but it was also right to check.’
‘Want me to clean and dress it, then?’ The junior doctor was keen to take over the case. ‘Let the cops take him in to talk to him?’
‘Yes. We’ll put him on a broad-spectrum antibiotic as well. And make sure he gets a tetanus shot. Thanks, Danny. You’re in charge now.’ Grace’s attention was swiftly diverted as she saw an incoming stretcher and she straightened and moved smoothly towards the new arrival as if she’d been ready and waiting all along.
‘Hi, honey.’ The girl on the stretcher looked very young, very pale and very frightened. ‘My name’s Grace and I’m going to be looking after you.’
Charles could hear one of the paramedics talking to Grace as they moved past to a vacant cubicle.
‘Looks like gastro. Fever of thirty-nine point five and history of vomiting and diarrhoea. Mom called us when she fainted.’
‘BP?’
‘Eighty systolic. Couldn’t get a diastolic.’
‘I’m not surprised she fainted, then...’
The voices faded but Charles found himself still watching, even after the curtain had twitched into place to protect the new patient’s privacy.
His attention was well and truly caught this time.
Because he was puzzled.
At moments like this, Grace was exactly the person he would have predicted that she would become. Totally on top of her work. Clever, competent and confident. She got along well with all her colleagues, too. Charles had heard more than one report of how great she was to work with and how generous she was with her time for staff members who were here to learn.
Thanks to the challenge that had been thrown at her within the first minutes of her coming to work here, Charles already knew how good Grace was at her job and how well she coped with difficult circumstances. That ability to think on her feet and adapt was a huge advantage for someone who worked in Emergency and she demonstrated the same kind of attitude in her private life, too, didn’t she—in the way she had jumped on board, under pressure, to take on the dog-sitting offer.
But...and this was what was puzzling Charles so much...there was something very different about her personality away from work.
Something that felt off-key.
A timidity, almost. Lack of confidence, anyway.
Vulnerability? The way she’d shrunk away from him at the park yesterday. When he’d ventured onto personal ground by asking her about her marriage. He’d been puzzled then and he hadn’t been able to shake it off.
He didn’t want to shake it off, in fact. It was quite nice having this distraction because it meant he could ignore the background tension he always had at this time of year when he was walking an emotional tightrope between celebrating the joy of the twins’ birth and being swamped by the grief of losing Nina, which was a can of mental worms that included so many other things he felt he should have done better—like protecting his family during the time of that scandal.
A nurse appeared from behind the curtain, with a handful of glass tubes full of blood that were clearly being rushed off for testing. He caught a glimpse of Grace bent over her patient, with her stethoscope in her ears and a frown of concentration on her face.
Grace had understood that grief so easily. He could still see those tears shimmering in her eyes when she’d been listening to him. Perhaps he’d known that she would understand on a different level from anybody else and that was why he had chosen to say more to her than he would have even to members of his own family.
But how had he known that?
And why was it that she did understand so clearly?
Who had she lost? Her husband, obviously, but the tone of her limited response to his queries had made him think that it was a marriage that simply hadn’t worked out, not one that had been blown apart by tragedy, as his had been.
He wanted to know, dammit.
More than that, and he knew that it was ridiculous, but he was a bit hurt by being shut out.
Why?
Because—once upon a time—she had fallen into his arms and told him everything she was so worried about? That the pressure of those final exams was doing her head in? That it was times like this that she felt so lonely because it made her miss the mother she’d lost more than ever?
He’d had no intention of revisiting the memories of that night but they were creeping back now. The events that threatened to derail his life that had crashed around him so soon after that night had made it inevitable that it had to be dismissed but there was one aspect he’d never completely buried.
That sense of connection with another person.
He’d never felt it before that night.
He’d been lucky enough to find it again—with Nina—but he’d known that any chance of a third strike was out of the question. He wasn’t looking because he didn’t want to find it.
But it was already there with Grace, wasn’t it? It had been, from the moment he’d taken her into his arms that night to comfort her.
And he’d felt it again at the park, when he’d seen her crying for his loss.
She’d been crying that night, too...
‘You okay?’
‘Huh?’ Charles blinked as he heard the voice beside him. ‘I’m fine, thanks, Miranda.’
‘Okay...’ But his half-sister was frowning at him. ‘It’s not like you to be sitting staring into space.’
Her frown advertised concern. A closeness that gave Charles a beat of something warm. Something good. Because it had been hard won? Miranda had come into their family as a penniless, lonely and frightened sixteen-year-old who was desperately missing her mother who had just died. It had been Charles who’d taken on the responsibility of trying to make her feel wanted. A little less lonely. Trying to persuade her that the scandal hadn’t been her fault.
‘I was just thinking.’ About Grace. And he needed to stop because he was still aware of that warmth of something that felt good but now it was coming from remembering something Grace had said. The way she had tried to convince him that he had no valid reason to feel guilty over Nina’s death—as if she really cared about how he felt.
Charles tapped the pile of papers in front of him. ‘I’m up to my eyeballs in statistics. What are you up to?’
‘I need a portable ultrasound to check a stab wound for underlying damage. It looks superficial but I want to make absolutely sure.’ Miranda looked around. ‘They seem to have gone walkabout.’
Charles glanced towards the glass board where patient details were constantly updated to keep track of where people were and what was going on. Who could be currently using ultrasound to help a diagnosis?
‘It could be in with the abdo pain in Curtain Two.’
‘Thanks.
