Hearts Of Gold. Meredith Webber

he’d left the ball in her court. It was up to her to admit they’d met before, or to carry on the charade. Thank heaven it was Friday and she had two whole days before she had to see him again.

      Before she had to sort out the muddle in her mind…

      ‘I know I don’t have to go to work, Henry, and I know going up there carries a risk of running into Alex, but it’s early—barely six-thirty—and not many people will be out of bed, and I want to see for myself how Baby Ross is doing. Maybe they’ve even decided on a name for him. I’ll just slip up there, then come back and take you for a walk.’

      Lacking a waggable tail, Henry made do with wiggling his hindquarters on the floor at the sound of his favourite word, but he obviously hadn’t taken much notice of the first part of the conversation because the moment Annie stood up, he fetched his lead and stood hopefully beside her.

      ‘Put it down before it goes all mushy,’ she told him, then added, ‘Later,’ knowing it was one word he did understand. Food, walk, later, fetch—he had quite a vocabulary.

      She walked to the hospital, adding words to her list of Henry’s vocabulary, deliberately not peering towards the front of the house where Phil and Alex resided.

      Fancy buying a house when you were only here for twelve months! Although houses in this area were a good investment…

      Thinking about the house was better than thinking about the man, or thinking about the situation the two of them were now in, so she mused on why someone might buy a house for a short-term stay all the way to the hospital and up to the fourth floor.

      ‘I’m sure he’s more alert than he was,’ Madeleine Ross greeted her when she walked into the room.

      The sister on duty had reported a quiet night, and assured Annie all the monitor results were positive.

      ‘It was weird, working in here on my own and with only one baby,’ she’d added. ‘Though staff from the special care unit next door, your old stamping ground, kept popping in to see me.’

      ‘Make the most of the quiet time,’ Annie warned her. ‘You know how hectic it can get, and I have a feeling that will happen sooner rather than later.’

      ‘Once word gets out Dr Attwood is operating here, you mean?’

      Annie nodded. She’d had her doubts but referrals were coming thick and fast, from as far afield as Indonesia and the Middle East.

      She sat with Madeleine until Ben returned with coffee and a doughnut for their breakfast, and was about to leave when Ben asked her to stay.

      ‘We want to ask you something,’ he said. ‘About the baby, but not about his health. About his name.’

      Annie waited.

      ‘It’s like this,’ he said, so slowly she wondered if he was having trouble finding even simple words. ‘We had names picked out, but now they don’t seem right…’ There was a long pause, then Ben looked at his wife as if he didn’t know how to continue.

      Annie came to his rescue.

      ‘They were names for a healthy baby—a different baby you’d pictured in your mind.’

      She smiled at both of them, and touched her hand to Madeleine’s shoulder.

      ‘It’s OK to feel that way. In fact, it’s healthy to grieve for that baby you didn’t have. It’s natural for you to have a sense of loss.’

      ‘It’s not that I don’t love him,’ Madeleine hastened to assure her, touching the still arm of the little mortal on the bed.

      ‘I know that,’ Annie said. ‘Of course you do. You probably love him more because he needs so much help. But you can change your mind about his name—call him something different.’

      ‘We’d like to call him Alexander, after Dr Attwood,’ Madeleine said shyly, and Annie smiled, wondering how many little tots with congenital heart disease were trotting around America, proudly bearing the same name.

      ‘I’m sure he’d be honoured,’ she said, and heard a voice say, ‘Who’d be honoured, and by what?’

      He was there again—as if she was able to conjure him up just thinking or talking of him. Like a genie in a bottle. Not a good thing when most of the genie-in-a-bottle stories she’d heard had terrible endings!

      ‘I’ll let Madeleine tell you,’ Annie said, and she slipped away.

      It had been stupid to come up here. She’d needed two whole days—two months? Two years?—to work out how to tackle the recognition thing. And the kiss! Now here he was, back within touching distance again. Or he had been until she’d fled the room.

      Determined to head straight home and thus avoid any chance of having to walk with him, she was leaving the ward when the sister called to her. A different sister, seven o’clock change of shifts having taken place while she was in Baby Ross’s room.

      ‘We’ve a new admission coming in. Sixteen-month-old baby, Amy Carter, shunt put in to deliver blood to her lungs at birth, but now something’s gone wrong. Dr Attwood’s called in all the theatre staff. He’s briefing them in half an hour.’

      The information upset Annie. She should have been the first one called so she could contact the necessary staff. She’d been at home until half an hour ago. She had her pager.

      She touched her hand to her hip and realised she didn’t have it! How could she have been so careless?

      She didn’t like to think about the answer to that, because she knew it involved distraction, and the reason for the distraction was so close.

      But she was here now—she could be involved.

      Alex came out of Baby Ross’s room—Alexander’s room?—at that moment and she turned to him, ready to confess her mistake, but he did little more than nod at her before entering the next room where, Annie guessed, Amy Carter would be nursed.

      Annie followed him, and saw him peering at the X-rays in the light cabinet on the wall.

      ‘You’ve heard we’ve an urgent referral on the way?’

      He didn’t wait for an answer, but pointed to a small tube clearly visible in the cloudy murk of the X-ray.

      ‘The cardiologist sent these on ahead. I believe in shunts—I use them myself in a lot of cases. You can insert them through a thoracotomy, rather than cracking open the chest, which is far less traumatic for the infant, and by putting in a shunt you give the baby time to grow, and give the heart muscle time to firm up so it’s not like sewing mousse.’

      He had his finger on the shunt, as if he could feel the small plastic tube itself rather than the image of it.

      ‘The other school of thought, of course, is to do all the repairs as early as possible—do a switch like we did on Baby Ross within days of discovering the problem. That saves the baby another operation later, and is possibly easier on the parents in the long run, but to me it’s still a huge insult to a newborn infant and the softness of the tissues can lead to complications. Stitches not holding, that kind of thing.’

      He was frowning as he spoke, voicing a debate that must often rage in his head, but when he’d switched off the light he turned and smiled at Annie.

      ‘I’m operating in an hour. As you’re here, do you want to watch? I didn’t call or page you because I felt you deserved a day off, and you’ve seen one switch. This will be similar.’

      ‘I’d like to watch.’ Mental apology to Henry—did he understand ‘later’ was a very indefinite concept?

      ‘Good.’

      Alex walked away, leaving Annie wondering just where things stood between them. This was not the post-second-kiss conversation she’d expected to have. Had he forgotten what he’d said last night?

      Or