergo the transplant, but after the operation there’s bound to be more.’
‘So think of it like both the transplant and the induction drugs are a mortgage deposit, and the maintenance drugs are your monthly mortgage payments. The bigger your initial deposit, the lower your monthly repayments need to be. In other words, the better the transplant takes and your body
responds to those initial immuno-suppressants, the less chance your body will reject the kidney in the future, so the less maintenance drugs you’re going to need.’
‘It doesn’t mean that a month, six months, twelve months down the road, my body might not suddenly decide to reject it.’ She sucked in a breath.
‘No, but we have to start somewhere. There’s no way to predict who will suffer a rejection episode, but if you do we adjust the medication to attempt to reverse it. You know that a good percentage of transplant patients go through at least one rejection episode but it’s mild enough to counter.’
‘I know, and some patients have the same transplanted kidney twenty, forty years down the road, and might have had a handful of rejection episodes they’ve been able to reverse.’
‘Right, and the lower your maintenance drugs are, the more room we have to play with to increase them.’
‘Yes.’
Without warning, Evie smiled.
‘You know, I actually do feel a bit better about it all.’
‘Good.’
One little word, which didn’t come close to how he was feeling. She looked genuinely less tense and his chest swelled a little to think that, together, they’d talked it out.
It wouldn’t be the last time she’d need to run through things, to steady herself, but he’d be here for her every time she needed him. But right now, she needed him to move on.
‘Are you hungry? If you fancy it I could make something to eat?’
She hesitated.
‘It isn’t a problem to make breakfast,’ he cajoled.
‘Breakfast would be nice.’ Evie finally held her hands out. ‘Shall I sort out Imogen’s nappy?’
Max looked at the falling nappy and grinned wryly.
‘I’ll learn soon enough.’
The buzz of contact as he handed their daughter to Evie caught him off guard. Quickly he retreated to his temporary bedroom to snatch up a fresh tee shirt from the drawer before heading to the safety of downstairs.
* * *
Evie watched him go, her heart beating faster.
He’d lied to her. And she didn’t know what it meant.
She’d been right that he had a complicated relationship with his parents. But she didn’t know whether to be relieved that he clearly didn’t have much time for his parents, or concerned that he clearly didn’t intend to talk to her about it. The way the topic had come up so naturally had seemed like a good opportunity to ease her way into admitting the truth.
But if Max wasn’t prepared to tell her even the first thing about them, then how could she possibly admit she’d met them, let alone that they had paid her to keep his daughter from Max?
And yet, as awful as it sounded, wasn’t it better that he didn’t appear to be close to them given their utter indifference to their granddaughter? Having experienced both sides of it herself, a loving home with her mother and stepfather, and a difficult relationship trying not to antagonise her father, she knew she would have been just as well off if her father had never been around at all.