guess things aren’t always as idyllic as they seem,’ he said slowly, the dark note to his voice so audible Tessa felt the hairs stand up on the back of her neck.
‘Are you all right, Max?’
For a second his eyes crinkled, but not in their usual sunny way as his face broke into a smile. Instead, deep, unfamiliar lines grooved the edges of his grey eyes as the beginning of a frown appeared. ‘It’s nothing,’ Max mumbled, fiddling with the salt shaker, which instantly hit her as strange. It was normally Tessa who fiddled, Tessa who played with her food, the sugar bowl, the teaspoons—anything she could get her hands on actually—while Max sat nonchalantly, a look of vague amusement on his carefree face.
‘If there’s a problem Max, you can talk to me,’ Tessa offered tentatively. ‘We’re friends.’
A look Tessa couldn’t quite interpret flashed in his eyes and she was quite sure, as she registered his Adam’s apple bob in his throat, that Max was working his way up to tell her something.
‘Here you are, Dr Slater, sunny side up, just as you like them.’ Like the channels changing on the television, instantly the vision shifted. The wistful moment disappeared and the larrikin was back as Max licked his lips, while Narelle busied herself arranging knives and forks.
Max always licked his lips when a plate was put in front of him, Tessa mused. He was the only person who enjoyed food as much as she did. They spent hours, literally hours, talking about recipes and restaurants and the lack of variety in the canteen’s machines at night. Mind you, unlike Tessa, Max didn’t suffer for his sins. Three bars of chocolate washed down with cola was his usual staple diet on a night shift and not a single globule of fat ended up on his tall wiry frame, whereas Tessa only had to watch him eat to suffer the consequences at the next weigh-in.
‘What’s this?’ Max’s fork stopped midway to his mouth as Narelle placed a steaming plate of bacon and eggs in front of Tessa.
‘My new diet.’ Tessa shrugged. ‘It’s low carbohydrate, or should I say no carbohydrate. Apparently loads of film stars are on it at the moment, the weight’s supposed to fall off you. And the best bit of it is that I can eat as much of this as I like.’
‘You’re not serious?’ Max stared incredulously at her heaving plate. ‘As much as you like?’
Tessa nodded. ‘The more the better. I had this for breakfast as well.’
Max peered at her plate more closely. ‘No toast to mop up the yolk?’
‘Definitely not.’
‘No mushrooms?’
‘No.’ Tessa shook her head seriously. ‘They’ve got carbohydrates.’
‘Fruit?’
Again Tessa shook her head. ‘It’s this and lots of it—no doubt I’ll be having this for dinner later. Apparently I can have cheese as well,’ she added with a slightly nauseous twinge to her voice.
‘Do you want me to ring Coronary Care now and book you a bed?’
‘You can talk,’ Tessa snapped indignantly. ‘Anyway, at least I’ll be thin as they’re strapping me to the cardiac monitor.’
‘How many times to I have to tell you, Tess? You’re fine just as you are.’
‘I don’t want to be fine,’ Tessa sighed. ‘I want to be thin and gorgeous and slip into tiny little tops and micro-skirts.’
‘Yes, please.’ Max winked. ‘To the skirts and tops I mean. OK, Tess, you’re not fine, you’re gorgeous and stunningly so—take it from a full-blooded male who knows a thing or three about women. So don’t you dare go rotting your health with yet another one of your fad diets.’
Thankfully he chose that moment to dive into his meal, which meant he wasn’t a witness to the huge blush that whooshed up Tessa’s cheeks as she fumbled with her knife and fork.
‘It can’t be good for you,’ he insisted.
‘It’s only for a couple of weeks, and for once it has nothing to do with vanity—it’s purely a financial thing.’ She watched as his forehead creased. ‘There was a letter waiting for me from the coroner’s court when I got back. I thought the inquest was going to be adjourned but it would seem that it’s going ahead at the original date.’ Despite the casual smile, Max heard the tremor in her voice. ‘And as neither of the two smart suits in my wardrobe will do up any more, it’s either this or a major splurge on my credit card.’
‘It will be all right, Tess.’ Brunch forgotten, Max put down his knife and fork and reached over the table, giving her a friendly pat on the arm. ‘You did nothing wrong that night.’
‘Let’s just hope the coroner agrees.’ A moment’s silence followed as Tessa wrestled with a sudden surge of tears in her eyes. ‘An eighteen-year-old died, Max, in my department, when I was on charge.’
‘I hate to state the obvious, Tess,’ Max ventured gently. ‘But that’s par for the course in this line of work.’
‘A coroner’s investigation isn’t the norm, though,’ Tessa responded quickly, the anxiety in her voice evident. ‘And endless interviews with the hospital’s solicitor are hardly part of my job description. If Matthew Benton’s death comes down to me I don’t think I can bear it.’
‘It won’t come down to you.’ Max’s calm voice broke in firmly. ‘Hell, Tess, the department was full to bursting and, yes, it was busy, but I’ve been over and over Matthew’s notes and everything that should have been done was done that night. Nothing was amiss, even though the place was busy, he still got all the right treatment.’
‘But did he get the best treatment?’ Her brown eyes jerked up to meet his, the question she had plagued herself with over and over coming out more forcefully than Tessa had intended. ‘I knew how stretched we were, I knew that it was getting dangerously busy. We had ambulances rolling up in pairs, a sick child in Resus, the waiting room bursting at the seams, and then we started to get in the patients from Matthew’s car crash.’
‘So you did the right thing,’ Max reasoned. ‘You realised that the place was getting too full, that the staff were being spread too thin, so you did something about it—you put the department on bypass.’
‘Ten minutes before the paramedics brought Matthew in. If I’d put the department on bypass earlier, if I’d told Ambulance Control sooner that we couldn’t accept any more patients, then they wouldn’t have come to us. They’d have taken him to another hospital that wasn’t so busy. Maybe there he’d have got better attention...’
‘And maybe he’d have died in the ambulance on the way.’
‘I know,’ Tessa said wearily, massaging her temples with her fingers, closing her eyes against the horrors of that night, but it didn’t work. They’d had this conversation numerous times, gone over and over the awful chain of events, but Max showed no impatience at the repetitive nature of the conversation. He, better than anyone, knew how much she needed to talk, needed to go over the jumble of events until hopefully they fell into some sort of order, and he waited patiently as Tessa sat with her eyes closed, struggling to hold it all together. ‘I know the outcome would probably have been the same whatever we’d done, I know all that.
