tried to change it.
‘I want her,’ she said, and her voice broke on a sob, but there was no changing what the scans had shown.
And Tom leaned forward and put his hands over hers, so there were four hands cupped over her belly.
‘Has your baby died, Tasha?’
And there it was, out there in all its horror. But it couldn’t be real. Please...
‘Not yet,’ she managed, and his grip on her hands tightened. I wonder if this is the way he treats all his patients, she thought, in some weird abstracted part of her brain that had space for those things. He was good. He was intuitive, empathic, caring. He’d be a good family doctor.
A good friend?
‘If anything happened to me, Tasha, I reckon you could go to him.’
Paul had been right, she thought. For just about the only time in his life, Paul had been right.
Oh, but laying this on him...
And he was a Blake. He even looked like his brother.
‘Tell me,’ he said, and it was an order, calm and sure, a direction she had to follow no matter how she was feeling. And she took a deep breath because this was what she’d come for. She had no choice but to continue.
‘My baby’s a girl,’ she whispered. ‘Emily. I’ve named her Emily after my grandma. I had to come back to Australia to access Paul’s sperm. I’m Australian and I have Aussie health insurance so I stayed here during my pregnancy. I’ve been doing locums. Everything was fine until the last ultrasound. And they picked it up. She has hypoplastic left heart syndrome. The left side of her heart hasn’t developed. That...that’s bad enough but I thought...well, the literature says there’s hope and there are good people in Melbourne. With the Norwood procedure there’s a good chance of long-term survival. I hoped. But two days ago I went for my last visit to the cardiologist before delivery and the ultrasound’s showing an atrial septal defect as well. And more. Nothing’s right. Everything’s wrong. While she’s in utero, she doesn’t need her heart to pump her lungs, so she’s okay, but as soon as she’s born...’
She took a deep breath. ‘As soon as she’s born the problems will start. The cardiologist says I need to wait as long as possible before delivery so she’s strong enough to face the faint possibility of surgery, but I’m not to hope for miracles. He says she’ll live for a little while but it’ll be days. Or less. The defect is so great...’
Strangely her voice was working okay. Strangely the words didn’t cut out. It was like the medical side of her was kicking in, giving her some kind of armour against the pain. Or maybe it was simply that the pain was so unbearable that her body had thrown up armour of its own.
Tom’s face had stilled. He’d be taking it in, she thought, like a good doctor, taking his time to assess, to figure what to say, to think of what might be the most helpful thing to say.
There wasn’t anything to say. There just...wasn’t.
* * *
Hypoplastic left heart syndrome...
He’d never seen a case but he’d read of it. He’d read of the Norwood procedure, a radical surgical technique giving hope to such babies, but with an atrial septal defect as well...
His hands were still gripping Tasha’s. They were resting against the bulge that was her baby, and he felt a faint movement. A kick...
In cases like this there usually weren’t any outward signs during pregnancy. A foetus only needed one ventricle. It didn’t use its lungs to get oxygen to the body, so while it was in utero there was nothing wrong.
If the experts were right, Tasha was carrying a seemingly healthy baby, a little girl who’d only survive for days after she was born.
This woman was a doctor. She’d have gone down every path. Her face said she had, and she’d been hit by a wall at every turn.
‘Transplant?’ he said, still holding her hands, and he thought maybe it was for him as well as for her. He had a sudden vision of his half-brother as a child, a tousled-haired wild child, rebellious even as a kid. A bright kid who’d tumbled from scrape to scrape. Paul had done medicine, too. Their father had been a doctor so maybe that’s why it had appealed to both of them, but the moment Paul had graduated he’d been off overseas. He’d helped out in some of the wildest places. He’d been a risk taker.
And now he was dead and his baby was facing the biggest risk of all. Being born.
A transplant? Without research it sounded the only hope.
‘You must know the odds,’ Tasha said flatly, echoing his thoughts.
He did. To find a suitable donor in time... To keep this little one alive until they found one, and then to have her fight the odds and survive...
He glanced up at Tasha’s ravaged face and he thought, Where are your friends? Where are your family? Why are you here alone?
And something inside him twisted.
He’d been a family doctor for ten years now. He loved the work. He loved this little community and when his patients were ill he couldn’t help but be personally involved.
But this woman was different.
She was his half-brother’s widow and as such there was a family connection. Her story was heartbreaking.
And yet there was something more. Something that made him want to loosen the grip on her hands and gather her into him and hold.
It was almost a primeval urge. The urge to protect.
The urge to take away her pain any way he knew how.
Which was all getting in the way of what she needed from him, which was to be useful. She was here for a reason. She didn’t need him to be messed up with some emotional reaction he didn’t understand.
‘So what can I do for you, Tasha?’ he asked, in a voice he had to force himself to keep steady. ‘I’ll help in any way I can. Tell me what you need me to do.’
She steadied. He could see her fighting back emotion, turning into the practical woman he sensed she was.
She let go his hands and sat back, and he pushed back too, so the personal link was broken.
‘I need an advocate,’ she told him. ‘No. Emily needs an advocate.’
‘Explain.’
She had herself under control again now—sort of.
‘I’m only part Australian,’ she told him. ‘My dad was British but Mum was Australian. I was born here but my parents were in the army. We never had a permanent home. Mum and Dad died when I was fifteen and I went to live with my aunt in the UK. That’s where I did medicine. Afterwards I took a job with Médecins Sans Frontières, moving all around the world at need, which is when I met Paul. Paul owned an apartment here so Australia was our base but we still travelled. I’ve never stayed still long enough to get roots, to make long-term friends. So now I’m in a city I don’t know
