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‘Brianna—’
‘Is it Amy Renwick? Is she back from Recovery, and there’s a problem, or—?’
‘Actually, I’m afraid I lied, and you’re not needed in the unit at all,’ Megan interrupted, looking shamefaced. ‘It’s just…I was passing the nurses’ staffroom and I heard the auditor yelling at you. I wasn’t eavesdropping, honestly I wasn’t,’ she continued as Brianna stared at her in alarm. ‘It’s just the walls in this place are so thin, and you sounded…Well, you sounded really upset, and in need of rescue.’
‘I did—I was,’ Brianna said with a small smile.
‘I think you should make a formal complaint,’ Megan declared angrily. ‘It’s one thing to inspect a unit, to ask the staff questions about how it’s run, but harassing someone…’ She shook her head. ‘That’s completely out of order.’
‘Megan, I don’t want to make a complaint,’ Brianna replied. ‘My interview is over, done with, so let’s just leave it, OK?’
‘Not on your life,’ the paediatric registrar insisted. ‘If this Connor whatever his name is—’
‘Monahan. His name’s Connor Monahan.’
‘Thinks he can ride roughshod over the nursing staff, upset them, then he can think again. I can understand why you might be reluctant to make a complaint, but I’m not. I’m more than willing to march up to Admin right now, and tell them they’d better warn him to back off or they’ll have the nurses’ union on their doorstep.’
Megan would do it, too, Brianna thought, seeing the fury in her friend’s face, and it was the last thing she wanted. It was hard enough for her to deal with Connor’s reappearance in her life without having the staff in Admin gossiping about it after they’d been told all the facts, and she would have to tell them all the facts.
‘Megan, it’s got nothing to do with the nursing staff, or the unit,’ she said unhappily. ‘It’s me. It’s to do with me. You see, Connor Monahan and I…We know one another.’
Her friend gazed at her blankly for a second, then a look of horrified realisation appeared on her face.
‘Oh, lord, he’s not an ex-boyfriend of yours, is he?’ she exclaimed. ‘Oh, Brianna, I’m so sorry, what a nightmare for you.’
‘A nightmare, for sure.’ Brianna nodded. ‘But you see…’ She took a deep breath. ‘The trouble is, Connor isn’t an ex-boyfriend. He…he’s my husband.’
CHAPTER TWO
‘BUT Mr Brooke said yesterday—after Amy’s operation—that she might need another operation,’ Naomi Renwick said, her eyes dark with fear. ‘He said he wouldn’t know for the next seventy-two hours whether he’d successfully removed all of the infection, so you’d be keeping a very careful eye on her.’
‘Which I would be doing whether Amy had been operated on or not,’ Brianna replied, wishing the ever-pessimistic consultant to the darkest reaches of hell. ‘Naomi, your daughter is doing very well. We have no reason to think she will require another operation—’
‘But if she does…She’s so little, Sister, so very little, and if she needs another operation…’
‘We’ll deal with it just as we’ve dealt with all the other problems Amy has faced since she was born a month ago. Naomi, listen to me,’ Brianna continued, as Amy’s mother made to interrupt. ‘I can’t give you any guarantees—no one can, but, please, please, don’t go looking for bridges to cross. Amy’s temperature’s normal, her colour’s good. In fact,’ she added, ‘just look at her.’
Naomi Renwick gazed down into the incubator where her daughter was vigorously kicking her little legs despite the fine line of sutures across her stomach, and her lips curved into a shaky smile.
‘She’s beautiful, isn’t she?’ she said, and Brianna nodded.
‘She is, and right now she’s in the best possible place, getting the best possible care, so hold onto that, OK?’
Brianna hoped Naomi Renwick would, but she wished even more, as she turned to discover Connor standing behind her, that her husband would dog some other nurse’s footsteps, if only for a little while.
Twenty-four hours, she thought as she began walking down the ward, all too conscious he was following her. Just twenty-four hours ago her life might not exactly have been perfect, but at least she hadn’t felt permanently besieged. Now she felt cornered, under attack, and it wasn’t just by his presence, or his continual questions about the unit. It was the way he managed to somehow incorporate so many barbed comments into what he was saying that was wearing her down, little by little, bit by bit.
‘How many incubators does the NICU at Plymouth have?’ he asked, and she came to a weary halt.
‘Twelve,’ she replied, ‘which is double our capacity, but their hospital covers a far greater area and population than St Piran’s, so it’s bound to be bigger.’
‘I also notice from your ward clerk’s files that every baby has a primary carer,’ he continued. ‘That doesn’t seem to be a very efficient system in terms of time or personnel.’
‘Not everything can be measured in terms of time management, or personnel distribution,’ she said acidly. ‘Especially the care of very vulnerable babies.’
‘I see,’ he said, but she doubted whether he did as she watched him type something into his state-of-the-art phone, which could probably have made him a cup of coffee if he’d asked it to.
Figures, statistics had always been his passion, not people, and he didn’t seem to have changed.
‘Connor—’
‘Does this unit normally have quite so many unused incubators? ‘ he asked, gesturing towards the two empty ones at the end of the ward.
‘There’s no such thing as “normal” in NICU,’ she protested. ‘We’ve had occasions when only three of our incubators have been in use, times when we were at full capacity, and last Christmas we were so busy we had to send babies to Plymouth because we just couldn’t accommodate them. It was tough for everyone, especially the families.’
‘It would be.’ He nodded. ‘Christmas being the time when most families like to be together.’
And you’ve missed two with me. He didn’t say those words—he didn’t need to—but she heard them loud and clear.
‘Things don’t always work out the way we planned,’ she muttered, ‘and babies can’t be expected to arrive exactly when you want them to.’
‘Not babies, no. Grown-ups, on the other hand,’ he added, his eyes catching and holding hers, ‘have a choice.’
And you chose to walk away from me. That was what he was really saying, and she swallowed painfully.
‘Connor, please,’ she said with difficulty. ‘This is a good unit, an efficient unit. Please don’t make this personal.’
His eyebrows rose. ‘You think that’s what I’m doing?’
‘I know it is,’ she cried. ‘Look, I can understand you being angry—’
‘I’m sorry to interrupt,’ Rita interrupted, looking anything but as she joined them, ‘but I’m afraid we’ve had a complaint about your car, Sister Flannigan.’
‘A complaint?’ Brianna echoed in confusion, and Rita smiled.
A smile that was every bit as false as the sympathetic sigh with which she followed it.
‘You’ve parked it in the consultants’ side of the car park today instead of the nurses’. Easily done, of course, when you’re stressed—’
‘I’m not stressed—’
‘Of course you are, my dear,’ Rita declared, her face all solicitous concern, but her eyes, Brianna noticed, were speculative, calculating. ‘How can you possibly not be when you’re doing two jobs?’
‘Sister Flannigan has two jobs?’ Connor frowned, and Rita nodded.
‘Our nurse unit manager returned to Spain a few months back, and, as Admin haven’t yet appointed his replacement, Sister Flannigan has had to temporarily step into the breach, which is probably why we’re not as efficient as we should be.’
‘I can’t say I’ve noticed any inefficiency on Sister Flannigan’s part,’ Connor replied, attempting to walk on, but Rita was not about to be rebuffed.
‘Oh, please don’t think I’m suggesting Sister Flannigan is inefficient—’
Yeah, right, Rita, Brianna thought angrily, and this is clearly payback time because I chewed your head off yesterday.
‘But when you’re as much of a perfectionist as I am,’ the ward clerk continued, all honeyed sweetness, ‘I do like everything to be just so.’
‘Which makes me wonder why you’re still standing here,’ Connor declared, ‘and not back in your office, dotting some i’s and crossing some t’s.’
The ward clerk’s mouth opened and closed soundlessly for a second, then she clamped her lips together tightly.
‘Well, no one can ever accuse me of remaining where I’m not wanted,’ she said, before stomping away, and Brianna sighed.
‘Which, unfortunately, isn’t true.’ She glanced up at Connor hesitantly. ‘Thanks for saying what you did, for backing me up.’
For a moment he said nothing, then his lips twisted into something like a smile. ‘I thought I always did. I thought we were a team.’
They had been once, she remembered. There had been a time when she couldn’t have imagined her life without him, and then, little by little, things had changed, and two years ago…
‘I’m sorry, Connor,’ she murmured, ‘so sorry.’
‘Sorry you left, or sorry I found you?’
His eyes were fixed on her, and the awful truth was she couldn’t give him an answer, not without hurting him, and she backed away from him, afraid he would realise it.
‘The car,’ she said haltingly. ‘I have to…I need to move my car.’
She was gone before he could stop her and, when the ward door clattered shut behind her, Connor clenched his fists until his knuckles showed white.
She hadn’t answered him. He’d asked her a simple, easy-to-answer question, and yet she hadn’t answered him, and he needed—wanted—answers.
Dammit, she owed him that at least, he thought furiously. When he’d first seen her yesterday, his initial reaction had been to thank God she was safe, his Brianna was safe, but then anger had consumed him. A blazing, blinding, irrational anger that she could be standing in front of him looking better than he’d seen her look in a long time, had been living happily in Cornwall for the last two years, when he’d been to hell and back, fearing the worst. And she’d disappear out of his life again in an instant given half a chance. He’d seen it in her dark brown eyes, in the way she looked at him.
Well, she wasn’t going to walk away from him a second time, he decided. This time he wanted answers, proper answers, and not some nonsense about him never talking to her, never listening, and he headed for the ward door to follow her.
‘I’m really very sorry about this, Sister Flannigan,’ Sid, the hospital handyman, said uncomfortably after she’d moved her car out of the consultants’ bay and into the nurses’ part of the car park. ‘To be honest, I don’t think there should be any divisions in the car park, but some consultants…’ He shook his head. ‘It’s a status thing for them, you see.’
‘It’s all right, Sid, truly it is,’ Brianna said quickly. ‘I don’t know where my brain was this morning…’ Well, she did know—it was on Connor, she’d been thinking about Connor, and how she didn’t want to meet him again, but she wasn’t about to share that even with someone as nice as their handyman. ‘So could you please tell whoever it was who complained that it won’t happen again?’
The middle-aged handyman didn’t look any happier. In fact, she could hear him muttering under his breath, ‘Officious twit…that’s what he is,’ as he walked away, and she smiled, but, as she closed her car door, her smile vanished.
It would be so easy to simply get back into her car, and drive away. No one would miss her for a while, and if she kept on driving, and driving, she might eventually reach a place where Connor would never find her. She could start again, change her name again, and—
‘Don’t, Brianna,’ a feminine voice said gently. ‘I know what you’re thinking, and it won’t solve anything.’
‘It might,’ Brianna muttered, as she turned to see Jess watching her.
‘Megan told me about Connor being your husband. She wouldn’t normally break a confidence—you know she wouldn’t,’ the counsellor added quickly as Brianna stared at her in alarm, ‘but she’s worried about you.’
‘I know, but…’ Brianna shook her head. ‘Jess, have you ever wanted to run away? To just run away, leave everything behind, and start all over?’
‘I did—I have,’ the counsellor replied. ‘When the staff at the hospital I worked in before I came to St Piran’s found out about me having HIV…a lot of them cut me dead, crossed the street to avoid me—’
‘Oh, Jess!’
‘And I couldn’t bear it so I ran, and then…’ She sighed, a low, sad sigh. ‘Well, you know what happened. That reporter from the Penhally Gazette broadcast my condition all over his newspaper, and I wanted to run again, but I knew if I did, I would be leaving behind the people, the hospital I felt I’d become such a part of.’
‘And Gio,’ Brianna murmured. ‘You would have been leaving him behind, too.’
‘I had no guarantees he would stand by me when he found out the truth, Brianna. He could have walked away and, if he had, then I…’ Jess managed a watery smile. ‘I would just have to have lived with it.’
Brianna stared down at the car keys in her hand.
‘I don’t know if I’m as strong as you are.’
‘I think you are,’ Jess said softly, ‘but it’s your choice, Brianna. You can stay and confront your fear, or you can run, but if you do run don’t forget that whatever you’re scared of won’t go away. It will always be there, like a dark shadow hanging over you.’
Her friend was right, she knew she was. Running wasn’t the answer, but to stay and try to get Connor to talk to her, to really talk…
‘Jess…’ she began, only to look sharply round with a frown. ‘Did you hear that?’
‘Hear what?’ Jess said in confusion. ‘I can hear the traffic, the birds in the trees—’
‘It’s a baby. A baby in distress, and it’s close by.’ Jess stared at her as though she was suddenly having grave doubts about her mental stability but, having worked with babies for most of her adult life, Brianna could recognise a baby’s cry from five hundred paces, and this baby was in trouble. Big trouble.
‘Maybe it’s a cat,’ Jess observed, following Brianna as she headed back to the consultants’ part of the car park. ‘Cats and kittens often make a sound like a baby.’
But it wasn’t a kitten or a cat. It was a baby who hadn’t been there when Brianna had moved her car just a few minutes ago. A baby lying wrapped in a white shawl beside Jess’s husband’s glossy Aston Martin. A baby whose face was blue, and who was breathing in tiny, rasping gasps.
‘Oh, my God! ‘ Jess exclaimed, as Brianna swiftly lifted the tiny bundle into her arms and cradled its head against her breast. ‘Who on earth would leave a baby here?’
‘It doesn’t matter who,’ Brianna replied. ‘This baby needs attention, and it needs it now.’
She was off and running before Jess could reply. Running so single-mindedly she didn’t see the tall figure walking towards her until she almost collided with him.
‘Brianna, we need to…’ Connor looked down, then up at her incredulously. ‘That’s a baby.’
‘Ten out of ten for observation,’ she replied, ‘and now can you please get out of my way because it needs help.’
NICU was the obvious place to go, she realised as she ran on with Jess and Connor following her, but she didn’t know if the bundle in her arms would make it that far, so she sighed with relief when she saw Josh walking across the entrance foyer of the hospital.
‘Hello, gorgeous, where’s the fire?’ He grinned as she raced towards him.
‘No fire,’ she replied breathlessly. ‘It’s a newborn, I found it in the car park, and it’s floppy, blue and breathing oddly.’
All Josh’s amusement disappeared in a second.
‘Jess, can you page Mr Brooke and tell him to come down to A and E immediately? And, if you can’t get him,’ he added as the counsellor turned to go, ‘page Megan. Brianna—you and the baby—A and E—now.’
‘My guess is respiratory distress syndrome,’ Brianna said as she hurried into A and E and placed the baby on one of the examination tables. ‘See how his skin and muscles are being pulled in every time he takes a breath?’ she added, carefully unwrapping the shawl. ‘How tight his abdomen is?’
