‘What’s happening?’ she asked.
‘We’ve stabilised the elbow, removing bone fragments that could shift. The circulation should hold until she receives specialist orthopaedic attention. The worst risk was the spleen. It was a mess. There was no choice but removal. Sorry, Ellie, to leave you with everything else. I had Chris slip out and tell Joe to call if there was any priority you couldn’t cope with, but then we went for it.’
‘He’s done the whole thing,’ Chris breathed. ‘He’s removed the spleen but he’s done so much more. He’s stopped the internal bleeding completely. Blood pressure’s already rising. And the elbow! Look at the X-rays, Ellie. To get the circulation back. He’s saved her life and he’s saved her arm. Oh, Ellie, I can’t tell you...’
‘Thanks to Chris,’ Marc growled, still focused. ‘You have a gem of a nurse, Ellie.’
‘Don’t I know it,’ she said a trifle unsteadily.
This was surgery way beyond her field of expertise. Maybe she could have diagnosed and removed the spleen but the pneumothorax had been just as urgent. She would have lost one of the two kids, and how appalling a choice would that have been? But the elbow... She glanced at the X-ray, saw the mess, and knew without a doubt that Lisa would be facing amputation if Marc hadn’t been here.
Marc’s battlefield training had come to the fore. She never could have done this alone.
A bullet had been dodged. Or multiple bullets. She wanted to sit down. Badly.
It wasn’t going to happen.
‘I’m just applying an external fixator and then I’m done,’ Marc told her. ‘Ten minutes? I gather the air ambulance is here. I’d like Lisa transferred to Sydney as soon as possible. The elbow will need attention from a specialist. I’m not an orthopod.’
‘You could have fooled me,’ Chris muttered, and Ellie looked at Marc and thought, What good fairy brought you here today?
And then she thought of the repercussions of him being here and she stopped thinking of good fairies.
She didn’t have time to go there. She had to face the relatives.
But there was no longer any urgency. She had room for thought.
Marc was here.
Good fairies? She didn’t think so.
* * *
The first chopper took the most seriously injured, including Lisa, but the boy with the pneumothorax left by road. Air travel wasn’t recommended when lungs were compromised. The road ambulance also took the driver of one of the cars and his girlfriend. The pair had suffered lacerations; the girl had a minor fracture. They could have stayed, but feelings were running high in the town and a driver with only minor injuries could well turn into a scapegoat.
The second chopper, a big one, had places to spare and the battered train crew chose to leave on it. They, too, could have been cared for here, but their homes, their families, were in Sydney. Borrawong Hospital was suddenly almost deserted.
But Marc was still inside and, as Ellie watched the second chopper disappear, that fact seemed more terrifying than a room full of casualties.
‘You can get through this.’ She said it to herself, but she was suddenly thinking of all the times she’d said it before. During the trauma of being the kid of a defiant, erratic single mum with cystic fibrosis. The roller coaster of a childhood living with her mother’s illness. The relief of her mother’s first lung transplant and then the despair when it had failed.
And then the moment the doors had closed at Sydney Airport and Marc was gone for ever. The moment she’d looked at the lines on the pregnancy testing kit. The moment she’d seen her baby’s ultrasound.
The day she’d made the decision to keep her baby, to stay here, to cope alone.
But it was no use thinking of that now.
The sun was sinking behind the town’s wheat silos, casting shadows that almost reached the hospital. Somewhere a dog was barking. This was Borrawong’s nightlife. Marc was about to see Borrawong at its best.
Why was he here?
‘You can get through this,’ she said again but heaven only knew the effort it cost her to turn and re-enter the hospital.
Felix was still in the waiting room. He’d pushed his wheelchair behind the reception desk and was engrossed in a computer game but he looked up as she entered and grinned.
‘Got rid of them all?’
‘We have. Felix, you were wonderful.’
‘I know,’ he said, his grin broadening. ‘I kept ’em all out. Except the doctor with the funny accent. He’s still in there now, helping clean up. Joe says if we have a doctor who cleans we should lock the doors and keep him. He said he’s your friend?’
‘I...yes. He’s someone I knew a long time ago. When I was at university.’
And Felix’s face changed.
Uh oh.
Felix was smart. He was also right at the age where he was asking questions, and the questions had been getting harder.
‘So you met my dad when you were at uni. Why won’t you tell me his name? The kids at school reckon he must have been married to someone else. Or he was a scumbag. Otherwise you’d tell me. Why can’t I meet him?’
And now Felix had met a strange doctor three hours ago while he’d been bored and had time to think—a guy who’d appeared from the past, a man his mum had never talked about.
A man with hair and eyes exactly the same as his.
‘Is he my father?’ Felix demanded and Ellie closed her eyes.
And when she opened them Marc was in the doorway.
He’d ditched his theatre gear. He was wearing casual chinos and a white open-necked shirt.
His dark hair, wavy just like her son’s, was rumpled. He’d raked it, she thought. He always raked his hair.
Felix looked like him. Felix was Marc in miniature—except for the freckles. And the wheelchair.
But there was no use denying it. Felix’s face was bristling with suspicion, but also with something else. Hope, perhaps? He wanted a father.
How wrong had it been not to tell Marc what she’d done?
She glanced at Marc again. His face was impassive. Shuttered.
She thought of the first time she’d met him. She’d been nineteen, a second-year university student, working her butt off to put herself through medicine. Marc had been twenty-four, just completed training, headed to Australia for a gap year before he started surgical training.
He’d intended working his way around Australia’s coastline, but in his first week in Sydney there’d been an international conference
