by Amy Andrews
Tess nodded. He looked so serious. So different from the smoky-eyed lover of last night.
‘I was thinking…’ he said. ‘Mum seems settled now with Tabby for company. Maybe I should go back to the couch?’
Tess regarded him for a moment then looked away. It was a sensible suggestion, given what had happened, but this thing wasn’t about them. It was about Jean.
‘She’s still wandering, Fletch.’
‘Not very often.’
‘Yes, but you know how upset she became that night when she thought you and I were going to get divorced. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want her to have to go through that again—it’s not good for her or her blood pressure. Actually…’ Tess thought back to her own response to the distressing incident. ‘It’s not good for any of us.’
Fletch nodded. He knew what she was saying was right.
But…
‘It would make things easier for us,’ he pointed out.
Or him anyway. Sharing a bed with her had been hard enough without last night’s little session playing like an erotic movie on slow-mo through his head.
And now he’d tasted her again? And realised he was as hot for her as he ever was? He wasn’t sure he was capable of waking tangled up in her and not letting his natural urges take over.
Tess looked at him. ‘It’s not about us, Fletch.’
Fletch met her calm amber gaze. She was right, of course. But he wasn’t so sure he could compartmentalise it as easily as she had.
She’d always been the expert in that department.
* * *
A few nights later Tess was woken again in the wee hours. Fortunately this time it was Fletch’s pager and not his mother.
It had been a long time since she’d been woken by a pager. When they’d been married it had been a regular occurrence that had barely caused her to stir but all these years later it was disorientating for a moment.
‘What’s that noise?’ Tess murmured as she groped through layers of sleep. The soft pillow beneath her head was warm and pliant and she snuggled into it farther.
Fletch was instantly awake. Tess’s head was on his shoulder, her body curled into his, her hand on his belly dangerously close to a piece of his anatomy that had obviously been up for a while. ‘Shh, it’s okay,’ he murmured. ‘It’s just my pager. Go back to sleep.’
He gently eased away from her as he reached for his pager, dislodging her hand and her head and her thigh crossed over his at the knee. He wished it was as easy to remove the lingering aroma of her hair in his nostrils and the warm imprint of her body against his. He pushed a button on the device and read the backlit screen.
Displaced, Tess roused further. She frowned. ‘You have a pager?’
‘I’m on call for the study,’ he explained quietly as he swung his legs over the side of the bed and his feet hit the floor. ‘They need me to consent an admission. There’s no one on that can do it.’
Only certain medical and nursing staff that’d done in-service on the study had been cleared to give consent. A large percentage of the staff across the two units had been trained up to ensure there was always someone on shift who could do it but occasionally it worked out that some shifts just weren’t covered.
Tess yawned, her heavy eyes refusing to open. ‘What time is it?’ she asked as she tried to snuggle into her actual pillow, finding it nowhere near as comfortable.
‘Two-thirty,’ Fletch whispered as he stood. ‘Go to sleep.’
No answer was forthcoming and he turned to look at her. She had taken his advice. The urge to lean over and drop a goodbye kiss on her mouth surprised him with its intensity. It was certainly what he would have done had they still been married.
But they weren’t.
* * *
Twenty minutes later Fletch was walking into the PICU at St Rita’s. He’d pulled on some jeans, thrown on a T-shirt, stuffed his feet into a pair of joggers and finger-combed his hair. He’d quickly brushed his teeth and ignored the fact that he needed a shave.
Time was of the essence where head injuries were concerned.
Every female staff member on the unit practically swooned as he entered. Any distraction from weariness was welcome at three a.m. and Fletch’s particular brand of scruffy chic especially so.
‘What have we got?’ he asked Dr Joella Seaton, the registrar covering the night shift.
‘Kyle Drayson. Eighteen-month-old immersion retrieved from Toowoomba area.’
She handed Fletch the chart and continued, unaware that Fletch had stopped listening.
‘Incident occurred at a local swimming hole where the family were camping at just after midnight. He’d woken and wandered away from the camp site. Local ambulance arrived within twenty minutes of call. After an extended down time they got a rhythm. He was medivaced out. He’s not quite three hours post-injury.’
Joella stopped talking and waited for Fletch to say something. He blinked when he realised they were standing outside room two and he hadn’t been aware they’d been walking.
Of course. Room two.
‘Dr King?’
Fletch looked blankly at Joella. What had she said? ‘I’m sorry, Joella, go on.’
‘Mum came in the chopper with him. She’s obviously very distressed. She’s currently with the on-call social worker.’
Fletch nodded as his demons prowled in front of the closed double doors. A glass window allowed him to see some of the activity as nurses scurried about, trying to stabilise the patient.
An eighteen-month-old patient. Who had nearly drowned.
Not a forty-year-old motorcyclist who’d been going too fast around a bend. Or a nineteen-year-old skateboarder who hadn’t wanted to look uncool in a helmet. Or a sixty-year-old golfer who’d been smacked in the head with a flying ball.
A boy. A little boy.
And he had to go into the room. He had to go in and stand at the end of bed two and look at little Kyle who had nearly drowned. Just as he’d done with Ryan ten years ago.
As a doctor this time, not a father.
For a moment he doubted he could. Not this room. Not another eighteen-month-old boy.
His pulse roared in his ears. His gut felt as if it had tied itself into the mother of all knots. Right now he would have paid Joella every cent he owned not to.
But he believed in this study. He believed in therapeutic hypothermia for acute brain injury. Had seen over and over how neuro-protective decreasing a patient’s body temperature could be. How it could reduce the harmful effects of ischemia by reducing the rate of cellular metabolism and therefore
the body’s need for oxygen. How it stabilised cell membranes. How it moderated intracranial pressure.
He believed he could give Kyle and kids like him—kids like Ryan—a better neurological outcome with a simple non-invasive therapy.
And to do that, he had to do his job.
He had to walk into room two and be a doctor.
* * *
Tess was getting back into bed from her dash to the loo when Fletch entered the bedroom a couple of hours after he’d left. She glanced at the clock. Four-thirty. There was a moment of awkwardness as their eyes briefly met but his gaze slipped quickly away and he barely acknowledged her before he headed for the bathroom.
‘Did you get your consent?’ she asked his back as it disappeared. She pulled the sheet up as the light went on in the bathroom. He didn’t answer. In fact, she wasn’t even sure he’d heard her.
‘Yes.’
Tess turned her head towards the bathroom and for a brief moment caught his backlit haggard face before he snapped the light off.
She stifled a gasp. He looked like he’d aged ten years in a couple of hours.
Drawn, pinched, tense.
Old.
He looked like he had that day with Ryan.
She sat up. ‘Are you okay?’
Fletch sank down on his side of the bed, his back to her. He shut his eyes for a moment, rubbed a hand through his hair. Kyle Drayson�
�s face, his blond hair and green eyes so like Ryan’s, seemed to be tattooed on the insides of his eyelids. He opened them, lifted the sheet and slipped under it.
‘I’m fine,’ he said, conscious of her face peering down at him.
Tess may have spent nine years apart from Fletch but she still knew him well enough to know that he wasn’t fine. Knew that whatever he’d gone to see at work hadn’t been pretty. She’d worked in ICU. She remembered too well those times when it was even too much for seasoned veterans.
And she’d been on the other side of the bed too. So had Fletch. Except he was still there, at the coal face.
How did he do it?
‘Was it bad?’
Fletch sighed. ‘I’m fine,’ he repeated.
His voice was telling her to leave it alone but his utter wretchedness provoked her to push. ‘Was it the kids or the adults?’
‘The PICU.’
His terse reply put an itch up her spine. ‘Do you…want to talk about it?’
Fletch shut his eyes. He wanted to do anything but. He wanted to be able to get in a time machine and erase the last few hours. He wanted to go back and stop Kyle from leaving his tent. Or further still. Stop Ryan from leaving the lounge room via a door Tess had been nagging him to fix.
‘It might help,’ she murmured, looking down into his tense face, his forehead scrunched, his lips flattened.
He snorted, his eyes flying open. ‘Oh, and you would know that how?’
How many times had he begged her to talk to him?
Tess blinked at the flash of venom reflecting like a great orb in his silvery-green gaze. He was right. Psychological advice coming from her was hypocritical in the extreme. But something was very obviously wrong.
And she couldn’t bear to see him so troubled.
She’d been blind to his torment a decade ago but she could see it with absolute clarity now.
‘Forget it,’ he said, flicking the covers back and vaulting upright. He swung his legs over the edge of the bed.
Tess frowned at the expanse of his back. ‘Fletch?’ She reached out a tentative hand and touched his shoulder. He flinched and her hand fell away. The rejection stung.
Fletch buried his face in his hands for a few moments, the spike of rage dissipating as fast as it had arrived. His hands dropped into his lap and his shoulders sagged. ‘I’m sorry.’
Tess watched him for a moment, feeling utterly impotent in the face of his turmoil. She wished she had some words for him but she was at a loss.
‘It was a little boy. Blond hair. Green eyes. Eighteen months old. An immersion. They’d put him in room two.’
The words fell like stones—like huge boulders, actually—into the silence. If Tess thought she’d been lost for words before, she was practically rendered mute now.
There were no words.
So she did the only thing she could think of. The only thing that felt right. She reached for his shoulder again. This time he didn’t flinch. This time he covered her hand with one of his own.
She moved closer then. Parted her legs so his back fitted into her front, his bottom pressed into the place where her thighs joined, her legs bracketing his. She pressed her cheek against his T-shirt just below his shoulder blade. It smelled of detergent and sunshine and man.
She felt and heard the steady thump of his heartbeat. Found comfort in its slow, assured pulse.
She wasn’t sure how long they sat there. All she knew was that when she whispered, ‘Come on,’ to him, he let her pull him back, let her draw him down until his head was resting on her chest, his ear over her own heartbeat, her arm around his shoulders.
‘What’s his name?’ she asked after a while.
‘Kyle.’
Tess ran the name around in her head for a moment. ‘Did they give consent? His parents? For your study?’
Fletch nodded. ‘The mother did.’
And because neither of them wanted to talk about Kyle or Ryan, she stroked his hair and asked him about the medicine. The medicine was safe. It was clinical. Unemotional. Free of baggage.
‘Was he part of the treatment group or the control?’
‘Treatment,’ Fletch confirmed. ‘They had the cooling blanket beneath him and were actively cooling him when I left.’
‘What’s the goal, temperature-wise?’
‘We only want to induce moderate hypothermia for forty-eight hours.’
Tess shivered at the thought. She knew that freezing water would currently be running through the latex underblanket and that Kyle’s skin would be icy to touch in a matter of hours. He would be oblivious, kept in an induced coma, but still the thought gave her chills and she was grateful for the heat of Fletch and his big arm encircling her waist.
‘That’s different from your earlier studies,’ she murmured.
He turned his head to look up at her. ‘You’ve read my studies?’
Tess allowed a ghost of a smile to touch her lips. ‘I’ve read all your published stuff.’
Fletch was speechless for a moment. A hundred things to say crowded to his lips but he dismissed them all. He’d often wondered if she’d ever thought of him.
It was good to know she had.
Tess let him talk. Listened to the rumble of his voice as he told her about his earlier studies. About his experiences in Canada with cold-water immersions having better neurological outcomes than those he’d seen in Australia. How because of Ryan he’d developed a special interest in the subject, which had fast developed into an obsession.
And somehow hearing her son’s name when they were both wrapped up together, keeping their demons at bay, didn’t seem so gut-wrenching.
The irony of it all wasn’t lost on her. Not even at five in the morning after another disrupted night.
Why had it taken her ten years to comfort him?
This was what he’d needed, what he’d asked for so many times in so many ways, and she’d denied him because she just hadn’t been capable.
When he’d needed her most, she’d pushed him away.
She should have been there for him more.
She’d failed Fletch as well as Ryan.
CHAPTER EIGHT
TWO weeks later Tess was in the middle of a lesson in making royal icing flowers when the phone rang. She reached across to the nearby wall where it was hanging and plucked it off the cradle, all without taking her eyes off the deft precision of Jean’s wrinkled fingers as they created sweet perfection.
Tabby lay at their feet, ready for any morsel that inadvertently landed on the floor, and Tess absently stroked the dog’s back with her foot as she said, ‘Tess speaking.’
Jean held up a perfectly formed miniature rose for her approval and Tess grinned and silently applauded.
‘Oh…hi, it’s Trish. How are you?’
Tess heard the disappointment in her ex-sister-in-law’s voice. She’d spoken to Trish a few times on the phone since the day they’d turned up with Christopher, just a quick hello and goodbye as she’d handed the phone to Jean or Fletch. But she knew that Trish rang religiously every day to speak to her mother.
‘You want to talk to Jean?’
‘No. I was hoping to speak to Fletch, actually. Is he there?’
Tess shook her head, even though Trish couldn’t see her. ‘He’s at the hospital at the moment.’
‘Oh…do you know when he’ll be home?’
There was more than disappointment in Trish’s voice. There was something else. Worry?
‘Not till about five. They’ve had quite a few study enrolments the last couple of weeks so he’s got a bit to catch up on.’
‘Right. Damn it.’
‘Is there something wrong, Trish?’
‘I was hoping he could watch Christopher for me for a couple of hours. I have an appointment for my thirty-two-week scan. Normally I’d take Christopher but he’s unwell at the moment. Doctor says it’s a virus, but he’s totally miserable so I don’t want to drag him from pillar to post. And I can’t leave
a sick child with any of my friends—they all have kids. It’s fine, Doug will just have to stay home and look after him instead of coming to the scan with me.’
Tess remembered how Fletch had been there at all her scans. How he’d revelled in the experience as much as she had. How it had bonded them even closer when they’d been able to share the images of their unborn son together, watch his little heart beat, his perfect little limbs kicking away like crazy.
‘What about Doug’s mother?’ Tess asked.
‘She’s up north, visiting relatives.’
And they both knew Jean wasn’t capable. ‘Could you reschedule?’
‘They’ve already squeezed me in on a cancellation. My obstetrician is always booked to the eyeballs.’
Tess felt an encroaching dread as she contemplated the right thing to do. Back in the old days she wouldn’t have hesitated to offer her services. But the mere thought of looking after Christopher terrified her.
‘Doug won’t mind,’ Trish assured her. ‘He’s pretty easygoing.’
Tess hated the awkwardness between them now. That Trish wasn’t even asking her. That she was obviously trying to reassure her. Once upon a time Trish would have just asked, secure in the knowledge that Tess would say yes.
She shut her eyes, knowing she couldn’t let Doug miss out on this experience when she was perfectly capable of looking after a small child. ‘I…I can do it.’
Her voice quavered, her heart pounded, but she’d offered.
Silence greeted her from the other end. Then, ‘Oh, Tess… It’s fine, you don’t have to do that…’
Tess shook her head. ‘Doug shouldn’t miss out on this, Trish.’ More silence. ‘Of course I’d understand if you preferred I didn’t.’
There was silence on the other end again for a long time and Tess wondered if Trish had hung up. God, Trish really didn’t want her looking after Christopher. And as much as she didn’t want to do it either, it hurt.
‘Look, it doesn’t matter,’ Tess said, gripping the phone hard. ‘It was just a thought. Forget it. I know my track record’s not…’
She couldn’t finish. She couldn’t say that the last little boy she’d been left in charge of had drowned.
‘What? Oh, Tess, no! I’m sorry, I was just thinking. Christopher doesn’t really know you, that’s all. It’s not about… I didn’t mean to…’