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could do anything for them at all, and then it wouldn’t be you.
    She had been three of the statutory four months now in A&E, as senior house officer, and she was really dreading moving on. Especially as her next department would be dermatology, which didn’t appeal to her at all. She had even considered, very briefly, becoming an A&E consultant, like Alex Pritchard, her present boss, but he had told her it was a mug’s game and that she’d never make any money.
    “Not many private patients come into A&E, and as we all know that’s where the money is.”
    “Money isn’t everything, though, is it?” Emma had said.
    “Perhaps you could try telling my wife that,” he’d said, and scowled; she never knew whether he was going to scowl or smile at her. He was a great untidy bear of a man, with a shock of black hair, and beetling eyebrows to match, and very deep-set brown eyes that peered lugubriously out at the world. Emma adored him, though there were more scowls than smiles at the moment—he was reputedly going through a very unpleasant divorce. But he was immensely supportive of her, praised her good work while not hesitating to criticise the bad, and when she removed a healthy appendix unnecessarily, having put down the symptoms of IBS to acute appendicitis, he told herhe had done exactly the same thing when he had been a junior surgeon.
    “You just have to remember everyone makes mistakes; the only thing is, doctors bury theirs,” he said cheerfully as he found her sobbing in the sluice, “and that woman is far from being buried. Although with her weight and her diet she probably soon will be. Now dry your eyes and we’ll go and see her and her appalling husband together …”
    But obstetrics had remained her first love, and the following summer, she would start applying for a registrarship.
    • • •
    Emma was twenty-eight and, as well as her exceptional looks, was possessed of an extremely happy, outgoing personality. She had grown up in Colchester, where her father had worked for a finance company and her mother was a secretary at the junior school that Emma and her brother and sister had all attended before going on to the local comprehensive. It had been a very happy childhood, Emma often said, lots of fun, treats, and friends, “but Dad was very ambitious for us, quite old-fashioned; we were all encouraged to work hard and aim high.”
    Which Emma, by far the cleverest of the three, was certainly doing; a Cambridge place followed by a Cambridge First. In medicine, a subject acknowledged as very tough, she was about as high as anyone could have hoped for. She had never thought for more than five minutes that she might have preferred to do something else. She loved medicine; it was as simple as that. She enjoyed—almost—every day, found the life hugely satisfying and absorbing, and remained extremely ambitious.
    • • •
    Emma looked at her watch: three o’clock. It was Friday and it seemed to be going on forever. She was on the eight-a.m.-to-six-p.m. shift, and it had been one of the slow days. Tomorrow she was going to London and out with her boyfriend. She’d been going out with him foronly three months, and he was the first she had had who wasn’t a medic. She’d met him in a bar in London; she’d been with a crowd of friends from uni, and one of them, a lawyer, had worked with him briefly.
    His name was Luke Spencer, and he worked for a management consultancy called Pullman. He earned what seemed to her an enormous amount of money and worked tremendously long days—almost as long as hers, but then, while she went home exhausted and slumped in front of the television, Luke and his colleagues went out for dinners at hugely expensive restaurants like Gordon Ramsay and Petrus and extremely trendy clubs like Bungalow 8 and Boujis and Mahiki. Occasionally Emma and other WAGs, as Luke insisted on calling them, rather to Emma’s irritation, were invited along on these evenings. The first time