18
I was right. The moment I sat down across from Declan’s desk, Christine started talking.
And continued talking. About how adamant the Coopers had always been about not vaccinating their kids, how irresponsible they were for taking them out of school to go on holiday, how Madeleine had always looked down on the other mums in Knockroe, believing herself to be superior, and now with her newfound TV fame was lording it over everyone even more...
I don’t think I’d realized until then just how deep the negativity Christine seemed to harbor toward the Coopers—or Madeleine, at least—was, and I couldn’t help but wonder if all this truly was about helping me.
My discomfort must have started to become apparent, because Declan looked at me earnestly from across the table and then spoke to his cousin. “Christine, would you mind going out front for a bit so I can talk alone with Kate?”
At first, she looked put out to be excluded from something that she needed to be involved in. But, truth be told, she was making me feel really overwhelmed, and I needed some distance from her. Especially if I was ever going to make a logical, well-informed decision about this situation.
Declan obviously sensed this. “I’ll need to talk with her about some issues that are privileged,” he added simply.
I appreciated the angle, and Christine fell for it, though of course no contract or agreement had been signed or even mentioned. So there was nothing that fell under client privilege. However, I was happy to let him run with the ruse if it meant I got a few moments’ headspace.
“Oh, right, of course,” she mumbled. “I’ll just wait out in reception. Take your time, Kate.”
She got up from where she sat and exited the room, delicately closing the door behind her, leaving me alone with Declan.
“So,” he said, with a twinkle in his eye. “My cousin can be a bit...much.”
I smiled, relaxing a little. It felt good, and I hadn’t realized just how tense I’d been since all of this had happened. It felt like forever since smiling had come naturally to me.
“Christine explained a little about the situation with your daughter. How is she?”
I knew he was only being polite, but he sounded so unexpectedly concerned that I was a little taken aback. And became once again overcome with emotion as I thought of my little girl.
“We don’t really know yet, to be honest. I’m not sure what Christine has told you but...”
“Tell you what, Kate, why don’t you tell me everything how you see it. I’ll be honest with you; I don’t actually know any of the specifics, other than what’s been filtered through Christine. And I think we both know she’s not exactly impartial.” He smiled, once again putting me at ease. “And just in case she’s given you the impression that we’ve been discussing you at length behind your back, that isn’t the case, either. She suggested something ‘theoretically’ to me over lunch with the family one Sunday and I gave her a broad-stroke legal opinion without knowing any particulars. Then she phones me yesterday telling me she wants to bring you in today. To be truthful, I’m probably just as overwhelmed as you are.”
“Oh.” His honesty and candor disarmed me and I felt a little better about the fact that Christine had not been completely forthcoming with either of us.
Then Declan opened a legal pad and picked up a pen. As he did so, it struck me how huge his hands were, and how it seemed like he’d be more at ease outdoors on a farm than in a tiny one-windowed office. Then again, Christine had mentioned that this was a family firm, so perhaps he’d followed in his father’s footsteps?
“I have to be honest, too. I’m not entirely sure what I am doing here at all,” I admitted. “I don’t want to waste anyone’s time. And this...kind of thing isn’t really my style.”
Declan nodded as he considered what I had just said. “Have you discussed this with your husband?” I saw him glance briefly at my left hand to my wedding ring. Evidently the fact that I was a widow didn’t come up when Christine was giving her cousin the rundown on my situation over dinner.
I cleared my throat. “I’m a widow. My husband passed away almost two years ago.”
I felt suddenly and inexplicably guilty then and tried to figure out why. Was it because I was verbalizing my relationship status to another man for the first time in ages? Or was it because I knew the very idea of legal action was something Greg would never have approved of if he were still here—in fact he would have been horrified.
My face must have shown my discomfort because Declan cleared his throat and said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
“You couldn’t have known if Christine didn’t mention it. I suppose that’s one of the reasons she wants me to consider this. I’m kind of up shit creek at the moment. I’m on unpaid leave, have a mountain of bills to pay and have no idea how bad my daughter’s condition will get.”
With that—the mere act of verbalizing the reality of the direction my life had taken—my voice broke and, much to my utter horror, I burst into tears.
“Oh, God, I’m so sorry.” I sniffed, feeling like an idiot for breaking down in front of a complete stranger. Talk about time and place...
But once more Declan seemed to know exactly the right thing to say.
“Tell you what,” he said, when I’d once again managed to compose myself, “why don’t you start from the very beginning, and tell me everything...”
* * *
When I’d finished, I watched as Declan tapped his pen on the pad of yellow paper in which he had been taking notes.
“I’m so sorry, Kate, it sounds like you’ve had a truly horrific time of it. How’s your little girl now? What’s the prognosis?”
I looked away. “That’s the issue. We don’t actually know—not until her brain activity has stabilized and they can assess any damage. In the early hours of Friday morning, they induced the coma to stop the convulsions, and she’s been under for three days now. They’re monitoring her in the meantime, but until they start weaning her off the coma drugs or she comes out of it herself, they don’t know whether the seizures will return. If they do, or she stays under too long, there might be...brain damage.” I put a hand over my mouth almost involuntarily, as if to stop those horrifically distressing words falling from my lips.
“Jesus.” Declan seemed to shudder. “That’s awful, I’m so sorry. Again, I can’t even imagine what you’ve gone through—what you’re still going through. All this from measles...”
“I know. And now I’ve started to question myself all over again about the allergy and whether we should have just bitten the bullet and given her the MMR vaccination when she was a baby. The choice back then was weighing up the certainty of a dangerous reaction taken against the risk of contracting measles. But now I’m thinking at least maybe we could have handled the reaction, whereas brain damage...”
This was what had been killing me in the days since Friday. Rosie could have been protected—by me and Greg, way back when. But as Dr. Ryan had reassured me at the hospital, nobody could ever have guessed how Rosie would react to measles, or envision her developing a serious complication like encephalitis on top of pneumonia.
But still, I couldn’t help but feel that anything would have been better than this.
I breathed out, hoping to get back on track. “So, that’s where we are. Even in the very best-case scenario, Rosie will require extreme levels of care and might be in the hospital for months. I’m a single-income earner, currently out of work, unpaid. Once the statutory period runs out, I don’t know what I’ll do, but in the meantime I have bills to pay and a very sick daughter to attend to. I suppose I just feel—” I shifted uncomfortably “—and in particular your cousin feels, that all of this could have been prevented had the other party not sent her infectious child to school.”
There, I’d said it. I’d uttered the words out loud. I’d blamed someone other than myself for what had happened to Rosie. I thought it would feel liberating, but instead it felt...wrong.
Declan exhaled deeply. “Well. It’s a tricky one. An action like this would be based primarily on negligence.” He tapped his pen on the edge of the legal pad. “And to succeed in a negligence claim, the plaintiff, in this case you on behalf of your daughter, would need to establish various proofs. One is that the defendant—the other parent—owed the plaintiff a duty of care. Another is that the defendant breached that duty of care, that the plaintiff sustained injuries and or losses—which you’ve just outlined—and, finally, that the defendants negligence was the proximate cause of the plaintiff’s injuries and losses.”
I nodded, trying to take it all in.
“Point one is a matter of law to be decided by a judge,” he went on. “The relevant concepts that would be taken into consideration would be those of reasonable foreseeability and what solicitors know as ‘the neighbor principle.’” He exhaled and sat forward in his chair. “The concept of the neighbor principle is defined as, and I quote, ‘those to whom a duty of care might be expected to be owed, would be those so closely and directly affected by their actions that they ought reasonably to have them in consideration when directing their mind to the acts or omissions that are being called into question.’” He looked at me. “It’s legal speak, so all a bit gobbledygook, I know. But do you follow?”
I nodded. He was basically saying that if you were aware that something you did might affect someone vulnerable, you needed to take that into account before you did that thing that would affect them.
“In your situation, Kate, you would have to establish that the other parents knew or ought reasonably to have known that their failure to vaccinate would cause a risk to other children. Ultimately, if a duty of care was held to exist, then the remainder of the case would turn on the facts. For example, knowingly sending a child to school while in an infectious state clinically could ground the proposition that this was unreasonable behavior.”
Declan turned the pen in his huge hands as he continued to outline his reasoning.
“But if a judge decides that no duty of care is owed, then the case fails at that first hurdle. To my mind, if a duty of care is owed, then the other facts are arguable; in the legal world, it’s described as a prima facie—an arguable case to be made on behalf of you, the plaintiff. And I’ll be honest with you, Kate, if what you’re saying is true and the sequence of events happened exactly as you described and, more importantly, you have a witness, your friend Lucy, willing to testify that yes, Mrs. Cooper knowingly and intentionally sent her child to school aware that she was infectious, then it seems to me that there is a willful-negligence issue at play here. What we need to ascertain is—and perhaps this is for a judge to decide—did Mrs. Cooper fully assess the potential outcome of her actions or, in this scenario, inaction? And does negligence in this situation extend to not just sending a sick child to school, but failing to vaccinate the child at all?”
My eyes flickered upward, surprised. “So you do think the Coopers might have a case to answer?” This surprised me; I’d assumed once Declan heard everything that he’d laugh me out of the office.
But no, he was taking this seriously. Very seriously.
“The law is a strange thing, Kate. Everything is open to argument and interpretation. And while of course there’s lots more to tease out in this situation, for the moment, I suggest you go home and think about the implications of actually going ahead with something like this. I’m guessing that you’re not here exactly of your own volition.”
“Well, no, as you say, your cousin can be...persuasive, but I was so angry the other night when Rosie almost died. And Madeleine...the other mum...” I trailed off, not wanting to tell him that seeing Clara’s mother on TV blathering happily about child safety or lack thereof had set me off. “When Christine told me that you were prepared to talk to me, I decided I might as well at least have the conversation. To get her off my back, if nothing else,” I added lightly.
But Declan seemed to think it was all perfectly normal and straightforward. “Well, from a legal point of view, I’m already envisioning how such a case could be framed. Naturally, I need to examine precedent, and carry out some further investigation of my own, but if you’re asking if there’s something there, then I’d have to answer yes—on the civil side, certainly, as of course there’s nothing criminal here. But, Kate, if you were considering this as a quick-fix answer to your financial problems, I should warn you, civil cases can take years to come before the courts.”
It’s not just that, I thought, remembering how arrogant and cavalier Madeleine Cooper had come across on that TV show.
Based on what Declan was saying now, the woman had recklessly put not only Rosie, but the whole school—maybe even the entire community—in danger. What if Clara had come into contact with an unvaccinated newborn, or any other vulnerable people? And who was to say that she hadn’t?
I’d thought about it long and hard since Friday and kept coming back to the same conclusion: Madeleine Cooper needed a wake-up call.
She needed to know that you don’t get to make a career out of being irresponsible, and that the choices you made had serious consequences, affected other people’s lives.
“It’s also worth considering that situations like this can be hard, especially in small towns,” Declan went on. “Any action that pits neighbor against neighbor is likely to spark a variety of opinions—including some negative ones. Would you be prepared for something like that?”
I gulped. Of course, this was one of the initial reasons I’d been so reluctant to pursue anything like this at all.
“I know what you’re saying, and honestly, I’m still so taken aback that you think there might actually be something there that I haven’t even thought about the possible ramifications, bad or otherwise.”
But now it seemed I would have to. Should I seriously consider this, consider taking the Coopers to court for what they’d visited on Rosie?
The old me would have immediately said no way. But something had changed in me in the early hours of Friday morning, I knew that. Seeing my daughter come so close to death had altered me in ways I couldn’t quite explain.
I’d almost lost Rosie then, and by some miracle that hadn’t happened, not that night anyway.
But the problem was—and this was something I wasn’t yet able to process—as things stood, I still didn’t know if I was going to lose her anyway.
And there was no way I would allow Madeleine Cooper to get away with that.
Declan sat quietly in his chair, watching me, as if he knew I was coming to a decision of sorts.
“Like I said, I really think that you should go off and think seriously about this. And, in the meantime, I believe I should also do my due diligence. I never want to lead any client, or potential client, down the wrong path. As far as I’m concerned, Kate, this is a two-way street. You have to be comfortable with me, but I also have to be comfortable with you. Sound fair?”
I nodded. There was something inherently reassuring about this approach, as if a partnership of sorts was being proposed.
And, for the first time in weeks, I began to feel a little more in control.
“And while you do consider everything and really think about the angles, is there anyone else who can give you a hand—with the day-to-day stuff?” he inquired. He was obviously referring to my situation, my home life and whether I had anyone—besides Lucy or Christine—to lean on. It was an honest question—and a simple one to answer, really—but it hit me like a truck.
No, there wasn’t anyone like that. My husband was dead, I had no siblings, my parents were elderly and had a life of their own some three hundred kilometers away. Notwithstanding the fact that I was almost forty years old and I couldn’t—wouldn’t—expect anyone else to upend their lives just to help me out.
I crossed my hands on the polished oak table and stared at them. These hands had been doing everything on their own for the last two years. Because they had to.
I straightened my shoulders and looked Declan right in the eye. “I’m not a victim,” I said simply.
I wasn’t sure if that answered his question. But it certainly answered the one that had been bumping around my own head lately.
Declan’s arresting eyes studied my face. His gaze was intent, steady. “I wouldn’t have thought for a second that you were.”