Billionaire Bosses Collection. Кэрол Мортимер

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       CHAPTER THREE

      CALLIE strode towards Johnston Street and her favourite Spanish bar.

      Some girls headed home to a chick-flick and tub of ice-cream when they needed comfort. She headed for Rivera’s.

      ‘Hola, querida.’ Arturo Rivera blew her a kiss from behind the bar and she smiled in return, some of her tension instantly easing.

      Artie knew about her situation: the necessity for her business to thrive in order to buy the best care for her mum. He knew her fears, her insecurities. He’d been there from the start, this reserved gentleman in a porkpie hat who’d lost his wife to the disease that would eventually claim her mum.

      She hadn’t wanted to attend a support group, but her mum’s doc had insisted it would help in the disease’s management and ultimately help her mum.

      So she’d gone along, increasingly frustrated and helpless and angry, so damn angry, that her vibrant, fun-loving mother had been diagnosed with motor neurone disease.

      She’d known nothing about her mum’s symptoms until it had been too late. Nora had hidden them well: the stumbling due to weakness in her leg muscles, her difficulty holding objects due to weak hands, her swallowing difficulties and the occasional speech slur.

      The first Callie had learned of it was when her mum had invited her to accompany her to see a neurologist. Nora hated needles, and apparently having an electromyograph, where they stuck needles in her muscles to measure electrical activity, was worse to bear than the actual symptoms.

      The diagnosis had floored them both—especially the lack of a cure and mortality rates. Though in typical determined Nora fashion her mum had continued living independently until her symptoms had made it impossible to do so.

      Nora had refused to be a burden on her only daughter, so Callie had found the best care facility around—one with top neurologists, speech, occupational and physiotherapists, psychologists, nurses and palliative care, while trying not to acknowledge her mum’s steady deterioration.

      It was as if she could see the nerve cells failing, resulting in the progressive muscle weakness that would eventually kill her mum.

      So she focussed on the good news: Nora’s sight, smell, taste, sensation, intellect and memory wouldn’t be affected. Nora would always know her, even at the end, and that thought sustained her through many a crying jag late at night, when the pain of impending loss crowded in and strangled her forced bravery.

      To compound her stress she’d had to reluctantly face the fact she had a fifty-fifty chance of inheriting it too. She hadn’t breathed all through the genetic testing consultation, when the doctors had explained that Nora’s motor neurone disease was caused by mutations in the SOD1 gene. That tiny superoxide dismutase one gene, located on chromosome twenty-one, controlled her fate.

      Insomnia had plagued her in the lead-up to her testing, and the doctor’s clinical facts had been terrifying as they echoed through her head: people with the faulty gene had a high chance of developing MND in later life, or could develop symptoms in their twenties.

      Like her.

      She’d worried herself sick for days after the test, and even though it had come back clear—she didn’t carry the mutated gene—she’d never fully shaken the feeling that she had a swinging axe grazing the back of her neck, despite the doc’s convincing argument that many people with the faulty gene didn’t go on to develop MND.

      Then СКАЧАТЬ