you want your name on his birth certificate?’
The choice he’d made was wrong.
In his defence, he’d been stressed to the point of breaking. The war had been going badly. He’d been overworked past exhaustion, doing work far beyond his range of expertise, but there’d been no choice. For every patient he’d treated there’d been three more waiting. He’d also been gutted by the thought of Ellie having the baby alone. He couldn’t bear the thought of what he’d lost. He’d made an instant decision then that he still regretted.
‘Leave it blank,’ he’d told her. ‘I can’t be there for him. I have no right to be his father. The adoptive father should have all the rights.’
It still hurt but Josef’s face cleared. ‘There you are, then,’ he said. ‘Even if the media finds out, it can be implied he wasn’t yours. What better reason to end the marriage?’
‘That’s not fair to Ellie.’
‘We’ll pay her enough to compensate.’
As if that would work.
He turned and faced out of the window again, across the manicured palace gardens to the mountains in the distance. Somewhere, on the other side of the world, Ellie was making a life for herself, without him and without their son. It was a decision they’d made together.
Ellie was tough. She’d had to be, with her background. She called life as she saw it.
And now? A legal expert would come blustering in from her past, offering her bribes. Even asking her to swear a child wasn’t his.
He thought of the Ellie he’d known. She was feisty, opinionated...moral. She also had a temper.
‘No,’ he told Josef. ‘It could turn the situation into a disaster.’
‘There’s no other way,’ Josef told him.
‘There is,’ he said heavily and he saw his path clear. This part, at least. ‘If this is as important as you say, then let me do it. I must be able to fly under the radar for a few days. I’ll face the media this morning and then I have a week’s grace until the funeral. Say I’m stricken with grief, incommunicado. If I board a plane this morning no one will notice—the media surely won’t expect me to be leaving the country. I’ll go to Australia and talk to Ellie myself. I’ll make sure the child’s privacy is protected and there are no cracks the media can chisel open. And then...’
He put down his coffee cup. It was fine china with the royal coat of arms emblazoned on the front, and he found himself thinking almost longingly of the paper cups he grabbed after all-night Theatre shifts. That part of his life was over and he had to accept it. ‘Then I’ll come home,’ he said heavily. ‘I’ll bury my family and I’ll accept the throne.’
LIFE AS BORRAWONG’S only doctor was sometimes boring, but just as often it was chaotic. If one person went down with the flu, the whole town usually followed. Kids never seemed to fall out of trees on their own. Ellie had a great team at the hospital, though. Usually she could cope.
But not with this.
Two carloads of kids had been drag racing on a minor road with a rail crossing without boom gates. Maybe the drifting fog had hidden the crossing’s flashing lights and the sight of the oncoming train until it was too late. Or maybe alcohol had made them decide to race the train. Whatever the reason, the results had been disastrous.
The train had just left the station so it had been travelling slowly, but not slowly enough. It had ploughed into one car, pushing it into the car beside it.
If the train had been up to speed, every occupant of the cars would have been killed. Instead, Ellie had seven kids in various stages of injury, distress and hysteria. Parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins—practically the whole town—were crammed into the waiting room or spilling into the car park outside.
Air ambulances were on their way from Sydney but the fog was widespread and there were delays. The doctor from the neighbouring town was caught up with an unexpected traumatic birth.
She was the only doctor.
Right now, she was focusing on intubating seventeen-year-old May-Belle Harris. May-Belle was the town’s champion netballer, blonde, beautiful, confident. At least she had been. Her facial injuries would take months of reconstruction—if Ellie could get her to live past the next few minutes.
Ellie’s team was fighting behind her, nurses and paramedics coping with trauma far beyond their training. But while she fought for May-Belle’s life, she had to block them out.
‘You can make it,’ she told May-Belle as she finally got the tube secure. At least she now had a safe air supply. The girl was deeply anaesthetised. She should have an anaesthetist to watch over her before she could be transferred to Sydney for specialist reconstructive surgery. Instead of which, she had Joe.
‘Can you take over?’ Ellie asked the seventy-year-old hospital orderly. ‘Watch that tube like a hawk and watch those monitors. Any change at all, yell. Loud.’
‘Louder than these?’ Joe said with a wry grimace. There were six others kids waiting for attention, plus the injuries and bruises of the train crew who’d been thrown about on impact. Some of these kids—the least injured—were...well, loud would be an understatement. One of the girls was having noisy hysterics and the very junior nurse allocated to her couldn’t quieten her.
With years of experience, Ellie knew she could quieten her in a minute but she didn’t have a minute.
‘Grab me by the hair and pull me over here if you need me,’ Ellie told Joe. Block everything out and focus on that breathing.
Moving on...
A boy with bubbling breathing also needed urgent attention. There had to be a punctured lung.
A girl with a shattered elbow needed her too. She risked losing her hand if Ellie didn’t re-establish a secure blood supply soon. The lung had to be a priority but that elbow was at an appalling angle. If the blood supply cut...
And what if there were internal injuries?
Focus, she told herself. Do what comes next.
* * *
He was heading for Borrawong’s Bush Nursing Hospital.
Marc hadn’t been surprised when Josef’s discreet investigators had told him Ellie was back working here. This was where her mother had lived, the town Ellie was raised in.
The last time he’d seen her she’d been heading home to care for her mum.
Borrawong was a tiny town miles from anywhere. A wheat train ran through at need, hauling the grain from the giant silos that seemed to make up the bulk of the town. The train felt like the town’s only link with civilisation.
He’d never been there. ‘As long as Mum stays well, I’m never going back,’ Ellie had told him. She was jubilant at having escaped her small-town upbringing,
