Jac snapped her head around as Evie hurried into the room, worried that Fletch had managed to injure himself putting things away or he'd set something on fire. As soon as she made it to the door however, the teen came to a very abrupt halt and casually walked in.
"Everything okay?" Jac asked, looking suspiciously over at the girl as she shifted Emma off her lap and onto the sofa beside her.
"Mmhm," Evie replied with a broad smile. "Would you mind helping me study after these lot are in bed?"
"Of course, I will," Jac offered, pulling her knees up to rest her chin on them and returning her attention to whatever Ella had decided they ought to watch.
It was only half an hour later that Fletch the three youngsters upstairs to shower before bedtime, leaving Evie and Jac alone in the living room.
"Wanna go grab your work?" Jac suggested, turning to face Evie and making space on the couch beside her.
Evie was back in a flash with her bio workbook, textbook, folder and exam paper in hand. She took a seat at the other end of the sofa, hiding the front of the paper from Jac's view in the hope that she wouldn't notice the massive C emblazoned on the front of it.
"I, uh, need to go through and figure out why I got questions wrong so that next time I don't make the same mistakes," she mumbled out, wondering why she had taken her Dad's reassurance so easily when this was Jac Naylor FRCS, this was Jacula, this was the woman that even Serena was reluctant to say no to.
"Okay, pass it here and I'll ask you any of the questions you got wrong again and we can see if you know the answers now," Jac said nonchalantly and Evie handed over the paper without thinking, eyes fixing on Jac's reaction; it didn't change.
She opened it to the first page, glancing down the right hand side before asking her a question on mass change. She answered confidently and was met with a nod.
They sat there, going through the entire paper as Evie got almost every question correct and was frustrated at herself for managing to mess up so badly in the exam. She didn't think she had been very stressed but apparently, she had.
"People with type 1 diabetes inject insulin to control their blood glucose level. A pancreas transplant is another treatment for type 1 diabetes. One risk of a pancreas transplant is organ rejection. Explain why a transplanted organ may be rejected," Jac asked and Evie frowned at her, wondering how she could've got this wrong.
"The immune system recognises the transplanted pancreas as a foreign body and attacks the antigens as it perceives them as a threat to the body, this is the main cause of hyperacute, acute, and chronic rejection."
"That's what you wrote down, and I know full well that it's correct, so I don't know why you were only given one mark for it," Jac replied, furrowing her brow. "Say that you got two extra marks then."
Evie grinned at that. She was only one mark under the grade boundary, and a B was far less of a disaster than a C.
The two continued like that for another half an hour, until Fletch poked his head around the door to tell Evie that the bathroom was free.
"Thank you, Jac," the girl offered with a smile as she gathered her things and hurried upstairs.
Fletch flopped down onto the couch beside Jac, smiling warmly as he wrapped his arm around her shoulders and glanced towards the TV. He couldn't help but notice just how relaxed she was, had Evie not mentioned the bad grade to her at all?
"Everything go well with Evie?"
"Fine, she seemed a bit upset about her grade but it was fine, and she did better than she thought she did anyway. That girl might just be the first Fletcher to end up working in a hospital doing something other than running errands and filling out forms," she answered in a teasing tone, a grin on her face as Fletch scoffed at her.
"Well, if there was gonna be a clever one, it was always going to be her," he admitted, remembering how Evie had always loved school, even when she was a kid and all she was learning was spelling and her times tables. "She definitely got all her brains from her mother."
"Oh hush, you know you're clever. It would take a genius to persuade even one nurse to carry on working under me and you've kept a whole team of them," Jac retorted with a grin, turning to kiss his hand where is hung over her shoulder. "Stop fishing."
