because her feet hadn’t started moving in that direction.
‘Me, too,’ blue eyes said cheerfully. ‘I’m heading for the hospital, and you seem to be going in that general direction. Shall we walk together?’
She could hardly say no. He’d come out of a house only four doors up from hers—a house that had been on the market for so long she’d stopped looking at the sign, so had missed the ‘Sold’ banner she now saw slapped across it. That made him a neighbour and to say no would be downright unneighbourly.
‘I guess so.’ Still muttering, though this time it was ungraciously. Now she had a new job, new boss and a new neighbour, and she hated change.
They were walking together now, and she knew it was time for introductions, but couldn’t bring herself to take the initiative, feeling that if she didn’t know his name, she needn’t count him as a neighbour. She’d make idle conversation instead.
‘You’re going to the hospital? Visiting someone?’
It was early but the place allowed relatives in at just about any time.
‘Going to work,’ he said, surprising her, as she’d put him down as a lawyer.
‘At the hospital?’
‘I’m a doctor—a lot of us work at hospitals.’
She knew the eyes would be twinkling but refused to look as he turned sideways towards her and held out his hand.
‘Phil Park. My father wanted to call me Albert or Centennial, but fortunately my mother’s common sense prevailed.’
He dropped his hand when Annie failed to take it, and she could sense he was disappointed his little joke—which he’d probably told a million times—had fallen flat, but Annie was too busy absorbing his name to be smiling at weak jokes.
Phillip Park. His name was on the list of new staff—one of the doctors who had come along in the new boss’s train. Paediatric surgery fellow? Anaesthetist? No, Annie was pretty sure the anaesthetist was a woman—Maggie Walsh.
Annie had personnel files of all the new appointees on her desk, but she’d purposely not read through them, deciding to meet the new staff without any preconceived ideas. Now she was sorry she hadn’t checked. She’d known Alexander Attwood was American, but had assumed the other staff would be Australians from Melbourne, where Dr Attwood had been working for six months.
‘And you are?’ Phil was saying politely.
‘Annie Talbot, former sister in charge of the neonatal special care unit at St James’s Hospital and, from today, manager of the new paediatric surgical unit. Great way to start a working relationship—running headlong into you.’
Phil Park’s hand clasped hers, warm fingers engulfing her palm, holding her hand just a fraction too long.
She withdrew hers carefully and moved a little further away from him, guessing he was a toucher, and not wanting to be the touchee.
‘But that’s great!’ he said. ‘We’ll be working together, and neighbours as well for a while. At least I assume we’ll be neighbours—or are you a health nut, and had covered several kilometres before you bumped into me?’
‘No, we’ll be neighbours,’ Annie told him, though she didn’t share his enthusiasm. Because, with the smiling eyes and hand held too long, she was sure he was flirting with her?
Or because the smiling eyes and hand held too long reminded her of Dennis?
‘Manager of the new surgical unit, eh?’ he asked, not in the least put out by her lack of enthusiasm. ‘How do you feel about that—coming from hands-on nursing in the PICU? That is what your special care unit is, isn’t it? A paediatric intensive care unit? And don’t most unit managers come from a secretarial or management background rather than a nursing one?’
Annie breathed easier. He might rattle on but she’d followed his thoughts and talking work was much better than considering flirtatious new neighbours.
Or Dennis.
‘I’ve mixed feelings about the shift from nursing,’ she told him, ‘but the new job’s a challenge. The new unit is a challenge—I imagine that’s why someone like your boss has come on board. Shifting to Jimmie’s isn’t like taking up a post at one of the renowned children’s hospitals. We’re just starting up. Neurologists and cardiologists—all the specialists, in fact—are still going to refer patients to the bigger hospitals.’
‘Not for paediatric cardiac surgery—not with Alexander the Great on board,’ he said.
‘You call Dr Attwood Alexander the Great?’ Annie was awed by such daring. Everything she’d heard or read about the man had instilled her with enormous respect for him.
Not to mention apprehension about the ‘ruthless’ part.
‘Not to his face.’ Phil retreated. ‘But all of us—Maggie, Kurt, Rachel—use the title when we’re talking about him. He’s come here because of the opportunity to start a small specialised unit that he hopes will be used as a model for other small units. Other hospitals have paediatric surgical units, but they’re not specialised to the extent we’d like to be. They do some congenital heart defects, which is our specialty, but they also do other congenital defects and things like brain tumours, gut obstructions, kidney and liver transplants—the lot.’
He glanced at her as if to see if she was listening, and as she was—and was fascinated as well—she encouraged him with a smile and a quiet, ‘Go on.’
‘Well, Alex hopes that if a small cardiac surgical unit can be made to work, physically, medically and financially, he’ll have a model to set up similar units in city hospitals across the US. At the moment, over there, they have places like Boston Children’s and Cleveland Clinic, maybe ten large hospitals with elite paediatric surgery units, but that means seriously ill babies, often newborn, with complex heart problems requiring surgery, have to travel huge distances for treatment, which not only puts extra stress on them but also disrupts family life and support systems.’
Annie took it all in—even felt a skip of excitement for the vision in her own heart—but at the same time his words puzzled her.
‘Does anyone else know of this plan of Dr Attwood’s? Is the hospital CEO on side? Does the board know? The government? After all, most of our funds come from them.’
She glanced towards Phil and for the first time saw his smile replaced by a frown. She hurried to dispel it.
‘I’m only asking because, as unit manager, I hadn’t heard any of this,’ she explained. ‘I thought we were going to be just another paediatric surgical unit like the ones you’ve mentioned.’
Her voice trailed away as she wondered if she’d missed something in the job description and in the interviews that had followed her application. Although that might explain the ‘little talks’ and her feeling that something ‘dodgy’ was going on!
‘A number of people know,’ Phil said, then he must have realised he’d spoken abruptly, for he found his smile again and favoured her with a particularly warm and teasing version of it. ‘Though I’ve just committed the cardinal sin in Alex’s book
