Emmerdale spoilers: Billy and Dawn left reeling by major news about Evan – and it’s heartbreaking
Billy and Dawn Fletcher (Jay Kontzle and Olivia Bromley)’s relationship hit crisis point in Monday (May 20)’s Emmerdale – and it came following a huge update on their baby son Evan’s health.
Evan has recently been diagnosed with leukaemia and has been undergoing chemotherapy to treat the condition. This has been devastating for the whole family.
Dawn has been living at the hospital, unwilling to leave her little boy’s side. Billy, meanwhile, has split his time between visits to the hospital and also looking after things at home, trying to maintain some kind of normality for the couple’s other children, Clemmie (Mabel Addison) and Lucas (Noah Ryan Aspinall).
Although Dawn and Billy have previously been a rock-solid couple, recently we’ve started to see friction between them.
Sleep-deprived and stressed, Dawn feels she’s carrying most of the burden of worrying about Evan as Billy isn’t spending as much time at the hospital as she is and feels more able to come and go.
What she isn’t seeing is that Billy is just as worried about Evan but is also trying to do what’s best for the rest of the family.
In this episode we saw Billy having a difficult morning trying to get Clemmie and Lucas ready for school. Lucas was in tears asking when Dawn was coming home and Billy looked like he was at the end of his tether trying to worry about all of his family.
At the hospital he couldn’t get the parking machine to work and he lost his rag with a parking attendant who was trying to be helpful but was doing it annoyingly slowly. This all meant that by the time he got to Evan’s room, Dawn had just had the meeting with the consultant on her own.
The news had been mixed. The good news was that Evan won’t need a bone marrow transplant. The bad news was that he will still need another two or three years of chemotherapy.
Dawn was distraught, thinking that her son’s milestones wouldn’t be the normal ones like the day he first crawls or walks, it will be things like the day he isn’t hooked up to tubes. ‘Our son is never going to have a normal childhood,’ she told Billy.
She was furious that he hadn’t been there when she got the news and wouldn’t listen to his explanation about the parking.
Dawn’s entire world is currently the hospital and Evan and she’s consumed by worry, to the extent where she can’t see the role that Billy is playing in trying to support her and all their kids, and she can’t see the huge toll it’s placing on him.
They had a blazing argument, and she asked him whether he blamed her for Evan’s condition because of her previous lifestyle.
‘All the messed up things I’ve done in my life, this is payback. Smack head, on the game. God knows what she put in her body,’ she said. Was he thinking that as a former drug addict and sex worker, it was her fault that Evan was ill?
This pushed Billy to his limit as he realised that he couldn’t get through to his wife. He said he was trying his best and left the room, collapsing in tears in the corridor outside.
