Except that nothing happened, and that was bad. It made it harder and harder to keep hoping, while everyone else was starting to give up. As the days went by Gavin began to imagine he could hear in everyone's voices—the nurses' and Mum's, even Gran's— that they were beginning to stop hoping. On the day after Gavin had talked to Lena, Robert picked him up after school again and drove him to Aberdeen. He went straight up to the stroke unit. Lena was already in the ward, working on one of the other patients. She looked up, nodded, and smiled, so he settled himself in beside Grandad's bed. Grandad's right hand still wasn't fidgeting around, which was a relief. Gavin didn't start off by holding it, the way he'd always done before, because he wanted Lena to be there to see if anything happened when he did. He'd got two new e-mails to read, one of them a three-pager from a model maker in Valparaiso whose English was only just good enough for the job. Usually Gavin would have found it fun making sense of it, but today it was difficult to concentrate enough.
