and I’ll show you around instead.’
Caroline’s reaction wasn’t what you’d call ecstatic.
More resigned, if anything, but after being distracted by the telling of his mother’s distress and their departure from the island earlier, he was hoping to have a chat about the situation at the mine—to find out what she was thinking.
Because she was thinking of something she could do to help matters. He’d known her too long and too well not to have picked that up.
But he could hardly ask about it while touring the little hospital and introducing patients, so he’d have to find another time.
‘There are four wards, if you can call small two-bed spaces wards. Three on this side, with sliding doors that can close each of them off, although most of the time we leave it open for the breezes.’
He led her into the first of these, which, at the moment, had two patients, young men from another island who had taken the tide too lightly and had been injured when the boat they’d been in had overturned on the reef. ‘As you can see,’ Keanu pointed out, ‘one has a broken arm, the other an injured ankle, and both have quite bad coral grazes—’
‘Which can easily become infected if not treated promptly and continually.’
Keanu nodded. Anyone who grew up in the islands knew about infections from coral so he wasn’t going to give her any brownie points for that. But walking with her, talking with her—even professionally—was so distracting to his body he couldn’t help but resent her presence.
If she wasn’t here—
No, he was glad she was here.
She belonged here, just as he did. He just had to get over this physical attraction thing.
Be professional.
‘The patient in the third bed, in what’s technically another ward, you might recognise—Brenko, Bessie and Harold’s grandson. The flying surgeon took out his spleen last week after he’d had an accident on his quad bike. More muscle than sense, haven’t you?’
The young man grinned, and the patients, who had been quiet as Keanu had brought the stranger into the room, all began to talk at once.
Was she really Caroline Lockhart? How could any Lockhart show her face here? What was going to happen with the mine?
The questions, and the animosity behind some of them, must have hurt Caroline deeply because he heard her sigh with relief when he stopped the talk.
‘Caroline is here as a nurse, so if you don’t want her jabbing you with unnecessary needles, you’d better start treating her with respect. She’s spent more time in these islands than some of you have been alive and is not to blame for anything her uncle did.’
The anger that underlined Keanu’s words quietened the young men, then Brenko said, ‘I’m glad you’re back, Caroline. I still have the ukulele you gave me when I was little.’
Caroline smiled at the memory, but Keanu guessed that one happy memory wouldn’t make up for the animosity that had been thick in the air around her.
He led her through the next small room, this one closed off with the shutters. An elderly woman patient was sleeping soundly, although the young men’s voices could be heard quite clearly.
‘Unstable diabetic,’ Keanu murmured.
‘It’s the curse of all the Pacific islands,’ Caroline replied quietly, and he nodded, then, feeling the hurt he knew she would be nursing, he put his arm around her shoulders and gave her a quick squeeze.
She shot away as if he’d burned her, then must have realised her reaction had been a little extreme and moved close again.
But not close enough for hugs or squeezes, however sympathetic.
In the fourth room, a young woman was sitting up in bed, nursing her baby, Anahera standing by in case either of them needed a bit of help.
‘We don’t have a maternity ward because we transfer all pregnant women to the mainland at thirty-four to thirty-six weeks, depending on the advice of our flying obstetrician, but this little fellow arrived early,’ Keanu explained, smiling at the sight of the mother and child.
‘By rights he shouldn’t be here. His mum was to be going out on today’s flight,’ he continued. ‘But Hettie and the local midwife who delivered him suspect his dates were wrong. As you can see, he’s a good size and he’s feeding lustily.’
He turned to smile at Caroline.
‘In all truth, we love having him here—we’ve all gone a bit soft. Because the women and their babies usually fly in and go straight to their homes, we don’t get to see the babies except on clinic runs. Consequently, we’re happy to keep these two here just in case anything goes wrong. We’ve got them isolated in this room to keep them clear of any infection.’
‘Because you don’t know how Buruli ulcers are transmitted?’
‘Exactly.’
‘The lad with the ulcer will be transferred to the ICU across the passage, beyond the theatre, once Mina has finished dressing the wound. It’s next to the recovery room and ICU is probably a grand name for it but it’s got a ventilator and monitoring equipment in it. The lad doesn’t need it but it does keep him isolated.’
Caroline nodded her understanding.
‘We’re not finished, are we?’ she asked. ‘Don’t you have linen cupboards and drug cabinets and instruments and sterilisers and a million other things that a hospital, even a small one, needs? Where’s your radiography department, for a start?’
‘Through here,’ he said, moving into a separate wing. ‘The theatre you’ve already seen and all the sterilising stuff is in an annexe off that. Cupboards for sterile clothing, etcetera are also in the annexe, and there’s a shower and locker room next to that and beyond the theatre is Radiography.’
‘It’s well planned,’ Caro commented.
‘We’ve your father to thank for that,’ he said. ‘And him to thank for us having the best and latest in radiography machines. Money from the mine put in the basics—X-ray and ultrasound—and the Australian government donated a mammography machine, but he won a grant from one of the big casinos to put in a CT machine. He really does everything he can for the island and the hospital.’
‘The hospital and Christopher,’ Caro pointed out, and Keanu heard the catch in her voice. Did she think her father cared more for the hospital and his son than he did for his daughter?
Keanu remembered that as a child Caro had felt guilty about her mother’s death, and Christopher’s cerebral palsy, blaming herself for both problems, but there was no way Max would feel that.
‘That was bitchy!’ she said suddenly. ‘Both the hospital and Christopher need him far more than I do. And Dad has so much on his shoulders, the least I can do is understand that and do whatever I might be able to do to lift some of the burden.’
Keanu wanted to argue that she had every right to feel left out, but he wondered
