adding another coat of paint in an attempt to transform the lounge from dull olive green to cool crisp white, there was a loud rap at the door.
‘Can you knock more quietly?’ Jasmine asked as she opened it. ‘If Simon was here—’
‘We need to talk,’ Penny said, and she brushed in and straight through to the lounge.
If Louise hadn’t exactly been brimming with understanding, then Penny was a desert.
Her blouse was still crisp and white, her hair still perfect and her eyes were just as angry as they had been when she had first laid them on Jasmine in the hospital corridor earlier on that day. ‘You said nothing about this when I saw you last week,’ Penny said accusingly. ‘Not a single word!’
‘I didn’t exactly get a chance.’
‘Meaning?’
She heard the confrontation in her sister’s voice, could almost see Pandora’s box on the floor between them. She was tempted just to open it, to have this out once and for all, to say how annoyed she still felt that Penny hadn’t been able to make it for Simon’s first birthday a couple of months earlier. In fact, she hadn’t even sent a card. Yet there had been no question that Jasmine herself would be there to join in celebrating her sister’s success.
Or rather celebrating her sister’s latest success.
But bitterness wasn’t going to help things here.
‘That dinner was to celebrate you getting your fellowship,’ Jasmine said calmly. ‘I knew you’d be upset if I told you that I had an interview coming up, and I didn’t want to spoil your night.’
‘You should have discussed it with me before you even applied!’ Penny said. ‘It’s my department.’
‘Hopefully it will be mine soon, too,’ Jasmine attempted, but her words fell on deaf ears.
‘Do you know how hard it is for me?’ Penny said. ‘All that nonsense about equal rights … I have to be twice as good as them, twice as tough as any of them—there’s a consultancy position coming up and I have no intention of letting it slip by.’
‘How could my working there possibly affect that?’ Jasmine asked reasonably.
‘Because I’m not supposed to have a personal life,’ was Penny’s swift retort. ‘You just don’t get it, Jasmine. I’ve worked hard to get where I am. The senior consultant, Mr Dean, he’s old school—he made a joke the other week about how you train them up and the next thing you know they’re pregnant and wanting part-time hours.’ She looked at her sister. ‘Yes, I could complain and make waves, but how is that going to help things? Jed is going after the same position. He’s a great doctor but he’s only been in the department six months and I am not going to lose it to him.’ She shook her head in frustration.
‘I’m not asking you to understand, you just have to believe that it is hard to get ahead sometimes, and the last thing I need right now is my personal life invading the department.’
‘I’m your sister—’
‘So are you going to be able to stay quiet when the nurses call me a hard witch?’ Penny challenged. ‘And when you are supposed to finish at four but can’t get off, are you going to expect me to drop everything and run to the crèche and get Simon?’
‘Of course not.’
‘And when I hear the other nurses moaning that you hardly ever do a late shift and are complaining about having to do nights, am I supposed to leap to your defence and explain that you’re a single mum?’
‘I can keep my work and personal life separate.’
‘Really!’
It was just one word, a single word, and the rise of Penny’s perfect eyebrows had tears spring to Jasmine’s eyes. ‘That was below the belt.’
‘The fact that you can’t keep your work and personal life separate is the very reason you can’t go back to Melbourne Central.’
‘It’s about the travel,’ Jasmine insisted. ‘And you’re wrong, I can keep things separate.’
‘Not if we’re in the same department.’
‘I can if they don’t know that we’re sisters,’ Jasmine said, and she watched Penny’s jaw tighten, realised then that this was where the conversation had been leading. Penny was always one step ahead in everything, and Penny had made very sure that it was Jasmine who suggested it.
‘It might be better.’ Penny made it sound as if she was conceding.
‘Fine.’
‘Can you keep to it?’
‘Sure,’ Jasmine said.
‘I mean it.’
‘I know you do, Penny.’
‘I’ve got to get back to work. I’m on call tonight.’ And her sister, now that she had what she came for, stood up to leave. Jasmine held in tears that threatened, even managed a smile as her sister stalked out of the door.
But it hurt.
It really hurt.
IT WAS HER favourite place in the world.
But even a long stretch of sand, the sun going down over the water and a storm rolling in from the distance wasn’t enough to take the harsh sting out of Penny’s words.
Jasmine hated arguments, loathed them and did her very best to avoid them.
She could still remember all too well hearing the raised voices of her parents seeping up the stairs and through the bedroom floor as she had lain on her bed with her hands over her ears.
But there had been no avoiding this one—Jasmine had known when she’d applied for the role that there would be a confrontation. Still, she couldn’t just bow to Penny’s wishes just because it made things awkward for her.
She needed a job and, no matter what her mother and sister thought of her chosen career, nursing was what she was good at—and Emergency was her speciality.
Jasmine wasn’t going to hide just because it suited Penny.
It had been cruel of Penny to bring up her relationship with Lloyd, cruel to suggest that she wasn’t going back to Melbourne Central just because of what had happened.
It was also, Jasmine conceded, true.
Finding out that she was pregnant had been a big enough shock—but she’d had no idea what was to come.
That the dashing paramedic who’d been so delighted with the news of her pregnancy, who’d insisted they marry and then whisked her off on a three-month honeymoon around Australia, was in fact being
