take Molly and run…find help. But where would she run to? She was lost in the maze of backwaters that made up the hidden face of Venice. This calle was a long way from the regular tourist trail with its friendly vendors and signposts to the main attractions. Her knowledge of Italian was minimal, and she would lose valuable time trying to find her way back to the Grand Canal…time Molly might not have.
Nell’s heart pounded as her mind filled with a deep and unreasonable hatred of Venice. Everything that had seemed so beautiful, so charming when they had first arrived had turned an ugly face on them. She glanced around, wondering if the dilapidation harboured the blight that had infected Molly—or the water, perhaps? The unusual silence of the traffic-free centre, which so recently she had enjoyed, now represented isolation; the lack of signposts seemed now to be a ploy to confuse the unwary tourist. And worst of all, Venice had welded her to this stranger, a man who said he was a doctor. And even if he was a doctor, for all she knew Luca Barbaro was a podiatric surgeon, happier sawing off bunions than treating children! But she was stuck with him. She couldn’t risk setting out on her own with Molly and getting lost.
It was her fault. She shouldn’t have brought Molly so far from home for a holiday. But then Jake’s accident had happened at the end of their road—on familiar territory…The policewoman sent to break the news and comfort her afterwards had said that was where so many accidents happened, when people let their concentration slip after a long journey. And of course, it hadn’t helped that Jake had had a secret life to distract him. It was hardly surprising he’d gone off the road.
The accident had happened on a Friday night, when Casualty was like a war zone. She had been locked inside her thoughts, fearing the worst, hoping for the best, when the scream came. It had been a woman’s scream, a scream that connected with Nell on so deep a level she had known her whole life was somehow wrapped up in it. When they finally allowed her into Jake’s room, no one had warned her that he wasn’t alone. The last thing she had been expecting to find was a young woman with a tiny baby in her arms, weeping by her dead husband’s bed.
CHAPTER TWO
‘WHAT are you doing?’ Nell refocused as Barbaro fished out his phone again.
‘Calling the ambulance service.’
Was it possible to edit the information he gave out any more? ‘Why?’ she pressed insistently.
‘To make sure there isn’t a hold-up. My patient needs proper care, which I can’t give here.’ He glanced around then held Nell’s stare as if daring her to argue.
Nell had to force herself not to shout. He was talking about Molly so impassively, as if he were a puppet master working them from the remotest reaches of his ivory tower. She shuddered involuntarily. The past, horrific as that had been, was nothing compared to this.
‘Tell me everything you can remember about the day.’
To keep her busy and distracted, Nell suspected as dark eyes probed her thoughts. She wanted time to collect herself, to examine her own actions. If she had done something wrong to bring Molly to this point, then she wanted to be the first to know. ‘Molly was quite well when we woke up this morning.’ A faint smile touched Nell’s lips as she remembered the light-hearted start to their day.
‘Cast your mind back to the moment when you first noticed signs of deterioration.’
‘Deterioration?’ The ugly word wiped out anything good about a day earmarked for pleasure that had tilted on its axis to reveal a face as sinister and outlandish as any of the painted masks she had seen in Venice.
‘Can’t you remember when she first slipped into this state?’
‘If you mean, do I remember when Molly fell so deeply asleep I couldn’t wake her?’ The way he was speaking…so remote, so detached. She couldn’t bear it. She wouldn’t bear it.
‘That’s right,’ he went on. ‘Tell me when the patient—’
‘My daughter’s name is Molly.’ She would not have him discussing Molly as though she were some test case in a textbook.
‘When Molly first became sleepy.’
Nell shook her head as she thought it through out loud. ‘Why did I wait for a problem to become a crisis?’
‘Because you thought she was only sleeping.’
She hadn’t been speaking to Luca Barbaro but to herself, and turned on him angrily. ‘I should have picked it up.’
‘Get over the guilt and tell me what you remember.’
His sharp voice shook her into gear. ‘It happened so gradually I hardly noticed.’
‘Until you couldn’t wake her, I presume? Has anything like this ever happened before?’
‘Never.’
‘This is important, Nell,’ he warned.
‘Do you think I don’t know that? And it’s Ms Foster, thank you.’ She stared at him with hostility. But for Molly’ s sake she had to go over everything again. Nell started to snatch at whispery strands of recollection from the day—the simple breakfast, the cappuccino froth lodging on her lip, which Molly had wanted to copy…dabbing it on, holding her up to laugh at her reflection in the mirror…Nothing to give warning of what was to come. And why was he examining Molly’s fingertips again? Was she getting worse?
The fear was rising again. It sat on her thought processes like a heavy weight. This was far worse than Jake’s accident, even though she’d been pregnant with Molly then, and still had everything to learn about betrayal, loss and loss of trust. She had survived the disillusionment of discovering Jake’s double life, survived having everything she believed in ripped away, and with no warning at all, but, staring at Molly lying lifeless in Luca’s arms, she wasn’t sure she was equal to this.
She wanted to ask more questions, but remembered from her experience with Jake that doctors were masters of deception. What would this man tell her that she could believe? She had been told so many lies. Where there’s life, there’s hope—that was just one of the many platitudes she had been fed in the hospital. No one told her before she went into Jake’s room that he was already brain-dead, and that his body only lived on thanks to the machines breathing for him.
‘Have you come up with anything yet?’
Dragging herself back to the present, Nell realised that Luca Barbaro had a frighteningly similar manner to the doctors she had encountered in the hospital following Jake’s accident. ‘I’m trying to remember.’ She was struggling with every atom of intellect at her command to try and pin down a trigger. If she could just identify the moment when things had changed…
She’d been over and over it, and still nothing new, and now the past was sucking her down again like quicksand. Jake’s death had flung back the curtain on his secret life, proving she hadn’t known the man she loved, the man she believed loved her and their unborn child. But Jake was wild, a free spirit. He would never have been content with a conventional life with her…
Barbaro was staring at her, Nell realised, his eyes hypnotic, demanding. He’d guessed something was chipping away at her mind. She didn’t want him climbing inside her head, reading her thoughts.
‘Tell me everything you did from leaving the hotel,’
