Page 40 of Tipping Point

“How’s she doing?”

The nurse pauses, smiles.

“As good as can be expected.”

I nod.

Before he leaves, I can’t help it. I speak.

“What purpose did it serve?”

I’ve been asking this question for fifteen years. This is the first time I’ve asked it out loud.

If he’s surprised, he doesn’t show it. We rarely talk when I visit.

“What do you mean?” he challenges me.

“What did it achieve, keeping her alive like this?”

All these years, every meal I’ve enjoyed was denied her. Every time I felt the sun on my face I recalled hers in the shadow of this perpetual room. Every woman in my bed, my mother’s warning. You can’t have a life, and here Grace lay, proof of my mothers words, the anchor that cemented me to the biggest risk of all.

Daring to think I could have it all.

“That was never your decision, Mr Brennan.” The nurse startles me back to the present. “That burden lay with her kids.”

I nod again, knackered after the long day. The race has drained me.

“How are they doing?” I stand and pour a glass of water, take a sip.

“She looks like her mother.” He smiles.

I think back to the fan, the young girl with the auburn hair who approached me in Melbourne. I shudder.

“And the boy, he’s smart. Doing well in school. He reads to her.”

We look at Grace, her hands neatly by her side, on top of the white linen sheet she’s covered with, tucked in around her.

“However,” he continues as he makes his way to the door, “I believe the purpose has always been the same.”

I look at him and frown.

“Dignity,” he says and slips from the room.

I don’t sit down again. Instead, I open the drawer of her bedside table. It’s filled with letters.

They are all addressed to me.

I get one every year from her kids. On the date of the accident.

I frown.

There’s a new one, on top, from the beginning of this year. It piques my curiosity. The girl, she never writes to me this time of year. I flip the letter over. Their address is right here, in Texas.

I pocket it. I don’t know why. There are fifteen years’ worth of unopened letters in the drawer.

I never planned to live past my racing career. I had always planned on ending my life when the day came. I have been anticipating that day for years. When I die, my lawyer will release the money I’ve saved for them, the two kids, and it will be theirs to do with as they please.

The trust for Grace will continue. She will always be taken care of.