not Barbara?’
‘Not Barbara,’ she said, suddenly distressed. She looked down at her pink dress, dropped the hose and grabbed a button and pulled, as if trying to see it, as if trying to reassure herself it was still there. ‘Button.’
‘Button?’ Ben repeated, and the little girl’s face reacted as if a light had been turned on.
‘Button,’ she said in huge satisfaction, and Ben thought someone, somewhere—a nanny perhaps—had decided that Barbara was far too formal for this little girl, and Button it was.
‘Your name is Button,’ Ginny whispered, and Ben saw a wash of anger pass over her face. Real anger. Anger at her late husband and the unknown Veronica? He watched as she fought it down and tried for calm. ‘Button, your mum’s sent you to me so I can look after you. Maybe watering these tomatoes can wait. Would you like to come inside and have a glass of lemonade?’
‘Yes,’ Button said, and Ginny smiled. And then she looked uncertain.
‘I have nothing,’ she faltered. ‘I really wasn’t expecting her until next month. I don’t know…’
‘Tell you what,’ Ben said, rising and dusting dirt from his knees. What was happening here was dramatic but he still had imperatives. Those imperatives had seen him take time out to try and persuade Ginny to be a doctor. That was a no go, especially now, but he still had at least twenty patients to see before he called it a day.
‘You take Button inside and give her lemonade, then go through her suitcase and see what she has. When you have it sorted, bring her down to the clinic. I can give Button a good once-over—make sure everything’s okay…’
‘I can do that.’
‘So you can,’ he said. ‘You’re a doctor. Okay, forget the once-over. But our clinic nurse, Abby, has a five-year-old and she’s a mum. If you don’t need a doctor, you might need a mum to tell you all the things you’re likely to need, to lend you any equipment you don’t have. I have a child seat in the back of my Jeep—I use the Jeep for occasional patient transport. I’ll leave it with you so you can bring Button down. I’ll have Abby organise you another—the hire car place has seats they loan out.’
‘I…Thank you.’
He hesitated, and once again he felt the surge of emotion he thought he’d long forgotten. Which was crazy. One long-ago love affair should make no difference to how he reacted to this woman now. ‘Ginny, is this okay?’ he demanded, trying to sound professionally caring—instead of personally caring. ‘Are you sure you don’t want me to ring Bob—he’s the local cop—and have him drag the lawyer from the ferry?’
She looked at him then, really looked at him, and it was as if somehow what she saw gave her strength.
‘No. I’m okay,’ she said. ‘I need to be. I don’t have a choice and neither does Button. Thank you for your help, but we’ll be fine.’
‘You will bring her to the clinic?’
She hesitated. ‘Yes,’ she conceded at last.
‘Big of you.’
She gave a faint smile. ‘Sorry. I guess I’m not up for awards for good manners right now. But I am grateful. I’ll come to the clinic when I need to. Thank you, Ben, and goodbye.’
She watched him go and she felt…desolate.
Desolate was how she’d been feeling for six months now. Or more.
Once upon a time her life had been under control. She was the indulged only daughter of wealthy, influential people. She was clever and she was sure of herself.
There’d been a tiny hiccup in her life when as a teenager she’d thought she’d fallen in love with Ben Mc-Mahon, but even then she’d been enough in control to figure it out, to bow to her parents’ dictates.
Sure, she’d thought Ben was gorgeous, but he was one of twelve kids, the son of the nanny her parents had hired to take care of her whenever they had been on the island. At seventeen she’d long outgrown the need for a nanny but she and Ben had stayed friends.
He had been her holiday romance, welcoming her with joy whenever her parents had come to the island, being her friend, sharing her first kiss, but he had been an escape from the real world, not a part of it.
His proposal that last year when they’d both finished school had been a shock, questioning whether her worlds could merge, and she’d known they couldn’t. Her father had spelled that out in no uncertain terms.
Real life was the ambition her parents had instilled in her. Real life had been the circle she’d moved in in her prestigious girls’ school.
Real life had become medicine, study, still the elite social life she’d shared with her parents’ circle, then James, marriage, moving up the professional scale…
But even before James had been diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma she’d known something had been dreadfully wrong. Or maybe she’d always known something had been wrong, she conceded. It was just that it had taken more courage than she’d had to admit it.
Then her father had died, dramatically, of a heart attack. She’d watched her mother, dry eyed at the funeral, already gathering the trappings of rich widow about her.
The night of the funeral James had had to go out. ‘Work,’ he’d said, and had kissed her perfunctorily. ‘Go to bed, babe, and have a good cry. Cry and get over it.’
Like her mother, she hadn’t cried either.
She’d thought that night…She’d known but she hadn’t wanted to face it. If she worked hard enough, she didn’t have to face it.
‘Lemonade or raspberry cordial?’ she asked Button. She sat her at the kitchen table and put lemonade in front of her and also the red cordial. Button looked at them both gravely and finally decided on red. Huge decision. Her relief at having made it almost made Ginny smile.
Almost.
She found herself remembering the day of James’s funeral. It had been the end of a truly appalling time, when she’d fought with every ounce of her medical knowledge to keep him and yet nothing could hold him. He’d been angry for his entire illness, angry at his body for betraying him, at the medical profession that couldn’t save him, but mostly at Ginny, who was healthy when he wasn’t.
‘—you, Florence Nightingale.’ The crude swearing was the last thing he’d said to her, and she’d stood at his graveside and felt sick and cold and empty.
And then she’d grown aware of Veronica. Veronica was the wife of James’s boss. She’d walked up to Ginny, ostensibly to hug her, but as she’d hugged, she’d whispered.
‘You didn’t lose him. You never had him in the first place. You and my husband were just the stage props for our life. What we had was fun, fantasy, everything life should be.’
And then Veronica’s assumed face was back on, her wife-of-James’s-boss mantle, and Ginny thought maybe she’d imagined it.
But then she’d read James’s will.
