Free The Year of Taking Chances by Lucy Diamond

not a dartboard. Too dangerous. Could they squeeze a pool table in here? Spencer would love
that.
    ‘Gem? It’s Harry. Listen, there’s been an accident. Are you sitting down?’
    The virtual pool table vanished into the ether. ‘An accident? What’s happened?’
    There was a sob in Harry’s voice. A
sob
? ‘It’s Spencer. He . . . Someone fucked up with the scaffolding, Gem. He’s fallen. It’s pretty bad.’
    All of a sudden it was hard to breathe. Her body froze rigid with the horror; her mind raced with terrible images of her husband plummeting through the sky. ‘Is he dead?’ she
croaked.
    ‘No, but he’s unconscious. They’ve airlifted him to Addenbrooke’s. I’m going to head over there now, shall I pick you up?’
    Stupid thoughts pinballed into her head. She hadn’t hugged him that morning. He liked to be up and out early, Spencer, and she’d still been in bed when he’d left. What if she
never hugged him again?
    ‘Gem? Shall I pick you up?’
    She swallowed. Get a grip, Gemma. This was happening – her worst nightmare – and she had to deal with it. ‘Yes,’ she said hoarsely. ‘Yes, please.’
    The hospital was about an hour’s drive usually, but it felt as if entire dreadful days passed before they reached the car park in torrential rain. Harry tried to make
conversation – something about seeing Caitlin, the girl from the party – but Gemma couldn’t concentrate. Apparently the scaffolding had collapsed on the first storey of the
building they were working on, and Spencer had plunged to the concrete below, landing in a crumpled heap, out cold.
    Gemma felt sick at the thought of him lying on the ground, unmoving and unresponsive, his beautiful face empty of any expression. He was the most unashamedly alive person she’d ever met. Once, a few months after they’d started seeing each other, they’d been walking into a rosemary-scented pub garden one warm Sunday afternoon when he suddenly smiled at her, eyes
brilliant, then put his arms in the air and shouted, ‘God, I love this woman!’ People had turned and smiled at his exuberance. Someone had even cheered.
    Please let him have come round by now,
she thought as they hurried to the Accident and Emergency centre.
Please let us get there, and for him to be sitting up in bed with a cup of tea,
joking with the doctors.
    He wasn’t sitting up in bed, though. He hadn’t even come round. He was lying flat, strapped into a neck-and-back brace so that he couldn’t move, having just returned from a CT
scan. He had broken his ankle quite badly and fractured three vertebrae, the softly spoken Indian doctor told them. They weren’t yet certain how his spinal cord would be affected.
    Gemma burst into tears of shocked disbelief. She’d watched enough hospital-based TV shows to know that spinal injuries could be devastating. ‘You mean he might not walk again?’ she asked, choking on the words. Oh my goodness. Spencer in a wheelchair, his legs useless? Football-mad Spencer never running or kicking a ball for the rest of his life?
    ‘We can’t rule anything out yet, I’m afraid,’ the doctor said gently. She put a hand on Gemma’s arm, and Gemma stared at her polished red nails in a daze. ‘We’re going to do an MRI scan, which should give us a clearer indication of any damage. The good news is that we can’t see any bleeding on the brain, although we won’t be
able to make a full assessment of his head injury until Mr Bailey comes round.’
    Head injury. Bleeding on the brain. That terrifying-looking brace clamping him in position. The possibility of him being paralysed, an invalid for the rest of his life. Gemma’s head swam
with one terrible thought after another. He’d never walk Darcey up the aisle, if she got married. He wouldn’t be able to work. He’d no longer be able to throw himself into
swimming pools on holiday, drenching them all deliberately with one of his ‘bombs’. He’d never dance with her