he cared to admit it or not, emotional reminders of the day his life had changed forever.
Should’ve gone up to the rooftop helipad instead. No one ever really went there in the winter. Although this year the bookies were tipping the scales in favor of snow. Then it really would be like living in a Christmas card.
“Why are you here? Was there some memo about an all-staff welcoming committee?” Finn knew there wasn’t. He was just giving his boss an out if he wanted it. Bloke talk came in handy for a lot of emotional bullet dodging.
Theo sighed. “Ivy.”
Finn lifted his chin in acknowledgement. Her mystery illness had been the talk of all the doctors’ lounges. “Gotta be tough, mate.”
“’Tis.” Theo flicked his eyes to the heavens, gave his stippled jaw a scrub and gave an exasperated sigh. “I hate seeing her go through this. She’s five years old. You know?”
Oh, yeah. He knew. It was why he’d retrained as a pediatric surgeon after the IED had gone off during a standard patrol. The loss of life that day had been shameful.
All of them children.
Who on this planet targeted children?
At least he’d had an enemy to rail against. Theo was shooting in the dark at a mystery illness. No wonder the guy had rings under his eyes.
“Had anything good today?” Topic-changing was his specialty.
Theo nodded. “A few interesting cases actually.” He rattled through a few of them. “Enough to keep me distracted.”
Finn huffed out an “I hear you” laugh. Work was the only way he kept his mind off the mess he’d made of his personal life.
You’re on your own now, mate. Paying your penance, day by day.
“The diagnostician. She managed to clear her schedule yet?”
Theo nodded. “Took a bit of juggling but she’s here now.”
Finn waited for some more information—something to say what Theo thought of her—but received pure silence. Any topic related to Ivy was a highly charged one so it looked like his boss was going to reserve judgment on the highly touted globetrotter until she’d had a bit more time with his daughter.
“What’s her name again?” Finn tried again when Theo obviously wasn’t going to comment further. “I heard one of the nurse’s call her Godzilla.”
Theo gave a sharp tsk.
He didn’t like gossip. Or anything that stood in the way of the staff acting as a team. “She’s a bit of a loner. Might give off a cooler edge than some of the staff are used to. Particularly around the holidays. But she’s not yet had a chance to get her feet on the ground, let alone establish a rapport with the entire staff.” He gave Finn a quick curt nod, making it very clear that he let facts stand. Not rumor. “She’s called Madison Archer. Doesn’t get much more American than that, does it?”
“Short of being scented like apple pie, I guess not.” Finn smiled at Theo, trying to add a bit of levity, but raised his hands in apology at Theo’s swiftly narrowed eyes.
More proof, as if he needed it, that Finn was no star at chitchat. He called a spade a spade, and other than that his conversational skills were operating on low to subterranean.
Theo’s expression shifted to something indecipherable. “It’s at times like this I understand how the parents feel when they walk in the doors of our hospital. Makes it that much more important we treat each other with respect. Without that, how can we respect our patients? Ourselves?” He lifted up his hands as if seeking an answer from the universe then let them fall with a slap against his long legs.
They looked at one another a moment in silence. This time with that very same respect he’d just spoken of.
Theo was a class-A physician and this hospital—the hospital he’d built—was one of the finest in the world, and still not one of them could put a finger on what was behind Ivy’s degenerating condition. Lethargy had become leg pain. Leg pain had escalated to difficulty walking. They were even considering admitting her full time, instead of dipping in and out, things were so bad.
How the hell Theo went about running the hospital day in, day out when his little girl was sick...it would’ve done his head in.
Precisely why being on his own suited Finn to a T. No one to worry about except his patients. No emotions holding him back...as long as he kept his thoughts on the future and his damn leg on the up and up.
He gave his head a sharp shake, silently willing Theo to move on. A wince of pain narrowed the furrows fanning out from his eyes as he shifted his weight fully onto his right leg.
The infinitesimal flick of Theo’s eyes down then back up to Finn’s face meant the boss man knew precisely what was going on. But he knew better than to ask. Over a decade of wearing the prosthetic leg and he still hadn’t developed a good relationship with the thing. The number of times he’d wanted to rip it from his knee and hurl the blasted contraption off the roof...
And then where would he be? In a wheelchair like Ivy?
Nah. That wasn’t for him.
Helping children just like her—and Adao, who’d learned too much about war far too soon—were precisely why he kept it on. Standing beside the operating table was his passion. And if that meant sucking up the building pressure and tolerating the sharp needles of pain on occasion? Then so be it.
“Well...” He tried to find something positive to say and came up with nothing so fell back on what he knew best. Silence.
After a few minutes of staring out into the inky darkness he asked Theo, “You heard anything about the boy’s arrival time?”
Finn was chief surgeon on the case, but Theo had a way of knowing just that little bit more than his staff. Sign of a good leader if ever there was one.
“Adao?”
Finn nodded, unsurprised that out of a hospital full of children Theo knew exactly who he was referring to. Although they didn’t have too many children flying in from Africa just a handful of weeks before Christmas.
Then again, war never took much time to consider the holidays.
“Did they get out of the local airport in Kambela all right?” Theo asked.
“Yeah.” Finn had received an email from one of the charity workers who’d stayed behind at the war-torn country’s small clinic. “Touch and go as to whether the ceasefire would hold, but they got off without a hitch. They say his condition’s been stabilized, but the risk of infection—” He stopped himself. Infection meant more of the arm would have to come off. Maybe the shoulder. Flickers of rage crackled through him like electricity.
This was a kid. A little kid. As if growing up in a country ravaged by war wasn’t bad enough.
There had been a fragile negotiated peace in the West African country for a few months now, but thousands of landmines remained. The poor kid had been caught in a blast when another little boy had stepped on one. That
