Kitabı oku: «Long-Lost Son: Brand-New Family», sayfa 2

‘That’s right.’ Dr Wetherby was very patient. ‘She and Dr Carmichael risked their lives to find him and Max, right in the teeth of the cyclone. We’re all devoutly thankful that the four of them survived.’

‘How long have I been in here now?’

‘Since Saturday night. And now it’s Tuesday. You missed all the drama.’

‘Not all of it.’

Except that she couldn’t remember. She and Felixx had been on the bus that had slid off the road. There had been a landslide, triggered by the massive dump of rain that had heralded the cyclone, apparently. She remembered when they’d left Mundarri a few hours earlier, trying to get her waif-like, silent nephew to say goodbye to Raina and Maharia, but as usual he hadn’t said a word, just waved, taken Janey’s hand, stretched his small legs to climb the bus’s high steps.

And that was all.

After this, everything remained blank, and when she’d regained consciousness, she’d had to ask, ‘Where am I?’ like an accident victim in a bad movie, before she’d remembered finding Luke Bresciano’s contact details at Mundarri among Alice’s things. The second thing she’d asked had been, ‘Where’s Felixx? My—my little boy.’ Because, for the moment at least, he was hers.

‘Is he OK?’ she asked now, having been told at first that he was but not quite daring to believe it.

‘Well, we have a couple of concerns…’ Charles Wetherby said.

‘Is he speaking?’

‘No, he’s not, and we were wondering if there’s anything you can tell us about that. He doesn’t seem to have a hearing problem.’

‘He hasn’t spoken to me either.’

‘Since when, Janey?’

She frowned and tried to will the fuzz out of her brain. Since when? Since ever! But had she managed to explain…? No, that’s right. They would have assumed the obvious relationship, and she’d been too fuzzy to correct them. ‘He’s not my son,’ she said.

‘But I thought—’

‘He’s my nephew. My sister’s child. I don’t know him very well. She—They believe in alternative healing at Mundarri. I don’t know if you’ve heard of—’

‘Mundarri? Some kind of spiritual retreat, up in the rainforest?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Well, I do think there’s a place in our system for alternative medicine…’

‘I do, too, sometimes.’

‘But I’ve heard they have some odd ideas.’

‘Odd ideas that killed my sister.’ She sketched out the story as briefly as she could, sidetracked into an ambush of emotion before she could swallow it back, and even just that amount of effort tired her out. ‘I’m sorry, I’m a doctor myself. Right, yes, I did tell you that.’ Her head hurt. ‘As you say, I think alternative healing has its place, but—’

‘We’re both doctors, you don’t have to explain.’

‘Will I be discharged today?’ she asked, knowing the answer even before she heard it.

‘Not before tomorrow, I shouldn’t think,’ Charles said gently. ‘Should we postpone your nephew coming in?’

‘Oh, no, please. I want to see him! Let me just close my eyes for a minute…’

And the next time she opened them, not long afterwards, there he was, being ushered into the room by an attractive and very energetic-looking woman with bright red dangly earrings. She had a pretty impressive bruise on the side of her face, which Janey put down to the cyclone.

‘Felixx…’ Janey struggled to sit up, struggled yet again not to cry. She didn’t want to scare him any more than he’d been scared already by all that had happened, all the uncertainty, all that he’d lost. ‘Oh, sweetheart…Oh, darling…’

She held out her arms, but Georgie Turner had to nudge him forward. ‘Come and hug your Auntie Janey.’ Charles Wetherby must have explained their relationship to her.

At last he came, and she felt his warm little body. Had a momentary flashback to the bus. That’s right, he’d fallen asleep on her shoulder, so warm and trusting and relaxed. Now she wanted to hold him for ever, just for the reassurance that they were both alive, that she hadn’t let him down, that they were together, so everything would be all right.

But he pulled back.

Didn’t speak, of course.

Why didn’t he speak?

He looked scared. She could see him taking in the equipment—the drip stand and bag of fluid and cannula taped to her hand, the monitor reporting on her oxygen and heart, and the imposing side rails and wheels and crank handle of the hospital bed.

Alice, she remembered. He was scared because his mother had died, and now his Auntie Janey was ill, too.

‘I’m feeling so much better, Felixx,’ she said quickly. ‘Dr Wetherby says I can probably get out of here tomorrow. I’m sitting here going woo-hoo!’

On Felixx’s face the sun came out from behind a cloud. It was the only way Janey could describe it to herself. His smile spread wide, his eyes went happy, his tense little shoulders dropped and relaxed. He looked as if there was something else he wanted to say or ask, but didn’t know how. Or didn’t dare.

‘Were you scared I was really sick?’

He nodded, cautious about it.

Oh, hell, of course he had been scared!

‘Nah,’ she said, deliberately casual and dismissive. ‘Takes more than a few bumps on the head to knock me around. We’ll be able to check into a nice motel, and—’ She stopped.

Georgie was shaking her head. ‘No motels,’ she mouthed.

The cyclone, Janey remembered. As she hadn’t seen it or heard it or even seen the damage yet, she had to take it on trust and her foggy brain kept forgetting. None of the motels in town were currently open for business apparently.

She put on a bright voice. ‘Well, we’ll have to camp or something.’

‘If you’re not feeling well enough to travel yet, Janey, we can arrange something. There’s a big house—it’s the original hospital building—where several of the doctors live, and we can usually find extra room.’ Georgie’s bright earrings bobbed as she talked. She looked like the kind of woman who could arrange emergency accommodation on an uninhabited planet if she had to. ‘We can lend you some clothes. Rowdy, here, was pretty happy to be reunited with his missing clownfish shoe, but his toes are getting squashed in those sneakers, so we’ve found him some new ones.’

‘You haven’t thrown the clownfish shoe away?’

‘Ooh, no, weren’t allowed to do that!’ Her face telegraphed the story. Rowdy must have clung to the shoe. Alice had painted the fish on it to hide the hole in the toe, Janey knew, and of course he wanted all the reminders of his mum that he could find.

‘Thanks,’ she said, her voice husky with tears.

‘To be honest, though,’ Georgie said gently, ‘getting back to the issue of where you’re staying, we’re encouraging people to evacuate if they can. Resources are pretty stretched. I think the Golden Palm will be up and running in a couple of days. It’s not exactly five-star, but they only had minor damage and they’re working on getting one block of rooms back into a fit state for guests. There’s the Athina, too, but that’ll be full. They’ve just had a big wedding. You’re from Darwin?’

‘I don’t know where I’m from right now.’ Janey closed her eyes. ‘The moon?’

The thought of finding a place to stay, tracking down Luke, presenting him with his son and saying something like, Do you want him? Alice said you didn’t, but she’s gone now, and I’m wondering if that might make you change your mind. After all, you are the only father he’s got…

Exhausting.

Too hard.

She’d asked someone about Luke, but maybe no one had passed the message on. Or, no, with services in the whole region so strapped, he’d be working around the clock, playing the hero.

He had a nice line in heroic behaviour. People loved the casual humour, the god-like reassurances and the warm fire in his amber-brown eyes, and immediately believed in him. She knew what he was like…or had known once…He wouldn’t be able to resist the opportunity to show off in all this chaos. Which was good, because she didn’t have the energy for their confrontation just yet.

‘Honey, we might take you back to play with Max, OK?’ she heard Georgie say. ‘Auntie Janey needs to rest for a while now.’

He stood there looking at her for a moment, frowning, giving off that same sense that he was about to speak, that the words were just crammed in his mouth bursting to come out, but as usual he stayed silent.

‘Bye, sweetheart,’ she managed, then the sleepy fog stole over her brain again, and hours passed.

The next time she woke up, her head had cleared, her stomach wanted food, her limbs were ready for a good stretch and altogether she felt about a hundred years better.

Until she became aware of the quiet masculine presence in the chair beside her bed—dark hair, strong shoulders, genuine, implacable fatigue written all over him—and realised it was Luke.

CHAPTER TWO

LUKE looked exhausted and stressed.

He had bloodshot eyes, hair yelling for a brush, even a streak of dried mud along his jaw. He looked older. There were some lines around his eyes and mouth. Janey hadn’t seen him in, what, seven years? No, just under six, if you counted photographs.

Alice had sent one from London shortly after Felixx’s birth—a casual shot of both parents and the tiny bundle of baby snuggled between them. Alice had looked tired, but Luke had glowed—the archetypical proud father. Just three months later, their marriage had shattered. Janey still didn’t know the full story, and what she did know had come only from Alice.

So how did you even start in a situation like this?

With ‘hello’ apparently.

Luke said it first, his voice low and tired and husky. Despite the changes in his appearance, he was still the man she remembered, dark and ferociously good-looking, with those trust-me-I’m-a-hero amber-brown eyes and a confident mouth that had rarely bothered to bestow its charming smile on Janey. She’d seen it quirked in annoyance or outright anger far more often.

‘Hello, Luke,’ she answered him. ‘It’s good to see you.’

His smile was strained. Good to see each other? Maybe. And they both looked wrecked. He carried his fatigue well, but she had no illusions about the appearance she must present after two days of unconsciousness in a hospital bed—and she’d never been the pretty one of the two Stafford girls.

‘It’s been a while,’ Luke said.

‘Too long.’

His face changed. The strong jaw suddenly looked harder. No charm in evidence at all. ‘Don’t put that down to me, Janey. Just don’t. I contacted you and your parents over and over, asking you to put me in touch with Alice, and you insisted you didn’t know where she was.’

‘We didn’t, then. She didn’t contact us for a couple of years.’

‘But you do now?’

‘It’s complicated…’

‘Explain, Janey. Pretend I’m completely in the dark, no idea what’s been going on for the past five and a half years with my wife or my son. Just pretend, OK?’ His voice dripped with harsh sarcasm on those last three words.

Oh, lord, their dealings were getting badly strained already, and she had some shattering news to impart!

I won’t do this, she vowed. I won’t make it into a battle or a litany of accusations, no matter how I feel about Luke, or how much truth there might have been in what Alice said! Felixx has endured enough, he doesn’t need his two closest living relatives to be at war with each other.

It wouldn’t have been Alice’s approach, she knew. Alice had loved the high drama of family arguments and taking sides and emotional manipulation. You became drawn into it, inevitably, because—like Luke—she had so much charisma, so much life, so much self-belief. The world always seemed a more interesting and dramatic place when she was around.

Had loved.

Had had.

Had seemed.

Luke must have seen something in her face. ‘I’m sorry. Shall we start again?’ he said.

‘Let’s.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he repeated. ‘I can’t do the small talk. Not in a situation like this. There’s only one thing I want to know right now. The child. The boy. He’s around four years old, people are saying. They’ve been calling him Rowdy, but you’ve said his name is Felix. So he’s your son. I had this stupid hope for a while that—’ He broke off.

The look on his face was that of a man still under torture. It shocked her, because she’d never seen him like this before, wouldn’t have said he had the capacity to feel life’s darker emotions so deeply.

He was the sunshine type.

‘Luke…Dear God, I thought you knew,’ Janey blurted out. ‘He is Frankie Jay. He is yours. Of course he is.’

She watched him try to stand then sit back down as if his legs had given out from under him. He looked totally bewildered. ‘But—Felix?’

‘Alice changed his name, and I’ve grown used to it. She changed hers, too, and both their last names. Alanya and Felixx Star. Felixx’s has a double X, which is—’

Ridiculous.

She stopped. Why give this detail now? The double X. Her opinion of it. Her brain still wasn’t working quite right. ‘He’s small for his age,’ she went on. ‘He does look like he could be four.’

Luke put his head in his hands for a long moment, hiding his expression. She wanted to reach out and comfort him with her touch, but didn’t think she had the right or that he’d want her to. The nakedness of his reactions kept surprising her, although she couldn’t have put into words what she’d expected instead.

More of a performance?

‘When they found your ID in A and E on Saturday night, I didn’t know why you’d been on that bus,’ he said eventually. ‘If it was anything to do with me, if it was just one of those bizarre coincidences, or if Alice had put you up to it for some reason…Hell, I can’t call her Alanya! Where is she? Was this her idea? Why bring him here now, after all this time, when she did so much—must have moved heaven and earth—to make sure I could never find either of them?’

‘Never find them? She said you didn’t want him! Or her. That you couldn’t handle father-hood and wanted your bachelor days back. That you were the one who left.’

‘Which you instantly believed, of course.’ Suddenly, they were both gabbling, fast and furious.

‘Yes, because—’ She fought the swimming feeling in her head.

‘When was this?’ he demanded. ‘After my phone calls from London, or before?’

‘You’d said when we were working together—and you said it more than once—that you never wanted kids. And you certainly used to enjoy your freedom. Some men find they can’t deal with—’

‘No!’

‘Yes! When we were interns, those three months in the paediatric unit. We saw some heart-rending things.’

‘All right, I remember. I was twenty-six years old. That’s a young man’s response, Janey, pretty unthinking in some areas, far too black and white. I’ll never have to see a child of mine go through this, because I’m damned sure now that I’m never having kids. As for enjoying my freedom, that’s just how you would phrase it, isn’t it? The negative connotation. We all needed a bit of a release in those days. I changed. I loved Frankie Jay like—When was this? When did she say this? After my phone calls?’

‘After, when she came back to Australia.’

‘When you already knew how desperate I was to get in touch with her and see my son.’

‘It’s easy to say. Especially on the phone from half a world away. That you’re desperate to get in touch. It’s the expected reaction. Casts you in a heroic—’

He swore. ‘You thought it was just a performance? Hell, I knew you never thought all that highly of me marrying your sister, but…’ His lips had gone white. ‘We worked together. I saved your backside a couple of times, and you even returned the favour. There was a degree of respect between us. Professional respect, at least. I thought. But that’s what you think I’m capable of.’

‘I wasn’t accustomed to think my own sister was telling lies. I didn’t know what to think or believe or feel. You know what she was like, Luke. She drew us all in.’

‘Captivating,’ he said bitterly. ‘She weaves these beautiful, magical webs around her life. You want to be in her world because it looks so sparkling and wonderful. You believe every word she tells you. She casts spells. Wait a minute…’ His face changed, and Janey knew he’d belatedly registered her use of that tell-tale word ‘was’—the past tense.

‘She died,’ she told him simply. She swallowed. Luke didn’t need to see her in tears. She’d shed enough of those when she’d first heard the news. ‘A week ago. No, ten days. Oh, hell, nearly two weeks, I’m still in such a fog.’

She sketched in the medical facts for him, then continued, ‘She was living at Mundarri, it’s a retreat. A commune, some people would call it. And they didn’t realise how ill she was until it was too late. Charles Wetherby knew of the place when I told him. Up in the rainforest. I don’t know if—’

‘Yes, spiritual healing, or something. I guess that fits. She’d begun to get heavily involved in that sort of thing in England before she disappeared.’

‘Disappeared?’

‘Just went off the grid, Janey. Do you think I didn’t try every avenue I could think of to track her down when she took Frankie Jay?’ His whole face blazed, and she could see the way his tightly held fists made his forearms knot with muscle. ‘She did it deliberately, no matter what she might have told you. That would have been when she changed their names, not when she got to the rainforest place, Mundarri. And I wouldn’t be surprised if she changed them more than once. Poor kid, probably doesn’t know what he wants to be called. It wasn’t me. I wanted our marriage. To try and save it, for his sake. I wanted to be a good father. She sabotaged everything.’

‘Luke—’

‘I don’t use that word lightly, and the only reason I never spoke of it in those terms when I called you from London was that I thought if I sounded too harsh about her you wouldn’t tell me where she was.’

‘Why didn’t you try again when you came back to Australia? I didn’t even know you were back in the country until I found your contact details amongst Alice’s things. She must have kept track of you.’

‘While making damned sure I couldn’t trace her. I gave up, that was why I didn’t make contact with you or your parents when I got back. Maybe I shouldn’t have given up. But it was killing me. I didn’t get a senior fellowship in the US that I wanted, because of it. I was too distracted, trying to find my wife and child. The fellowship went to someone else, and deservedly so, because I hadn’t been giving a hundred per cent and I couldn’t fake it any more.’

Luke Bresciano? Unable to fake it?

Again, she let too much show on her face.

‘Yes, you’re right, OK? I did used to fake it sometimes, when we were interns.’

‘Sometimes?’

‘OK, a lot. Never the actual medicine, but the bedside manner, the confidence, sure! It was a survival strategy. We all had them. Apparently you weren’t impressed with mine.’

‘Finish the story, Luke.’

‘I came home to Australia instead. I knew my son was at least safe, that Alice loved him. I decided that would have to be enough, the abstract knowing. I’m not the first parent to have lived through losing a child completely when a marriage breaks down—to have a son or daughter or a whole family just vanish out of your life, and your ex to go to incredibly extreme measures to deprive you of any contact. I joined a support group for a while, but some of the bitterness and desperation I saw in those other parents…No. For sheer survival I had to turn my back and start again.’

‘Oh, Luke…’ She slumped against the raised upper half of the hospital bed, her energy completely drained. Her hands were actually shaking, cold despite the tropical heat.

He reached out and covered her clammy fingers with his warm palm. Instinctively, she closed her eyes. The contact felt good, far better than she would have expected. It oriented something in her universe, and she didn’t stop to think if that might be in any way dangerous.

Couldn’t stop to think.

Didn’t have any thought power left.

‘This is too exhausting for you,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry. We shouldn’t be talking about it now.’

‘We had to. How could we have put it off? What would we have said instead?’

‘Where is he? Will you let me see him?’

‘Let you see him?’ Her eyes flew open, she tried to sit up and saw stars.

His voice seemed to come from a distance. ‘Your sister didn’t let me, for over five years. Who has legal custody of him now?’

‘I do, but it’s temporary.’

‘Your parents…?’

‘Mum’s not well. Dad’s struggling, taking care of her. Alice’s death has hit them hard. They couldn’t manage a child now. They want me to have him, but—’

‘You don’t?’

‘Oh, I do, with all my heart, but I thought you should have a say in it, Luke.’ He was still holding her hand. Instinctively, she squeezed it. ‘That you should have him, if you want him. I—I do trust that your heart’s in the right place.’

He’d never been bad, after all. Just because she hadn’t liked him, just because he’d made her spit chips every time they met, and she had thought him so arrogant and immature…She wouldn’t let personal feelings win out over the objective realities of right and wrong. He’d be a good father, if he wanted to be.

‘All the stuff that happened with you and Alice…’ she said, ‘a bad marriage can bring out the worst in people.’

‘We were never right for each other. We dazzled each other at first, but I wouldn’t want those stars in my eyes again.’

‘Luke, if you want Felixx…Frankie Jay…then he’s yours. He has to be. It’s the right thing. That’s why I came to Crocodile Creek.’

Approaching the doctors’ house where he’d lived for almost five months, Luke saw the place as if he’d never seen it before.

Because now, since Sunday night, his child had been here.

He’d left Janey to rest, knowing there were still a million things to say but that she was too exhausted for either of them to do any more talking at this point. In any case, the urgency to see his son was suddenly shattering.

It pulled him like a magnet, made him feel ill and dizzy. He couldn’t live a minute longer if he didn’t see his boy. A part of him still believed it would all turn out to be some nightmare mistake and the child wouldn’t be his at all.

‘He’s sleeping on a camp stretcher on the floor in Emily’s room,’ Charles had told him a few minutes ago. ‘Has been for the past two nights. I guess you really have been bedding down in the A and E department.’

‘Yes. When I’ve slept at all.’

The whole town was in chaos. With the bus crash and cyclone barging in on their wedding reception three nights ago, Emily and Mike Poulos should have been miles away on their honeymoon by this time but instead they’d stayed to help. They’d had no choice in the matter, and it might be days longer before they could easily be spared and before regular commercial flights resumed.

The short snatches of time that Emily and her new husband did manage to spend together, they spent over at the Athina Hotel, in a room that was too rain-damaged for real hotel guests, with its sodden carpet ripped up, but quite acceptable to a couple of battle-weary doctors who happened to be newly married and madly in love.

Which meant that Emily’s room had been available for Max and Frankie Jay.

I am not calling him by the name Alice used when she stole him away.

‘Although I’m not sure what he’d be doing right now,’ Charles had continued. ‘Eating, probably. He’s developed quite an appetite since we got hold of him.’

And when Luke tiptoed up the steps and into the big communal kitchen with his heart thudding right up in his throat, there he was. His son. Eating an enormous hamburger with everything, half of which—fried egg, beetroot slice, grated carrot, pineapple ring and cheese—was sliding out the sides and back onto the plate.

Frankie Jay had beetroot juice and burger bun crumbs smeared all over his face, and was tackling with serious attention the issue of how to get the fallen bits of hamburger filling back into his mouth. Via reinserting them into the bun? Or should he take a more direct route?

Luke simply stood and watched, totally overwhelmed, seeing bits of himself, bits of Alice and Janey and four grandparents and finally just the new, unique being that wasn’t bits of anybody else but was just Frankie Jay. Dark hair, brown eyes, scratches and mosquito bites on his skin, freckles across his nose, wiry little limbs.

Georgie saw him in the doorway first, and she must already have been briefed by Charles as she raised her eyebrows in a question that said, Shall I let him know you’re here?

Luke shook his head, wondering if the whole medical community—in fact, the whole town—knew by now that this was his long-lost son, and the owner of that forlorn little shoe. He’d kept to himself a fair bit since coming here. His shattered past would provide fascinating fodder for gossip. The thought stripped him raw, when he didn’t know how any of it was going to work out.

Georgie nodded and stayed silent, and they both watched Frankie Jay eating. Only when his plate was cleaned of every last bun crumb and tomato sauce smear and lettuce shred did he look up. As if wondering about dessert. Hadn’t Alice fed him up in the rainforest? No wonder they’d all thought he was only four years old, he was tiny! And, though wiry, he was thin.

‘Had enough, Rowdy?’ Georgie said cheerfully.

Rowdy?

That’s right. He hadn’t been speaking.

Why hadn’t he been speaking?

So they hadn’t known his name, the medical personnel who’d rescued him and checked him and brought him in, and the nickname they’d given him had apparently stuck. Luke found he quite liked it. It took care of the adversarial relationship in his own mind between Felixx and Frankie Jay, and provided a compromise that everyone could live with, at least for the time being.

Rowdy looked towards the doorway and saw him at last, then nodded slowly in answer to Georgie’s question. He’d had enough to eat was the impression. Well, maybe. Because if the word supper happened to be mentioned a little later on, he wouldn’t say no…

‘Hi, Rowdy,’ Luke said to him. He couldn’t believe it was such a quiet moment when there should be trumpets sounding or a huge orchestra reaching a crescendo. In the back of his mind he realised it was no accident that so few people were around. Charles and Georgie had engineered this whole scene by sending everyone else away.

To protect my child? Or to protect me?

Both, he decided, and was grateful. It was good of them. Not something he had the right to expect when he’d kept so much to himself since he’d come to Crocodile Creek. Janey wouldn’t believe that the charmer with the major ego from Royal Victoria Hospital could have morphed into such a workaholic loner.

‘This is Luke, Rowdy,’ Georgie said. ‘He’s…’ She threw him a panicky look. What did Rowdy know?

‘I’m a friend of your Auntie Janey,’ Luke supplied.

Rowdy smiled. Apparently he liked his Auntie Janey.

‘I’ve just been to see her.’ An image flashed into his mind of the way she’d looked against the hospital white of her pillow. Vulnerable yet calm. Lips a little dry. Eyes huge and shadowed. Never anywhere near as beautiful as Alice, but a lot more grounded and with an intelligence she could never hide. ‘She’s still pretty tired, but she’s doing a lot better.’

Rowdy pressed his lips together and nodded, and you’d have thought from his expression that Janey’s recovery was all down to him, that possibly the entire universe would end if this one kid didn’t breathe in the right way, or wipe his plate clean with the correct licked finger, or something. He had an air of crushing responsibility about him, and the pleasure of the hamburger was apparently already too far in the past to be of any help.

‘Hey…’ How did you reach out to a kid who didn’t speak. Why didn’t he speak? How did you create a bond, and trust, and a relationship?

Luke felt completely at sea. He’d been holding himself back for so long, he just wanted to unleash his emotions right now, on the spot. Crush his child in his arms. Say all these fervent, dramatic words.

I love you. I would die for you. I have missed you every single day. I taught you to laugh, do you know that? I used to blow raspberries on your tummy when you were three months old, and you used to gurgle and gurgle and laugh and laugh…

But he knew he couldn’t.

What the hell should he do instead?

He turned back to Georgie, helpless and close to tears. ‘I…uh…’

‘Hey, shall we head outside for a bit before it gets dark?’ she said cheerfully to Rowdy, who stood up at once. The weight on him seemed a little lighter again, but his silence was just as complete. She told Luke, ‘We had a team clearing up around the pool area yesterday, so the kids would have somewhere to play. The whole town is doing it—creating tiny pieces of order in the chaos. The beach is still a mess, the sand half cut away and covered in debris, and the surf is brown.’

He grabbed her arm just as she was about to follow Rowdy outside. ‘I don’t know what to do, Georgie.’

She stopped in her tracks. ‘You mean about the momentous reunion?’

‘Yes.’

‘Momentous isn’t what he needs, I don’t think.’

‘I know it isn’t, but what is there instead? It’s momentous for me, and I’m having a hard time getting past that to what else I could—’

‘Just…child care. Fun stuff. Minute by minute. Throw him a ball. Read him a story tonight. We have kids’ books here. Take it slow. We can’t swim yet, unfortunately, because the pool’s still full of debris and muck and chairs.’

‘I’ll clean it out tomorrow,’ Luke said. It was a resolution and a promise. He knew he hadn’t made himself a full part of the Croc Creek medical community in the months he’d been there. This felt like something he could grab hold of, something concrete that he could do. For Rowdy. For his fellow doctors. For himself.