Daring to Date Her Ex

by Annie Claydon

  ‘What would you do if…?’ Suddenly the thought of another woman seeing that tattoo made her want to cry. ‘What happens if someone else sees it there?’

  ‘Lots of people have seen it.’ His gaze found hers and he gave up the pretence of not knowing what she was talking about. ‘Not in the way you mean. Are you going to tell me to have it lasered off?’

  ‘It would serve you right if I did.’ She couldn’t. Whatever it meant, it was still something that remained of a past that both hurt and was precious to her, and Thea couldn’t bear to just rub it out. ‘Keep it.’

  He nodded, smiling as he rolled his sleeve back down. ‘What are you doing today?’

  ‘I thought I might go in to work at some point.’

  ‘Stay. Ava’s having lunch over at my parents’ place today and I said I’d join them if I wasn’t working. You’re welcome to come along too.’

  It was tempting. But tattoos and trees were one thing. At some point they had to get back to the real world. ‘No. Thanks, but I really need to get going. I was going to go into work today, there are some things I need to catch up on.’

  ‘Okay. Do you want a bit of company? I’ll drop by my parents’ place for a couple of hours and then come to the hospital. I can be there at twelve.’

  ‘That would be good. Maybe we can work something out about any connections to this new case.’ Slowly, word by word, the magic was dissolving. Like a night mist that couldn’t withstand the sunshine.

  ‘Yeah.’ He lay on his back, still staring at the canopy above their heads. ‘No need to move just yet, though.’

  ‘No. Not just yet.’

  * * *

  Thea was at the hospital by eleven, checking through progress reports from the TB nurses and signing off treatment schedules. Half an hour later her phone rang, an unknown number coming up on the display.

  ‘Thea Coleman.’

  ‘Thea?’

  ‘Ava? Is everything all right?’ Thea hadn’t given Ava her mobile number, but she supposed that Lucas might have. The thought occurred to her that maybe he wouldn’t be coming, and she realised just how much she’d been looking forward to seeing him again.

  ‘Yes. Can I talk to you?’

  ‘Of course you can. What’s on your mind?’

  ‘I can’t talk now. Lucas is on his way to the hospital, and he’ll be there soon.’

  ‘Do you want me to get him to call you when he gets here?’

  ‘No. I want to ask you something. Can you meet me? It’s important.’

  A trickle of guilt crawled down Thea’s spine. Had Ava seen her with Lucas that morning? ‘Let’s meet up for coffee in the place around the corner from your house. Would that suit you?’

  ‘That would be great. In half an hour?’

  ‘Half an hour’s fine. I’ll see you then, Ava.’

  ‘Yeah, thanks. Don’t tell Lucas, will you?’ The call ended abruptly, as if Ava didn’t want to hear any of the reasons that not telling Lucas might be a bad idea.

  ‘Right.’ Thea looked at her phone. Whether she liked it or not, she’d just agreed to meet up with Ava behind his back. To discuss an important matter of an unknown nature. Thea sighed, and scribbled a note for Lucas, leaving it on his desk.

  * * *

  An hour later, Thea walked back into the incident room at the hospital. Lucas was sitting at his desk, concentrating on something on the screen of his laptop.

  ‘Lucas.’

  His face broke into a smile when he saw her. Maybe it was waking up with him that morning that made that smile so much more potent. Or knowing that he had a tattoo. Or how his body felt when she lay next to it.

  ‘Hi. Where have you been?’

  ‘I had to go and meet someone.’ Better get this over with. ‘I met Ava for coffee, actually.’

  ‘Ava? She didn’t say anything about meeting you.’

  ‘No, she called me after you left. She got my number from your phone. Apparently you should password it.’

  ‘Clearly.’ The penny dropped. ‘So you and Ava have had a secret coffee assignation. Is this anything I’m supposed to worry about?’

  ‘I don’t think so. In fact, I think it’s probably a very good thing.’

  ‘So why are you being so vague?’ The look he shot her was laden with suspicion.

  ‘Because…’ Thea dropped her car keys on her desk and sat down. ‘Because she thinks you might not like what she had to say and I’m supposed to talk some sense into you.’

  ‘Okay. That’s making me feel better already. How were you thinking of talking some sense into me?’

  ‘I’ll work that one out if the need arises. It’s really not that bad.’

  ‘A minute ago it was very good. Tell me quickly before things deteriorate any further and it becomes a disaster.’

  ‘Safiyah’s got a boyfriend. He goes to the school around the corner. Ava thinks he may be the link we’re looking for.’

  ‘That’s it?’

  ‘The boyfriend hasn’t been tested yet. Safiyah’s tried to persuade him to come forward, but he won’t because he doesn’t want to get her into trouble.’

  Lucas rolled his eyes. ‘At least he’s showing concern for Safiyah, however misguided. How does Ava know all this?’

  ‘They all message each other. They’ve been chatting about it for days. Apparently a whole group of them got together and decided I was their best bet.’

  ‘You?’ There was a touch of hurt pride in his voice.

  ‘Ava knows that I can put someone on the list for testing. She also knows that I’m a doctor and bound by professional confidentiality, so I can’t just go to Safiyah’s parents and tell them about her boyfriend.’

  He thought for a moment. ‘That’s not entirely true. It’s a bit of a grey area.’ He frowned. ‘Anyway, I’m a doctor. Couldn’t she tell me?’

  ‘And you’re her parent. She reckons that’s a conflict of interest for you. You said it yourself the other day.’ Thea decided not to mention that Ava had said that Lucas would probably go ballistic if she told him.

  ‘Right.’ He thought for a moment. ‘Actually, that’s a pretty mature choice for her to have made.’

  ‘I thought so.’ Thea decided to change the subject while Lucas still seemed relatively happy with the situation. ‘So how does that affect our thinking on the spread of the infection?’

  He strode over to the white-board on the wall and started drawing circles. ‘All right, so what do we know? There’s Safiyah, and she’s in contact with her boyfriend.’ He frowned. ‘Not too much contact, one hopes. Her mother’s not going to like that one bit.’

  He turned suddenly, weighing the marker pen in his hand. ‘I don’t suppose Ava happened to mention…’

  ‘Whether she’s got a boyfriend too? No, she didn’t.’

  ‘Couldn’t you have asked? Woman to woman?’

  ‘If she’d told me, woman to woman, that would imply I’m not supposed to tell anyone else.’

  ‘Does it?’ He gave her his most charming smile and Thea resisted it. ‘You’d tell me if you’d discussed it, though?’

  ‘What, so you could try to get me to tell you what we’d said?’

  ‘Well, we both know that wouldn’t work.’

  No one even talked about Bangladesh, let alone joked about it. Thea drew in a startled breath and then found herself laughing. If Lucas had treated this like a dirty little secret, it would have compounded all her fears. Talking about it, laughing about it even, made it all shrink back into perspective.

  ‘Yeah. Keep that in mind, eh?’

  Lucas shrugged and returned to the white-board, drawing a few more circles. ‘Okay, so we know that Derek Thompson’s not our index case. What if Safiyah is? What if the infection passed to the boyfriend and then on to Derek?’ He stood back and shook his head. ‘No, that doesn’t make sense.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because Derek’s been ill for a while now. Safiyah would have been ill sooner.’

  ‘Maybe he
r body fought the infection off for a while. Each case of TB develops at a different rate.’

  ‘Yeah, sure. But she’d have had to be infectious for months. I don’t see that much of her, Ava usually takes her over to my parents’ for tea, but I think I’d have noticed if she had active pulmonary TB for the last six months.’

  Thea nodded. ‘True. Although if you’re keeping a strict barrier between home and work, you probably shouldn’t mention that…’ A marker pen whizzed past her ear. ‘Missed.’

  ‘I meant to. Moving on…’

  ‘Okay, moving on, it’s the other way around. Derek passed the infection to the boyfriend who passed it on to Safiyah.’

  ‘Maybe.’ Lucas started to pace restlessly. ‘Now there’s something else I don’t understand. In order to pass the infection on to Safiyah, he’d have to have active pulmonary TB. And yet if he’s not been tested then he’s not in any of the contact groups. And despite us briefing all the teachers on the symptoms to look out for, none of them have noticed. Does that sound very likely to you?’

  ‘No.’ Thea rested her chin on her hand. The problem seemed insoluble.

  ‘We need to know more, and we need to know quickly. There are a lot of kids at risk in those two schools.’ He threw himself into his chair, rubbing his hand across his face. ‘You do know this is killing me, don’t you?’

  * * *

  It was a tough admission to make. Ava used to tell him everything, and now it seemed that he was the last to know. Even her friends thought that Thea was a more likely confidante than he was. He couldn’t argue with the logic of that, but the reality of it was eating at him.

  From the look on her face, Thea knew she was treading on eggshells. ‘You’re being very reasonable about it.’

  He gave a snort of wry laughter. ‘Yeah, well, looks can be deceptive.’

  ‘It’s a lot easier to discuss these things with someone you don’t know so well. I wouldn’t have talked about my friend’s boyfriends to my dad.’

  ‘Thanks.’ That might be true, but it wasn’t helping.

  ‘At least we know to test the boyfriend now. If he is infected we have the chance to catch it early. And it might have been a little melodramatic, but Ava and her friends did the right thing.’

  ‘I’ll tell her that when I get home. In fact, I’ll call her right now.’

  Thea gifted him with a wonderful, glittering smile. ‘I’ll let you do that. I’m just going out to the drinks machine.’

  Lucas found himself rubbing his arm, where the tattoo lay under his shirt, as he watched her go. He’d put it there as the one permanent reminder of the woman he’d loved and then lost through his own selfishness. Now it was different. A reminder that he hadn’t just messed up his own life but hers as well. A reminder that he shouldn’t do so again.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Week Six

  ‘HOW DID IT go with Ava last night?’ Thea asked the question as soon as the Monday morning meeting was finished and they were sitting at their desks, facing each other.

  Lucas shrugged. ‘Oh, you know. She’s a teenager. I’m apparently a fatal flaw in an otherwise pristine stratagem.’

  ‘She said that?’

  ‘Yeah. She’s developing quite a line in carefully considered insults. I blame the debating society.’

  Thea chuckled. ‘Good girl. So which part of the pristine stratagem did you manage to disfigure?’

  ‘Don’t you start. Safiya told her that we were going to talk to her mother this morning. She thought that I might give the game away.’

  ‘And I suppose you told Ava that it would look pretty fishy if we refused to talk to Safiyah’s mother, let alone being completely unprofessional.’

  ‘Yes, I did. Then I said that you’d undoubtedly rip my tongue out if I said a word out of place, and offered her ice cream.’

  ‘And the ice cream worked?’

  ‘Yep. I stopped off on the way home and got some Rocky Road.’ Lucas grinned at her. ‘I find that forward planning’s the key.’

  She returned his smile, and the room suddenly lit up. It did that every time. ‘I prefer toffee fudge…’

  ‘Yeah, I know you do.’ The memory slammed him in the face. Toffee fudge ice cream, a hot day and Thea lying naked on his bed. Of all the times they’d eaten ice cream together, that had to have been the best. And probably the messiest.

  He tried to put the memory back where it was supposed to be, somewhere in the portion of his brain that was not designed for access at random moments. Still it lingered faintly, like a cool summer breeze playing around his cerebral cortex.

  ‘So are you ready to go?’

  ‘In a minute.’ She was tapping away at her computer keyboard. ‘I’ve just got to quickly send my notes from the meeting off to Michael.’

  * * *

  Before she’d left the office, Thea had slung a bright silk scarf over her dark jacket, its indigo shades making her hair seem even more golden than usual. Lucas had complimented her on the way she looked and she’d blushed a little.

  ‘Dr Coleman. Welcome to my home.’ Safiya’s mother opened the front door with a self-possessed smile.

  ‘Thank you. And, please, call me Thea.’

  ‘What a lovely name. Mine is Amina.’ Amina led the way through to the sitting room and Thea sat down in the chair that she selected for her.

  ‘What a beautiful room.’

  Amina nodded in acknowledgement. When Lucas had visited briefly to collect Ava, he’d never seen this room anything other than spotless, unlike his own living room, which sometimes showed signs of wear and tear, produced by one teenager and one busy doctor.

  They went through the preliminaries of tea, and Thea pronounced her delight at the home-made biscuits. She asked how Safiyah was, as if this were a social call, and nodded solicitously at Amina’s answer. Then, as smooth as silk, she moved on to the business in hand.

  ‘You have some concerns that you’d like to share with us.’

  ‘I do.’ Amina clasped her hands together in her lap. ‘I have an idea where Safiyah may have caught TB.’

  There was nothing on Thea’s face, apart from polite interest. ‘In terms of contact tracing, we promise absolute discretion.’

  ‘That is not quite what I had in mind.’ Amina smiled. ‘I am worried for that person.’

  This wasn’t quite the way that Lucas had been expecting the conversation to go. At least Thea seemed to be keeping up and not showing the surprise that he felt.

  ‘Amina, can you explain this to me a little more?’

  Amina nodded. ‘My sister’s child has been unwell for some months now. The doctor said that it was a winter virus, and then that she had developed a slight case of pneumonia.’

  ‘And she’s no better now?’

  ‘The doctor said that it would take a while to resolve. I told my sister that it was taking too long, but…’ Amina shrugged. ‘Mariam is still not fully recovered.’

  ‘And she’s not been referred to the hospital?’ Maybe Lucas imagined the flicker of annoyance in Thea’s face, it was so fleeting. She had every cause. There really was no excuse for a GP in central London not considering TB in this context.

  ‘I urged her to insist. But she does not. She will do what the doctor tells her, over her own sister.’

  ‘And Mariam and Safiyah are close? They see each other regularly?’

  ‘Yes, they do.’

  Thea smiled. ‘Then we have no problem. Mariam will have to be tested for tuberculosis as part of the testing we’ll need to do for all of Safiyah’s contacts.’

  ‘In ten weeks’ time? She will have to wait that long?’

  ‘No. Who told you ten weeks?’ Lucas reckoned he knew the answer to that question.

  Amina’s gaze dropped to the carpet. ‘Safiyah and your daughter have…they message each other. Safiyah told me.’

  Thea grinned, and the tension that had suddenly filled the room wound back down again. ‘Well, Ava’s absolutely correct, we do normally wa
it, because ten weeks is the incubation period for the infection. But if someone is showing symptoms it’s quite a different matter. I will do what’s necessary to make sure that your niece is seen straight away.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Amina smiled. ‘I appreciate that. My sister will do what is best for Mariam, but she may delay. The…shame.’

  ‘There’s no shame in any of this, Amina.’

  ‘I know. Others don’t think so. I had a call from one of the parents at school this morning. She was very apologetic but said that she was sure I would understand that it would not be appropriate for Safiya to come to her daughter’s birthday party.’

  ‘When’s the party?’ There was a trace of anger in Thea’s tone.

  ‘In six weeks’ time.’

  ‘Look, Amina, I haven’t seen Safiyah and so I can’t give an opinion on her particular case. But, in general, once a patient has been on the drug regime for two weeks, they’re not infectious. When Safiyah’s doctors give her the all-clear, it’ll be perfectly all right for her to go to whatever party she wants to.’ Thea was keeping her outrage under wraps. But it was there, like a hard backbone of truth in what she said.

  ‘This is what they have told me.’ Amina’s mother shrugged miserably. ‘But what can I do?’

  Anger flashed in Lucas’s heart. That well-worn organ, which had been jerked out of its enforced rest from the first moment he’d seen Thea again.

  ‘You can help me, Amina. My daughter wants to see Safiyah, and I won’t deny her the opportunity to see her friends because of someone’s prejudice. As soon as Safiyah is non-infectious, I’d be grateful if you and your family would come to my house for a meal.’

  ‘I…’ Amina’s self-control broke, and she looked suddenly flustered. ‘I appreciate your offer, but the drugs make her sick.’

  ‘I understand that. I’m a doctor, I can deal with that. What I can’t deal with is irresponsible people who act out of prejudice. I won’t deny my daughter the opportunity of seeing her friends just because someone who doesn’t know the facts thinks it’s a good idea.’