CHAPTER SIX
IT WAS midnight before Jonas returned.
Em was wide awake when his car pulled in-not because she needed to be, but because she simply couldn’t sleep.
Everyone else was sleeping. There was no reason not to be asleep herself, and no reason why she should be nervous about having the children on her own. Jonas, she discovered, had even provided for night-shift child care.
Amy went home at six but if both doctors were called out, the arrangement was to open the connecting door to the hospital, alert the night staff, and the house could be treated as an extra kids’ ward, to be checked by the nurses at need.
It was so simple, Em thought. She just wished her feelings about Jonas were as straight forward.
Not so simple either were her feelings for the little boy in the crib beside her bed. Her bedroom was the logical place for him to be, she’d decided, a decision made even easier by the boys’ insistence that Bernard sleep in
She didn’t intend to have babies, she told herself for maybe the thousandth time in her life. So…she couldn’t attach herself to Robby. She couldn’t!
Just like she was never going to marry. There simply wasn’t room in her life for a family.
But she loved-
And Jonas.
This was all far, far too complicated!
And now here was Jonas, returning to make her heart do things that were completely foreign to her. Complicating her life still further.
She should stick her head under her pillow and force herself to sleep, she told herself crossly, but she could do no such thing.
Instead, as Jonas’s key turned in the lock, she padded through to the living room to meet him.
He was exhausted.
She’d left the wall lamp on in case one of the children wandered in the night. It threw enough light on Jonas’s face to show his facial features harshly etched, as if he was deeply exhausted. His eyes were dark and shadowed, and the expression on his face was grim.
‘Jonas?’ Her heart lurched in fear. Dear heaven, Anna… What had happened?
But he saw her in the shadows, and his face cleared like magic. ‘Em.’
‘How is it with Anna?’
He’d taken a step toward her-for a moment she thought he was going to reach for her-but the tone of her voice stopped him.
It was meant to. She was getting far too emotionally involved here. She had to stand back a bit.
She couldn’t take his proffered hands.
So she made her voice clinical-doctor enquiring of colleague about a mutual patient-and she waited until he pulled himself into order.
‘I… She’s fine.’
She relented, just a little. ‘But you’re not fine,’ she told him. ‘I can see that. Come and have a cup of tea and tell me about it.’
‘You couldn’t make that a brandy?’
‘It went as badly as that?’
‘No.’ His face twisted into a grimace of a smile. ‘Hell, no. It’s just that I’m exhausted.’ He shrugged. ‘I didn’t get much sleep last night.’
Of course he hadn’t-and at least she’d had the train journey for sleep. Once more, her heart twisted. Somehow she managed to keep her voice dispassionate, but there were still these darned undercurrents running through her. Undercurrents she didn’t know what on earth to do with.
She took refuge in practicalities, crossing to the dresser, finding the brandy and pouring him a drink.
Handing it to him was tricky. She had to cross her emotional barrier. Her closeness limit. But then she backed away and hitched herself up onto the dresser, to watch him from a safe distance.
‘I won’t bite, you know,’ he said conversationally, and she managed a smile at that.
‘Nope. But I like it here.’ She motioned to the armchair. ‘Sit down and tell me all.’
He sat, but his eyes didn’t leave hers. ‘You look like a pale blue, very odd sort of garden gnome,’ he complained. ‘A garden gnome after a spray-paint job. You don’t look doctor-like at all.’
She thought about that, looked down at her jogging suit and smiled. ‘Hmm. Don’t you approve of the night-time me? Would you like to come through to my surgery while I put on a white coat?’
He grinned. ‘That’s kinky, Dr Mainwaring. I think I’ll leave it like it is. In fact, I kind of like it. Gnome-like instead of doctor-like.’
She smiled again, but then there was silence. Things settled between them. Almost. Em was still achingly aware of the closeness of him. He was eight feet away. Or, if you looked at it another way, he was three short steps away…
‘Tell me about Anna,’ she managed, and waited some more.
He looked at her, with that strange, questioning look that told her he only half believed she wanted to know. He wasn’t accustomed to professional caring, she thought. He wasn’t used to country doctors who worried about their patients on a personal as well as a professional level.
‘It’s gone as well as it could have,’ he told her.
‘Which means?’ Once more, she waited.
‘Small tumour. As the X-rays showed, it’s less than a centimetre across. It was all contained in the soft tissue under the breast, and it doesn’t look like there’s any spread at all. They’ve taken a fair margin, but there’s no sign of dispersion. They haven’t had to touch the nipple, so she’ll be left with one breast just slightly smaller than the other. If the pathology shows the margins are clear, I doubt Anna will even need a prosthesis.’
‘That’s great. And the nodes?’
‘They’ve done a complete node clearance. It looks good.’ Jonas’s face cleared then, but he looked down into the brandy as if he was trying desperately to see into the future. ‘One node was slightly enlarged, but we have to wait until late tomorrow or the next day for the pathology results.’
‘Oh, Jonas…’
‘It’s a bloody long wait,’ he said.
‘Longer for Anna than for you.’ But still it was hard for him. Suddenly she could bear it no longer. Slipping off her perch, she took the steps to cross the barrier between them. She placed her hands on the back of his neck and started to massage, slowly, expertly easing the knots of tension across his shoulder blades.
He sighed at her touch, and leaned back into her, but she knew his mind was still on Anna.
‘You know, even if it has spread to the nodes, at stage two the prognosis is still positive.’
‘I know that.’ He shook his head. ‘There was someone else there,’ he said slowly, and Em thought this through. He sounded so weary it was as if conversation was an effort.
‘Waiting to hear how Anna went, do you mean?’
‘Yes. Just sitting, like me, waiting to know she’d come out of Theatre.’
Her brow wrinkled. ‘Was it Kevin?’ She’d thought Anna’s de facto husband had long gone.
He shook his head at that. ‘No chance. If it had been, I reckon I’d have strangled him with my bare hands. This guy’s name is Jim Bainbridge. Big guy. In his late thirties.’
‘I know Jim.’ Em’s hands were still doing their gentle massage and she could feel the knots of tension in Jonas’s shoulders slowly unravel. ‘Jim’s the local fire chief. He’s a really nice man. Almost pathologically shy, though.’ She thought about it and saw the connection. ‘He’s Anna’s nearest neighbour. They share a back fence.’
‘Mmm.’
