in the area were home to medical personnel from St James’s Hospital. Jimmie’s, the staff all called it—
Not what he should be thinking about—nicknames for hospitals. What he had to consider was why he was even thinking about her. So she was alive! She had obviously survived the typhoon though how, when he’d seen photos of the collapsed church and couldn’t imagine anyone surviving beneath the rubble, he didn’t know.
Was that the accident she’d spoken of? Was the memory loss amnesia?
Which brought him neatly back to the fact that it didn’t matter. So, an old girlfriend was living two doors away—so what?
It certainly wasn’t important as far as Lauren was concerned, for she didn’t have a clue who he was.
And there was no reason why things couldn’t stay that way.
Except that he’d spent the night tossing and turning in his bed, fragments of their time together returning to haunt his dreams, images of how she looked now intruding into his sleep, which was extremely aggravating.
And her not remembering him made him feel…not angry but definitely put out.
‘Are you coming?’
The old house in which he was living was hospital property, available for rent by visiting specialists. It was divided into two flats, and Grace Sutherland, the second of the surgical fellows working with Alex Attwood’s team this term, was occupying the other one. She was tapping at his door, as she did most mornings, so they could walk to work together.
Grace chattered as they walked, talking about Theo, the Greek perfusionist on the surgical team. Was Grace really interested in the mechanics of, and possibilities of improvement to, the heart bypass machine or was her interest more personal? Jean-Luc and Grace had been in Australia less than a week, and had only met the members of the surgical team a couple of days earlier—could she be interested in a man so quickly?
Women—he would never understand them, and now he no longer tried. He’d already chalked up one failed marriage, and since the end of his engagement to Justine—she’d accused him, perhaps justly, of being more interested in work than he was in her—he had found there were plenty of women who didn’t want to be understood any more than they wanted permanence, women happy to enjoy an affair with no strings attached on either side.
And if, at times, he felt an emptiness in his life, he knew he had only to return to work—to see the babies and children he treated—and he would feel fulfilled and whole again. There was something in their innocence and trust that allowed him to forget about his relationship failures—forget even his cynicism about life in general. Being withhis small patients renewed his determination to provide them all with the best possible chance at life.
‘Just being with these children brings me indescribable joy,’ Lauren had once said, talking of the children in the orphanage, and in his head he had often echoed those words, thinking her long gone yet finding comfort and confirmation in them.
Except she wasn’t long gone—wasn’t dead at all.
He strode out along the footpath, aware his steps must have slowed as he thought about Lauren, so he was trailing behind Grace who moved with athletic ease.
‘Did you leave a beautiful woman behind in France? Is that why you’re dreaming your way up the road?’ Grace asked, stopping at the lights to wait for him to catch up.
‘No beautiful woman left behind,’ he told her. ‘No non-beautiful woman either, except, of course, my mother and my grandmother, a brace of aunts and a horde of female cousins.’
Grace studied him.
‘You’re far too good-looking not to have women falling over themselves to be with you, so what’s the story?’
He had to smile. His new colleague didn’t know the meaning of subtle—all her questions and observations were equally blunt and often intrusive.
‘Maybe I’m not interested in women,’ he said, hoping to stop her probing, but she greeted this remark with a laugh, then took his arm to cross the road, the lights now showing green and a crowd hustling all around them.
‘The consulting rooms and team-meeting rooms are above the theatre and PICU,’ Grace reminded him as they went into the big building.
‘I remember, but I’ll stop on the floor below and check the babies before I go up,’ he said. ‘I’ve plenty of time.’
Grace seemed surprised, but checking the babies in his care was always the first thing he did when he entered a hospital. It was more than a habit, because even when he didn’t need to see them to boost his spirits, he felt it centred him—concentrated his mind on his work, and most of all reminded him why he did what he did. So the tiny scraps of humanity on whom they operated would have a chance to live normal, useful, happy lives.
‘You do your thing with the babies and I’ll go on ahead,’ Grace told him, her tone of voice and the look she gave him suggesting she was humouring him in some way.
Well, Grace could think what she liked. He was going to visit the babies!
Jean-Luc found his way into the PICU, where he spoke to the sister watching the monitor and learned that all the babies in the unit were stable, some doing better than others, but all progressing. He visited each one of them, learning names—Mollie, Jake, Tom—finding himself translating them into the French equivalents because that made them more personal to him. He talked to parents sitting by the cribs, introducing himself to those he hadn’t met before, assuring and reassuring them.
But always the focus of his attention was the infants, most of whom slept peacefully or watched him pass with wide-open eyes.
He was leaving one of the single rooms after a quiet chat with the parents of a three-year-old recovering from a septal defect repair when a voice, so familiar he shivered at hearing it, penetrated his consciousness.
Movement on the far side of the bigger room attracted his attention and he watched as a tall woman in the smock and headscarf of a nurse led a distressed couple out of a door.
They disappeared from view but now they were outside the room he could hear their voices more clearly.
‘But he’s so tiny, how can he survive?’ a woman wailed.
‘Because he’s had the best team in Australia operating on him,’ came the confident answer. ‘Yes, it was a traumatic operation for such a tiny baby but, believe me, the men and women in that theatre know their jobs. If anyone can sort out the problems your Jake had with his heart, that lot could. Now all we have to do is get him better.’
Impossible! Coincidence couldn’t stretch that far. Although his mother always said things happened in threes and here was Lauren alive, number one, then living all but next door, number two, now working in the same unit, number three.
Impossible!
Yet this third coincidence—or twist of fate—had shaken him and he went into the small tearoom and sat down for a moment. Could he work with Lauren and not tell her of their shared past?
All their shared past?
She had a child and presumably a husband although she was still using her maiden
