glanced up at Rob.
‘You okay with anaesthesia?’
Rob grinned.
‘I haven’t been here long but as Bill told me soon after I arrived, country doctors do the lot,’ he said. ‘How long would you want him out to it?’
‘Hopefully twenty minutes, but double it—make it forty to be on the safe side. He’s due to be flown out if we can get him stable.’
‘The plane will wait,’ Rob assured him, already checking the available drugs and drawing up what he’d need.
Bill prepared the area beneath where the young man’s shoulder should be, quickly shaving the hair and swabbing antiseptic all around then stepping back as Nick made the incision.
‘We know it’s in the armpit—it should be right there,’ Nick grumbled, but the muscle had been torn so badly it was hard to see where the armpit should have been.
A fresh flush of blood as Bill moved the lad’s scapula revealed the tear, blood pulsing from it into the surrounding tissues.
‘The pressure must have been enormous,’ he murmured. ‘It looks as if it’s been ripped apart. I’ll have to cut off the torn ends and sew it back together. The vascular surgeons in Brisbane can do the fancy stuff.’
Bill watched in utter amazement as the man she’d known so well as a boy—her first best friend—calmly performed life-saving microscopic surgery on their patient. But the whole shift had been one surprise after another, beginning with Nick walking into the ER as if he belonged there.
‘Another suture!’
He snapped the order, making her realise he’d already asked while she’d been reliving the shock of his arrival. Her mind back in gear, she worked with him, actually thrilled to be seeing him in action—seeing just how good an emergency doctor he’d turned out to be.
Not that she’d ever doubted it. Nick had always been able to do anything, and even excel at it, once he’d set his mind to it.
Her friend Nick …
CHAPTER TWO
THE PATIENT WAS finally wheeled away, heading for an airlift to Brisbane and the experts who might or might not save his life and, with even more luck, his arm. Bill slid down the wall and slumped to the floor of the trauma room, oblivious to the mess of packaging, blood, swabs and tubing that littered the floor.
‘Not bad for a first night on duty?’ she said to Nick, smiling up at the man who leant against the wall across from her. ‘Think you’ll enjoy work back in the old home town?’
His face was drawn, the stress of the two-hour fight to keep the youngster alive imprinted clearly on his features, yet he found the shadow of a smile.
‘Anything you can do I can do better,’ he teased, using a phrase that had been bandied back and forth between them a thousand times in their youth.
A young nurse poked her head into the room.
‘Want me to clean up?’ she asked.
Bill shook her head.
‘I’m off duty, I’ll do it in a minute.’
She turned back to Nick to find him studying her, a strange expression on his face.
‘What?’ she asked, disturbed not by him looking at her but by her reaction to it—to him, the new him.
‘Rob Darwin? Love interest?’ he asked.
‘As if!’ Bill snorted. ‘Not that he’s not a nice young man, and not that he wouldn’t like there to be something, but …’
She hesitated, finding her reluctance to date hard to put into words.
‘No spark?’
Nick had found the words for her.
‘None at all,’ she said, ‘and it seems a waste of my time and unfair to him just to date for the sake of dating.’
‘Very noble of you,’ he teased, then he smiled again.
This smile was better than the first one, and her reaction more intense.
Weird when this was Nick, but she didn’t have time to consider it as he was speaking again and, anyway, maybe the reactions were nothing more than tiredness and the aftermath of stress.
‘There must have been a spark with Nigel,’ he was saying. ‘What really happened there? You could have married him, the Great God of Surgery, and been taken away from all this. You could be down in the city, doing social stuff, running fundraising balls, lunching for good causes, decked out in designer gear instead of bloody scrubs.’
‘Now, there would be a fate worse than death!’
The words were lightly spoken but pain pierced her heart as she remembered it had been that same ‘Great God’ who’d ordered her to have an abortion a month before their wedding because he didn’t want people thinking they’d got married because she was pregnant. She breathed deeply, aware that too much bitterness still leaked into her veins when she thought of that disastrous time.
The realisation that the man she’d loved had been nothing more than a shallow, social-climbing pretender had rocked her self-confidence and made her question her judgement about people, particularly men. The miscarriage two months later had exacerbated her loss of self-worth and it had taken years, back here in Willowby with her family and friends, to rebuild it.
Although now she’d grown a thicker skin and heavier armour to shield her fragile heart …
Nick heard the change in her voice and wondered how much damage her broken engagement had done to her trust—to Bill herself, given she was the most trusting person he had ever known. It worried him that he didn’t know the background to the break-up—didn’t know a lot of things about his friend.
His best friend!
What did the kids call it these days? BFF? Best friends for ever?
‘Anyway,’ she was saying, while his mind had drifted back to the past, ‘if we’re going to talk of what might have happened in our lives, you could have married Seraphina or whatever she called herself when she fell pregnant, and gone swanning off to New York to live off her earnings as a top supermodel.’
That was better, more like old times, Bill taking the fight to him!
‘Serena,’ Nick corrected. ‘You’re muddling her up with Delphina, who was the one before, and, anyway, I did offer to marry Serena but she wanted none of it, not me, not a child and definitely not marriage.’
Silence fell, the ghosts of dead children lying between them among the empty packaging and blood.
Bill reacted first, pushing herself up off the floor, stripping off her soiled apron and flinging it into a bin, then bending to begin collecting the rubbish off the floor.
‘I’ll
