LITMIR.BIZ

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England,’ she told him. ‘I couldn’t stay here. Paul’s mother blamed—’

      ‘Paul’s mother is a vituperative cow,’ he said solidly, and Tasha thought of Deidre and thought she couldn’t have put it better herself.

      ‘She thought I should have stopped Paul trying to climb.’

      ‘No one could ever stop Paul doing what he wanted to do.’

      ‘You knew him?’

      ‘Not much. My mum was happy for me to meet Paul but Paul’s mother...not. When Dad moved on from Deidre as well, it made things even more complicated. Dad was a serial womaniser. My mum coped okay—she got on with her life—but Deidre stayed bitter. She fought Dad’s access to Paul every inch of the way. Dad cared about both Paul and me, but with Paul he ended up sidelined. As we got older Paul and I used to meet a bit. We’d have a drink with Dad occasionally, but after Dad’s death we lost touch. Tasha, you need to drink.’

      ‘What...?’

      He took her cupped hands in his and propelled the mug to her lips. ‘Tea. Drink.’

      She drank and was vaguely surprised by how good it tasted. When had she last had tea?

      Come to think if it, when had she last eaten?

      Great. Collapsing would help no one.

      Neither would coming here. She should face this herself.

      She couldn’t. She needed... Tom.

      ‘So tell me why you’re here?’ he asked.

      She’d come this far but she didn’t want to tell him. She didn’t want to tell anyone.

      Telling people made it real. It couldn’t be real. It had to be a nightmare.

      ‘Tasha, spill,’ Tom said, in that gentle voice that did something to her insides. It made things settle. It made the battering ram in her heart cease for a moment.

      Though of course it started up again. Some things were inescapable.

      ‘My baby...’ she started, and Tom sat back a little and eyed her bulge.

      ‘Close to term?’

      ‘I’m due to deliver next week.’

      He nodded, as if it was entirely sensible that a close-to-term pregnant woman had decided to drive to Cray Point just to see him.

      She should keep talking.

      She couldn’t.

      ‘Do you have a partner?’ he asked tentatively when she couldn’t figure what to say next. ‘Is the baby’s dad around?’

      And finally she found the strength to make her voice work. ‘The baby’s father is Paul.’

      ‘Paul...’

      ‘He left sperm,’ she managed. She’d started. She had to find the strength to continue. ‘That last climb...I was so angry with him for going. There’d been two landslides on Everest, major ones. The Sherpas were pulling out for the season, as were most of the climbers, but he still insisted on going. Then he came home that last night before he left, laughing. “I’ve got it sorted, babe,” he told me. “I’ve been to the IVF place and left sperm. It’s all paid for, stored for years. If worst comes to worst you can have a little me to take my place.”’

      She paused, searching for the words to go on. ‘I think it was a joke,’ she said. ‘Maybe he thought it’d make me laugh. Or maybe he was serious—I have no way of telling. But I knew...I waved goodbye to him and somehow I knew that I’d never see him again.’

      She tilted her chin, meeting his look head on. ‘I was almost too angry to go to his funeral,’ she told him. ‘It was such a stupid, stupid waste. And then Deidre was in my face, blaming me, making nasty phone calls, even turning up at work to yell at me. So I left for England. You know I’m a doctor, too? I took a job in the emergency department in a good London hospital and I decided I’d put Paul behind me. Only then...then I sort of fell in a heap.’

      Tasha shrugged. How to explain the wall of despair that had hit her? The knowledge that her marriage to Paul had been a farce. That her judgement was so far off...

      She remembered waking one morning and thinking she was never going to trust again, and the thought had been followed by emptiness. If she couldn’t trust again, that excluded her from having a family. A baby. The thought had been almost overwhelming.

      ‘So you decided to use the sperm,’ Tom said, as if he was following her thoughts, and she felt a surge of anger that was pretty much directed at her naïve self.

      ‘Why not?’ she flashed. ‘Paul left it to me in his will. I could bring our baby up knowing the good things about Paul, feeling like it knew its dad. It seemed better—safer—than using an unknown donor, so I decided I’d be brave enough to try.’

      And then she hugged her swollen belly, and the tears at last welled over.

      ‘I wanted this baby,’ she whispered. ‘I wanted her so much...’

      Wanted. Past tense. The word was like a knife to her heart. She heard it and tried to change it.

      ‘I want her,’ she said, and her voice broke on a sob, but there was no changing what the scans had shown.

      And Tom leaned forward and put his hands over hers, so there were four hands cupped over her belly.

      ‘Has your baby died, Tasha?’

      And there it was, out there in all its horror. But it couldn’t be real. Please...

      ‘Not yet,’ she managed, and his grip on her hands tightened. I wonder if this is the way he treats all his patients, she thought, in some weird abstracted part of her brain that had space for those things. He was good. He was intuitive, empathic, caring. He’d be a good family doctor.

      A good friend?

      ‘If anything happened to me, Tasha, I reckon you could go to him.’

      Paul had been right, she thought. For just about the only time in his life, Paul had been right.

      Oh, but laying this on him...

      And he was a Blake. He even looked like his brother.

      ‘Tell me,’ he said, and it was an order, calm and sure, a direction she had to follow no matter how she was feeling. And she took a deep breath because this was what she’d come for. She had no choice but to continue.

      ‘My baby’s a girl,’ she whispered. ‘Emily. I’ve named her Emily after my grandma. I had to come back to Australia to access Paul’s sperm. I’m Australian and I have Aussie health insurance so I stayed here during my pregnancy. I’ve been doing locums. Everything was fine until the last ultrasound. And they picked it up. She has hypoplastic left heart syndrome. The left side of her heart hasn’t developed. That...that’s bad enough but I thought...well, the literature says there’s hope and there are good people in Melbourne. With the Norwood procedure there’s a good chance of long-term survival. I hoped. But two days ago I went for my last visit to the cardiologist before delivery and the ultrasound’s showing an atrial septal defect as well. And more. Nothing’s right. Everything’s wrong. While she’s in utero, she doesn’t need her heart to pump her lungs, so she’s okay, but as soon as she’s born...’

      She took a deep breath. ‘As soon as she’s born the problems will start. The cardiologist says I need to wait as long as possible before delivery so she’s strong enough to face the faint possibility of surgery, but I’m not to hope for miracles. He says she’ll live for a little while but it’ll be days. Or less. The defect is so great...’

      Strangely her voice was working okay. Strangely the words didn’t cut out. It was like the medical side of her was kicking in, giving her some kind of armour against the pain. Or maybe it was simply that the pain was so unbearable that her body had thrown up

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