Sarah's Gift. Caroline Anderson

was lounging in the kitchen doorway, a beer dangling from his finger, an indulgent smile playing around his lips. He turned to her. ‘How long have these two been married?’ he asked softly.

      She peered past him to where they were wrestling with the corkscrew and giggling, and smiled. ‘Just over a year.’

      ‘It shows,’ he said drily. ‘Shall we start taking things through to the dining room?’

      ‘Good idea.’ They loaded up with salads, plates of cold meat and cheese, steaming garlic bread and hot jacket potatoes crisped in the oven, and then went back for Ryan and Ginny.

      ‘If you could bear to drag yourselves apart,’ Sarah said from the doorway, ‘we’ve taken everything through. All we need is the wine, one more chair and you two.’

      They separated reluctantly, and as Sarah looked at the soft flush on Ginny’s cheeks and the possessive glow in Ryan’s eyes she thought inexplicably of Matt.

      Heat raced through her, taking her breath away.

      ‘You’re mad,’ she muttered to herself, and turned to find her nose almost on Matt’s broad and rather solid chest.

      ‘Excuse me?’ he murmured.

      ‘Nothing. Come on, let’s eat.’

      She went back into the dining room, herded the children onto their seats and sat down amongst them, automatically stopping fights, pouring them half-glasses of water from the jug and taking two of the four pieces of garlic bread away from Gus.

      ‘But I like it!’ he protested.

      ‘So does everyone else. You have to share—and, anyway, if you have all that, you won’t have room for all the other lovely things.’

      The others were seating themselves during this exchange, and Ryan turned to Matt with a laugh. ‘You can see why we love having Sarah here, can’t you? She’s just a natural with them.’

      ‘So I see.’

      She could feel his eyes on her, seeing her, all the way through their meal. She had never felt more watched, and yet every time she looked up he was looking somewhere else, talking to someone else, spearing a piece of salad, handing someone something—never looking at her.

      And yet she knew—she just knew—that he was.

      What she didn’t understand was why.

      A new SHO on her A and E rotation was attached to Sarah the next day, so she hardly saw Matt. She missed him, especially since the young woman was struggling to deal with the new job.

      Sarah had to prompt her to X-ray a person who had come in, having had a minor shunt in her car and struck her head on the steering-wheel.

      She’d been brought in by a friend, and so ambulance staff hadn’t had a chance to apply a neck brace. Jo Bailey, the new doctor, asked her how she felt and treated her like a minor head injury patient, while Sarah, gradually realising that a cervical examination wasn’t going to be forthcoming, quickly whipped out an X-ray request form, filled it in and slid it across the desk.

      ‘Dr Bailey, if you could just sign this while I put the neck brace on, I’ll take the patient round to X-Ray for you.’

      Dr Bailey, confused and ready to protest, caught Sarah’s eye and subsided. She signed the form, handed it back and muttered, ‘Thanks.’ Sarah slid past her with the patient on the trolley.

      ‘Any time,’ she said with a smile and a wink, and stifled a sigh until she was out of earshot.

      The result was clear, but it might not have been following a rapid deceleration and subsequent whiplash, and it wouldn’t hurt the doctor to learn before it was too late. They had coffee shortly afterwards, and Jo Bailey thanked her again.

      ‘I don’t know what I was thinking about. I know you have to check the neck—I must have been cuckoo.’

      ‘There’s a lot to remember all at once,’ Sarah consoled her, and then they were off again.

      Now, however, she was erring on the side of caution, ordering tests that would bleed patients dry and clog up the labs and X-Ray for weeks. Sarah, once again taking over, edited the requests a little, except in cases where she herself felt out of her depth, and then they called on Jack or Ryan.

      When Ryan came, Matt came too, and so she got to see him. At one point he paused beside her and, under cover of a screaming child, he glanced at Jo Bailey and raised an expressive brow. ‘Is she safe?’

      Sarah nearly laughed. ‘I have no idea. I suspect not. It may just be nerves, but I think she needs to be attached to someone medical who can stop her using up the region’s financial resources single-handed.’

      ‘That bad, huh?’

      ‘Easily. Either that or she forgets to X-ray necks.’

      ‘Holy-moly. She’s a liability.’

      ‘Tell me about it. Talk to Ryan—if she works with him she won’t come to any trouble.’

      ‘He doesn’t need us both.’

      Sarah laughed. ‘I can nursemaid you—you just use the wrong words.’

      He mock-bristled. ‘They are not wrong!’

      ‘Just not English. See what he says.’

      ‘I will.’ He tapped her on the nose. ‘You’re prettier than he is.’

      She blushed a little but he’d gone, whisked away by another call, and she was left alone with the screaming child and Jo.

      Within half an hour they’d swapped, under the pretext of Ryan wanting Jo to see some action in Resus, and Matt was with Sarah. After that last remark she wasn’t sure it was a good idea, but after a few minutes she decided it had just been another joke.

      She felt perversely disappointed, not that there was much time for flirting. They were rushed off their feet, and she was only too glad to be working alongside someone who knew what they were doing.

      She soon got used to him saying ‘CBC’, ‘EKG’ and so on and, as on the day before, she found they worked together almost without the need for words.

      At one point they were working in Resus alongside Ryan and Jo Bailey, and Sarah was hugely relieved to have Matt opposite her and not Jo. A woman was admitted with severe head injuries, including a massive scalping injury, due to her hair being caught in machinery. Her face had been torn apart, her skull compressed on one side, and there was no chance for her.

      ‘Ouch—bad hair day,’ Matt winced, and whistled under his breath. ‘Right, let’s see if we can stop this bleeding and assess her consciousness level. Do we have a GCS score yet?’

      The Glasgow Coma Scale was an international scale used to evaluate the degree of consciousness of a patient, and there was no language barrier. There was no score, either, because the ambulance that had brought her in had had more important things to worry about—like keeping her alive.

      Sarah wasn’t sure if they would succeed for much longer. They tried, anyway, because she was young and fit and it just seemed a lousy way to go, but it was hopeless.

      They shocked her, they injected her with a cocktail of drugs to prompt her heart, but to no avail.

      ‘This is hopeless,’ Matt said, shaking his head.

      ‘Want to stop?’

      ‘No, but there’s no point going on. She’s a corpse, basically. What the hell are we trying to achieve?’

      Sarah shut her eyes and sighed. ‘You’re right. Let’s give up. We might even get time for tea if we stop now.’

      ‘Her husband’s here,’ someone said around the door, and Matt rolled his eyes.

      ‘Wow. I’ll go get him, shall I? I expect he’d like to see her—one last fond look.’