LITMIR.BIZ

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he said.

      ‘Thanks,’ she said softly, lifting her hand from under his and replacing it on top, where it sat, warm and comforting, although wasn’t he supposed to be comforting her?

      She really should stop holding his hand. This was just a dinner between colleagues—old friends—not a date.

      But holding Will’s hand felt … nice. Pathetic word but it covered the situation.

      Very nice would be even better—

      A low ping of a message arriving on Will’s mobile broke into her thoughts, and the gravity on his face as he read the message told her it wasn’t good news.

      ‘I’m sorry, Alex, but your father’s had a setback—heart attack or stroke. His surgeon is on his way, but I’ll have to go.’

      ‘I’ll come with you,’ Alex said.

      Will was on his feet, asking the waiter to put the dinner on his account, shrugging into the jacket he’d hung on the back of his chair.

      ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said to Alex as he walked her to the door, slipping a comforting arm around her shoulders and giving her a hug. ‘His surgeon was worried about him undergoing the operation when he’d had a heart attack three years ago but the leaking heart valve was restricting his life and eventually would have killed him. Now this!’

      Will insisted on driving her to the hospital.

      ‘I can drop you back at your car later,’ he said.

      ‘No car. I got a cab from the airport earlier and walked from the hospital this evening,’ Alex whispered, while all the ‘what ifs’ clamoured in her head. She should have come sooner, tried harder to heal the wound between herself and her parents, at the very least thanked Dad for getting in touch with her in the end.

      Now it might be too late. A post-surgical patient was too fragile to have heroic lifesaving measures practiced on him.

      ‘He’d signed a health directive stating he didn’t want to be resuscitated,’ Will said quietly as he opened the door of his car for her.

      Alex found a wan smile.

      ‘I was just thinking he was hardly a candidate for the more heroic revival techniques.’

      Will patted her hand. ‘Let’s wait and see.’ He closed the car door and walked around the hood to get in beside her.

      They arrived at the ICU to find a flurry of activity as they prepared to take the patient to Radiography for a CT scan of his brain, a stroke now seeming the most likely cause of his deep unconsciousness.

      Alex stood beside her father’s bed, with Will on the other side.

      ‘If it’s a stroke it would have to be haemorrhagic, rather than a clot—he’d be on blood thinners post-op,’ Alex said, trying to think professionally so she could block out the emotion and nerves.

      Will nodded glumly. ‘Any bleed with already thinned blood could be catastrophic.’

      Alex watched helplessly as gentle hands stripped away the tubes and monitors before lifting her father onto the scanner’s stretcher and sliding his head into the machine.

      In ten minutes they had the answer, a subarachnoid haemorrhage where an unsuspected aneurysm had burst.

      Her father was returned to his bed and reattached to monitors and breathing apparatus, but Alex knew it was too late. Such a catastrophic bleed had only one outcome, especially in her father’s weakened post-op state.

      And heroics, had any been available, weren’t an option. Within an hour of them returning to the hospital her father was dead. Alex looked down at the man who, in her childhood, had been so good to her. It had been a strict upbringing, but Dad had been patient, and caring, and always kind.

      Until the end …

      She looked across the bed at Will, who’d stayed quietly there to support her.

      ‘I suppose I’ll have to organise a funeral in that damn church!’ she muttered, again using practicalities to keep the fear and pain at bay. ‘And face those women who spat at me when I took their precious Mr Spencer to court.’

      ‘I don’t think so,’ Will said, something in his voice making her look up from the figure on the bed. ‘I get to see the health directives of all patients coming into the ICU, and also any personal requests in the event of a patient’s death. Your father left very specific instructions. There were to be no services at all, from memory.’

      ‘Poor Dad,’ Alex whispered, then she turned away from the bed, aware that tears were close to falling and not wanting to give in to the mix of rage and grief inside her until she was on her own. ‘I’d better get home and go through his papers and just hope he left some instructions.’

      Will could hear the tears thick in her voice, and knew instinctively she wouldn’t want to cry in front of him. The teenager who’d lived next door was all grown up now, and he had to respect her adulthood for all he wanted to take her in his arms and comfort her.

      He insisted on driving her home, aware that if he missed the last ferry he’d have a long drive out to the highway and back into town, but he knew she’d been tired and jet-lagged before her father’s death had hit her, and he didn’t want her returning to that house of hurt on her own.

      He kept the headlights shining on the front of the house, while she dug around under pot plants for a spare key.

      ‘It’s always here,’ she muttered when he joined the search, and it was he who found the hollow rock among the pebbles on the path.

      He unlocked the door for her and pushed it open, wondering just how hard this would be for her. She was standing back, just a little, and he sensed she was gathering the nerve to walk into the place that had once been her home.

      He was about to suggest she stay somewhere else—at his mother’s place or a hotel in town—just for tonight when an unnerving voice yelled from the darkness.

      ‘That you, Bruce?’

      To Will’s surprise, Alex laughed and laughed, stepping past him and reaching out to switch on a light, calling, ‘Buddy, where are you? It’s Alex, Buddy.’

      The pink and grey galah shot like an arrow down the hall, landing on Alex’s head and dancing a little jig there before settling on her shoulder, turning his head a little to one side as he studied her, then letting loose with a loud ‘Who’s a pretty girl, then?’ as he nuzzled his head against her cheek.

      Now the tears she’d held in check spilled from her eyes, although through the dampness she was smiling.

      ‘Silly bird,’ she said, turning back to Will. ‘We’ve had him since he was a fledgling and we have no idea where he got the name Bruce, but no amount of patience on Dad’s part ever got him to say another name. He talks a lot of other rot, but he always comes back to Bruce.’

      The galah was brushing his feathers against the tears as if to dry them up, and seeing the love between the pair made Will’s heart twist, but at least the bird had made it easier for Alex to step back into her childhood home.

      She had found a tissue and finished the mopping up operations.

      ‘Thanks, Will, for everything,’ she said quietly. ‘Not only for now but for before, because that first year with the Armitages you were always around and so—so normal you helped me be normal too. I’ll be okay now I’m home—home with Buddy. I’ve left my luggage in the visitors’ room of the CCU, but I can collect it tomorrow. I imagine there’ll be a ton of forms to fill out and arrangements to be made.’

      He was being dismissed in the nicest possible way and although he’d have liked to help her—to save her the pain of making arrangements for her father whatever they might be—he knew he had to go.

      He touched her shoulder and, daring the bird to object, kissed her lightly on the cheek.

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