find him a cubicle,’ Tom said. ‘You fill in the paperwork and I’ll come and check on him as soon as I can.’
He smiled at Harry before he turned away. ‘Hey, buddy...who have you got there? T Rex?’
Harry clutched his plastic dinosaur more tightly to his chest and curled closer to his mother. Laura could feel the sudden tension in his small body from being too close for comfort to a man he didn’t know. But her heart squeezed hard when her son was brave enough to say something back to Tom.
‘His real name is Tyrannosaurus Rex,’ Harry whispered.
‘It is,’ Tom agreed. ‘Did you know that he had sixty teeth? And they were all razor sharp and could be this big?’ He held his hands with a large gap between them.
Harry’s eyes widened and his jaw dropped. Laura grinned at Tom. Way to go, she told him silently. He had just won the heart of a six-year-old who was passionate about dinosaurs and he might have even erased much of the fear that this small boy had of men he didn’t know well.
She headed towards the central desk, to pick up the forms she needed to fill in and to check the board to see what cubicle might be free.
Fizz was on her way out of the department. ‘Oh, no... Harry... Are you still feeling sick, sweetheart?’
Harry nodded.
Fizz caught Laura’s gaze. ‘Want me to stay? Cooper’s just gone with Harley to get the car but we could come back.’
‘No...we’re good.’
Fizz raised an eyebrow. She knew that Harry was shy with men he didn’t know. She also knew that her husband had won Harry’s trust very early on, when he’d been one of Laura’s flatmates.
‘You remember Cooper, don’t you, Harry? He helped you when you broke your arm last year.’
Harry nodded.
‘It’s all better now, isn’t it? Your arm?’
Harry nodded again.
‘Well, Doctor Tom will help make whatever it is that’s making you feel sick all better, too.’
‘He will,’ Laura agreed. ‘And who knew that he knew so much about dinosaurs?’
Fizz chuckled. ‘There you go. A match made in heaven.’ But her smile faded as she looked back at Laura. ‘Text me,’ she said, ‘if there’s anything I can do to help.’
‘I’m sure we’ll be fine,’ Laura told her. ‘You go and enjoy the rest of your day with your boys. I’m probably overreacting.’
‘I’d be exactly the same with Harley. And we both know that you need to listen when a mum’s feeling worried. Instinct should never be ignored.’
‘Mmm...’ But Laura didn’t want to think about a mother’s instinct. Because hers was trying to send messages that were too scary.
She just knew too much. She’d seen too much in this department. People that came in, occasionally, with symptoms that should be of no great significance but turned out to be something really awful.
Laura collected the paperwork and settled Harry onto the bed in a spare cubicle. She left the curtain open enough to be able to see what was happening in the department because she wanted to see the moment Tom started heading in their direction.
She wanted him to come and make her feel safe.
More than anything, she needed the reassurance that Harry was safe.
* * *
Tom collected the new patient file from the central desk and was reading through the information Laura had provided about Harry as he walked to their cubicle. Perhaps that was why it came as a bit of a shock to look up and see Laura and Harry through the gap in the curtains.
He saw Laura McKenzie almost every day he was at work but he’d never seen her looking like this. She was normally on her feet and always busy, caring for her patients or fully involved in an assessment or resuscitation scene. Even if she was taking a break, she’d be reading while she ate a sandwich, or chatting to one of her friends like Fizz.
Right now, however, she was half on the bed with her son, perched on one side and lying across the pillows so that Harry was tucked under the shelter of her arm. She was gently smoothing the dark spikes of his hair, quietly watching as Harry made his plastic dinosaur hop slowly across the blanket she had tucked around him.
Tom had never seen Laura staying this still, her body language shouting its focus on only one thing—her precious son. Or with an expression like that on her face. That mix of tenderness and concern—the picture of a mother’s love—hit him like a punch in the gut and Tom found himself swallowing hard. To get a flashback twice in one day was more than a little disturbing when he’d been so sure he was well past that part of his life. Or perhaps this was simply an aftershock of how he’d felt seeing Maggie and Joe with their newborn baby and getting dragged back into the past like that.
It felt like longing, this sharp twinge of discomfort.
Or a renewed flash of grief for a future that was never going to happen.
Whatever it was, he knew he could handle it but it was certainly giving him a new perspective on this woman he’d worked with for so long. Someone he had learned to trust because she’d never attempted to get past the guardrails he had in place in his personal life. And, in this moment, he felt closer to her than he ever allowed himself to get to a colleague or a member of a patient’s family, for that matter. It was already under his skin. That note of tenderness. The knowledge that Laura was very vulnerable right now. All he could do was try and contain it. To make sure it didn’t grow any stronger.
‘Hey...’ Tom pasted a smile on his face as he pulled the curtain shut behind him. ‘How’s it going in here? Is Tyrannosaurus Rex finding enough to eat?’
Harry hid his toy under the blanket. ‘He’s not hungry.’
‘Oh...’ Tom pulled out a chair and perched on the edge of it, so that he wasn’t looming over the bed. ‘How ’bout you, Harry? Are you hungry?’
Harry shook his head. ‘I was sick,’ he told Tom. ‘At school. I was sick on the mat at story time.’
‘Oh, no...’ Tom could feel Laura’s gaze on his face but he kept his gaze on his young patient. ‘And you’ve got a sore tummy, too, I hear.’
Harry was silent. His chin was going down and his head tilting further into the crook of Laura’s elbow.
Tom raised his glance. ‘How long has the cream been on his arm?’
Laura touched the clear plastic cover that was keeping the generous blob of anaesthetic cream in place over the easiest vein to get a blood sample from. ‘Needs another ten minutes or so.’
‘Okay. So, tell me about what’s been happening. This isn’t the first time for a sore tummy, is it?’
Laura shook her head. ‘It’s been happening off and on for a long time. Almost since he started school, which made me think it was
