He hung up his white lab coat behind the door and poured himself syrupy coffee from the glass flask. While he had been in the meeting reviewing the latest results of the pharmaceutical company’s new Alzheimer’s drug, the ochre liquid had stewed on the percolator machine’s heating element for most of the morning. He decided it should still be passable. His mobile phone bleated from the holster on his belt. Unhooking it, he noticed the display showed a mobile number, but not one stored against a contact in the phone. Immediately thoughts that Madeline, his beautiful wife of eighteen years, had been involved in another car crash raced through his mind. She’d had three in the last four months, but none had been serious. While she hadn’t yet been formally diagnosed, he was intimately familiar with the early signs of dementia, and suspected he should talk her into scheduling a check-up at the local GP surgery. He was dreading facing her initial reaction and the inevitable changes it would cause to their lifestyle, when, no doubt, the diagnosis would be confirmed.
