Ryan came in a couple of hours later.
‘Good evening,’ she said.
‘Good evening. Thank you for picking up Truffle. Janie texted me,’ he said.
‘It’s fine.’ She paused. ‘I made a veggie chilli—there’s a bowl in the fridge and half a packet of microwaveable rice.’
‘Thanks. That was good of you.’
‘It’s what we agreed.’ And, if she was honest with herself, she’d missed cooking for two. ‘And there’s a brownie on the plate.’
‘From Janie?’
‘No. I made some for the ward tomorrow. But I kept the chocolate well away from Truffle.’ She paused. ‘Parm told me about your case on Saturday.’
His face shuttered. ‘Yeah.’
‘That’s hard.’
‘Yeah.’
She folded her arms. For pity’s sake, would he give her a break? ‘I’m trying to be nice.’
He shrugged. ‘I’m a guy.’
She’d noticed, though she stuffed the awareness right back in the box where it came from. She wasn’t ready to notice his masculinity. She didn’t need any complications in her life.
‘And guys don’t talk about things? That’s so stupid.’ She shook her head. ‘Talking’s a good safety valve. It helps us cope when we have a case that breaks our hearts.’
He looked at her. ‘Or it makes us relive it.’
‘As you wish. But some food might make you feel better. I’ve fed Truffle, by the way. I looked on the pack and weighed out what they said was the middle of the range for a dog her size. I hope that was all right.’
‘Thank you.’ He looked surprised. ‘That was kind.’
‘I could hardly feed her veggie chilli,’ she pointed out drily.
‘No, because onions and garlic are toxic for dogs.’
‘Did you used to take your bad days at work out on Clara?’ she asked.
‘I...’ He closed his eyes for a moment. ‘No. Sorry. That isn’t fair of me.’
At least he admitted it. She pushed down the fact that Charlie had never admitted when he was in the wrong. Charlie was dead and buried, along with a lot of her hopes and dreams. ‘Sit down,’ she said. ‘I’ll microwave stuff, and you talk. Otherwise it’s going to fester in your head and you won’t sleep tonight.’
‘You’re bossy,’ he said.
She inclined her head in acknowledgement. ‘Sometimes you have to be.’ She busied herself sorting out the chilli and rice while he sat down, then put the bowl in front of him.
‘Thank you,’ he said. And then he didn’t speak for a while, except to mutter that the chilli was good.
When his bowl was empty, she folded her arms. ‘No brownie until you talk. And, just so you know, I make seriously good brownies. You’d be missing out on a lot.’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘Unless you’re holding out for a dipping sauce of hot mango sorbet to go with it?’
For a moment, she thought she might have gone too far, but then he laughed.
And oh, that was a mistake.
When he wasn’t being grumpy, Ryan McGregor was the most gorgeous man she’d ever met—including Charlie, in the years when she’d been young and starry-eyed and hopelessly in love. Ryan’s grey eyes stopped being stony when they were lit with amusement, his face changed entirely when he wasn’t being all brooding and severe, and his mouth suddenly looked warm and soft and tempting.
And she’d better stop thinking that way, because she wasn’t in the market for a relationship. This six months in Scotland was all about getting her head straight and finding herself again, getting back to a place where people would just stop pitying her.
‘I’ll pass on the hot mango. But yes, please, to a brownie.’ He paused. ‘Saturday was grim. I take it Parm told you that the baby didn’t make it?’
She nodded.
‘It’s the worst thing ever, when a baby dies,’ he said. ‘And it makes you feel so angry and so helpless, all at the same time. The parents were young and they didn’t get the right support.’ He closed his eyes briefly. ‘Part of me wants to see them locked up for ever—I hate losing patients, and circumstances like these make it worse—but it’s not my job to judge them. When you’ve got a baby who won’t stop crying so you haven’t slept properly for weeks, and you don’t know what to do to stop the baby crying, and you’re frustrated and miserable and desperate, sometimes you react in a way you wouldn’t do if you were in your right mind. If you don’t ask for help, or you don’t know how to...’ He blew out a breath.
‘Well. There’s a young man right now who has to live with the consequences of what he did for the rest of his life. A family ripped to pieces. A funeral to plan. Everybody loses.’
‘What happened?’ she asked softly.
‘The parents brought him in, saying he’d had a fit. They didn’t know what to do. I was trying to find out if anything like that had happened before, or if there were any warning signs they hadn’t known to look for, if there was a family history—and then the mum broke down. It seems the baby woke them a lot during the night and the dad went in when the baby started crying in the morning... And he shook the baby.’
Georgie felt sick. A momentary snap with life-changing consequences. How would they ever forgive themselves—or each other?
‘The eye exam showed retinal bleeding, but the blood tests didn’t show up any bleeding or genetic disorders,’ Ryan continued softly.
She knew what he was going to say next. ‘And the scans showed subdural haemorrhage and encephalopathy?’ Together with the retinal bleeding, it was the triad that usually proved non-accidental injury.
‘The surgeon tried a shunt to reduce pressure in the baby’s brain, but...’ He shook his head. ‘We need to do more to support vulnerable parents. Teach them that it’s fine to ask for help. That the crying won’t go on for ever, even though it feels like it—and, when it gets too much, then you just put the baby safely down
