right to sack her. It was her mother who’d played the scarlet woman, not her.
But in a tiny town distinctions blurred.
She’d sat in the nurses’ station with her stomach cramping, feeling sick, knowing she couldn’t live with this stress a moment longer. She was being unfairly tarred with the same brush as her mother, and she knew she didn’t deserve it. But it was a small town and so far she’d always stuck up for her mother … that couldn’t go on.
On the way home she’d stopped to buy groceries. Walking into the general store had been a nightmare. Shocked, judgmental faces had been everywhere.
The Ellis women.
Then she’d tried to use her card to pay for groceries. ‘Declined: Limit exceeded.’
Her mother had been using her credit card?
Speechless, she’d gone home and there was the vicar, pudgy, weak and shamefaced, but totally besotted with her mother.
‘Make yourself scarce for a while, there’s a good girl,’ her mother had said. ‘We need time to ourselves. It’ll be okay, dear,’ she’d cooed as Lily had tried to figure what to do, what to say. ‘We were going to go to Paris but we’ve run out of money. It doesn’t matter. If Harold can just borrow a little bit more from his relatives we’ll leave. We’re in love and everyone just needs time to accept it.’
Enough. What had followed had been the world’s fastest pack. She’d driven eight hundred and fifty miles from Adelaide to Sydney. A seventeen-hour drive, her stomach cramping all the way. She’d had cat naps at the side of the road, or she’d tried to, but sleep had refused to come. She’d arrived in Sydney late in the afternoon, trying to figure how she could survive on what little money she had.
She’d walked into the nursing agency before it had closed and they’d fallen on her neck.
‘All your documents and references are in order. There’s a job tonight, if you’re available. Sydney Harbour Hospital is desperate.’
She’d found a cheap boarding house, dumped her luggage and booked accommodation for the next night. That was tonight, she thought, glancing at her watch. She could have the room from ten.
But it was five hours until ten o’clock, and she was so tired she was asleep on her feet.
Her stomach hurt.
She stared at her locker, trying to make her mind think. The thought of finding an all-hours café until then made her feel ill. There’d be an on-call room somewhere for medical staff, she thought. Probably there’d be a few. There’d be rooms for obstetricians waiting for babies. Rooms for surgeons waiting for their turn in complex multi-specialist procedures.
Rooms to sleep?
Just for a couple of hours, she thought. Just until it was a reasonable time to find breakfast and book into her boarding house.
Just for now.
He had a whole hour of thinking he’d done it right. One lousy hour and then the phone went off beside his bed.
‘Problem.’ It was Finn. Of course it was Finn—when did the man ever sleep?
When did Finn ever wake him when it wasn’t a full-blown emergency? Luke was hauling his pants on before Finn’s next words.
‘It’s Jessie,’ Finn snapped. ‘It seems he has a congenital heart problem. No one thought to tell us, not that it would have made a difference to what you did anyway. His heart’s failing. You want to come in or you want me to deal?’
‘I’m on my way.’
She woke and he was right beside her. Luke Williams, plastic surgeon. He looked like he’d just seen death.
The on-call room was tiny, one big squishy settee, a television, a coffee table with ancient magazines and nothing else. She’d curled into a corner of the couch and fallen asleep. Until now.
The man beside her wasn’t seeing her. He was staring at the blank television screen, gaze unfocused.
She’d never seen a man look so bleak.
‘What’s wrong?’ she breathed, and touched his arm.
He flinched.
‘What are you doing here?’ His voice was harsh. Breaking. It was emotion that had woken her, she thought. Raw grief, filling the room like a tangible thing.
‘I don’t get into my boarding house until ten,’ she told him. ‘So I’m camped out, waiting. But what is it? Jessie?’
‘He died,’ he said, and all the bleakness in the world was in those two words. ‘Cardiac arrest. He had a congenital heart problem and no one thought to tell us. As if we had time to look for records. The admission officer didn’t even read the form, she was too upset. We patched him up, we made him look like he might even be okay, and all the time his heart was like a time bomb.’
‘There was no choice,’ she managed, appalled.
‘There was a choice. If I’d known … I could have taken the flap off, thought about grafts later, concentrated on getting his heart stable first.’
She took a deep breath. What to say?
This man’s anguish was raw and real.
A congenital heart problem …
If Luke had known he might well have decided not to try and save his face, but without that immediate operation Jess would have been left with a lifetime of skin grafts. With a face that wasn’t his.
‘What sort of life would he have led?’ she whispered.
‘A life,’ he said flatly. ‘Any life. I can’t bear …’
And she couldn’t bear it either. She took his hands and tugged him around to face her.
There was more to this than a child dying, she thought. This man must have lost patients before. He couldn’t react like this to all of them. There was some past tragedy here that was being tapped into, she guessed. She had no idea what it was; but she sensed his pain was well nigh unbearable.
‘I killed him,’ he said, and for some reason she wasn’t sure he was talking about Jessie.
‘The dog killed him,’ she said, trying to sound prosaic. ‘You tried to save him.’
‘I should have—’
‘No. Don’t do this.’
He shuddered, and it was a raw and dreadful grief that took over his whole body.
Enough. She pulled him into her arms and held him. And held and held. She simply held him while the shudders racked his body, over and over.
This couldn’t just be about this child, she thought.
Something had broken him.
He
