were the things he didn’t want to leave behind. The sheer tranquillity. Emma’s e-mails. The sense of her personality lingering like a well-loved fragrance in every room. The sight of his four-year-old twin daughters playing in their ‘cubby house’ under the old hydrangea bushes, without an apparent care in the world, despite the upheaval unleashed on them by the collapsing of their parents’ marriage.
His marriage. His marriage to Claire.
This was the reason Pete made another tour through the house. He went down the brick steps at the front, around the slate paved path at the side of the house and into the back garden once more, rebelling against a reality he couldn’t change.
He didn’t want to leave at all.
But, of course, he had to. Emma Burns was coming home tomorrow, after her three-month trip, and he was moving into his own brand-new place in Glenfallon’s trendiest suburban housing development. The interlude had to end, and real life had to resume.
He’d had professional cleaners in, and he’d groomed Emma’s garden himself. The fact that it was spring and flowers were in bloom made it a little easier than it would otherwise have been for him to tell the real plants from the weeds.
The real estate agent was dropping in this afternoon to satisfy himself that everything was in order, but Pete knew this was just a formality. Everything was in order. There was really nothing more to do. He put the key in an envelope, along with a card he’d written to Emma, left them on the kitchen bench top, let himself out the front door and clicked it shut behind him.
Dr Croft had left a couple of things, Emma discovered on Sunday afternoon. The card, for one, which was nice. It was thick and expensive, with a lushly colourful painting of poppies on the front. Inside, he’d written, ‘Welcome home, and thanks for renting me your little slice of paradise at a time when I really needed it, Pete. P. S. I want the names of your paint colours.’
His e-mails had been like that, too. Simple and brief, most of them, they’d bounced from heartfelt to practical and back again in the space of three sentences. She had replied in the same vein, and several times over the past three months they’d had a conversation going back and forth for days—a conversation which had had nothing to do with the impersonal tenant-to-landlady issue that had begun it.
Standing in her empty, pristine kitchen, Emma smiled.
She’d enjoyed those electronic conversations. She’d enjoyed the fact that she’d been sitting in an internet café in Paris, with half a dozen languages chittering around her. She’d enjoyed feeling tired and hot, and she’d enjoyed smelling of sugar and cheese and chocolate after hours of lessons in haute cuisine.
Most of all, oddly enough, she’d enjoyed the companionship. On a professional level, she’d known Pete Croft on and off for…well, it had to be several years, at least, but it had taken flurries of e-mails flashing back and forth across half the world to make her feel as if she knew him as a person.
E-mails, and the fact that he’d been living in her house.
Emma was tired and jet-lagged after the long flight from Europe and the connecting hop, in a small propellor-driven aircraft, from Sydney to Glenfallon. The ground didn’t seem quite steady beneath her feet. There was a lot to do if she was going to get settled back in before she started work on Tuesday, but she found it impossible to put her flagging energy to anything useful just yet.
Instead, she wandered around the house and garden, finding evidence of her tenant’s recent occupation. He’d repaired the latch on the side gate, and the torn flyscreen on the kitchen door. His four-year-old twin daughters, Jessie and Zoe, had dropped a brown Lego horse in the daffodil bed.
He’d left a bottle of brand-new aftershave on the bathroom window-sill, hidden behind a set of cheap lace curtains which she intended to replace soon. For some reason, Emma was tempted to open the aftershave, to see if it smelled like him—What, could it smell like his e-mails?—but sensibly she didn’t. She would give it and the Lego horse back to him when she got a chance, but doubted the matter was urgent.
She knew Pete had bought a house in the new development at the edge of town, but didn’t have the address. He would be busy moving in, finalising the details of his divorce, his property settlement and his custody arrangements. Plastic horses and missing bottles of unused aftershave would be far, far down on his list of priorities.
‘I’ll unpack, and put on a load of laundry, and get myself organised,’ Emma decided, and wondered if it was only because her wonderful three months in Paris was over that she felt so flat.
‘Dr Croft? It’s Patsy McNichol.’
‘Yes, Patsy? What is it?’
Pete blinked, rubbed the sleep out of his eyes and tried to lift his voice above its early-morning creak. The red figures on the clock radio beside his bed showed six twenty-five, and it was not yet fully light. He was quickly alert, however. He knew this patient wouldn’t be phoning him at such an hour on a whim.
‘I’m bleeding again,’ she said. ‘But it’s much worse, this time, and…and there’s some cramping, too.’
‘What kind of cramping?’
‘Well, I don’t know. Could it be contractions?’ She was trying to keep her voice steady, but it wasn’t working. Pete could hear the wobble and the pitch of panic. She didn’t want this to be happening yet.
‘How does the pain feel, Patsy? Is it steady? Describe it for me.’
‘It sort of drags, like really bad menstrual cramps, but it’s tight, too. It builds, and then it ebbs, and then a little while later—I should have been timing it, shouldn’t I?—it builds again. It woke me up about half an hour ago, and I just lay there, but then I felt the blood.’
‘How much?’
‘The bed is soaked.’
‘Is it still flowing?’
‘It’s eased off. Seems to have.’
‘Are you lying down?’
‘Yes, with my feet up.’
‘Can Brian drive you to the hospital?’
‘We’re already dressed. I didn’t want to disturb you any earlier than I had to.’
Pete dammed back a sigh of frustration. Why were people like this? He had patients who would phone his home number at midnight, complaining of a paper cut, without so much as a ‘Sorry to bother you’, and patients who would hang back on a lifesaving call in order to give him ten minutes more sleep.
‘I’ll see you there as soon as I can,’ he told Patsy.
He dressed quickly, opting for a set of green surgical gear—drawstring pants and a short-sleeved, V-necked top. Realistically, given the position and size of Patsy’s uterine fibroids, he was probably going to be assisting with an emergency Caesarean first thing this morning.
He could feel the aridity of his new bedroom as he moved around it in the early-morning light. The whole house was still far too bare and echoing and new after the cottage cosiness and warmth of Emma Burns’s place, which he’d been forced to abandon three days ago.
How
