Unknown Read Online Free PDF

styles. Wouldn't you?'
    'It's up to you, Bronny.'
    'Well, I would.'
    So, after the second week, Lucy didn't wear a uniform, and Bronwyn had been right. Lucy's own clothing suited her far better, and she always looked fresh and nice.
    'And if I hadn't been so concerned with Bronwyn and the baby, perhaps I'd have sensed that there was danger, that I had the capacity to find her attractive. Hell, I didn't think I had a particle of sensuality left in me then! If I'd seen it coming, remotely seen it coming, maybe I wouldn't have cracked that night...'
    It was impossible and useless to conjecture on the subject. He could never truly know. And, until Friday, it had ceased to matter. It had been in the past.
    Now, however...
    He spent a few pointless moments rewriting reality. If Lucy could have found the right man to be Charlotte's father. If he'd encountered her on her doorstep on Friday evening as a happily married woman, then it would all be easy, wouldn't it?
    At the heart of his complicated feelings about Lucy was simple gratitude—gratitude that she'd done so much to ease Bronwyn's death and dying, and to nurture Ellie's fragile new life. Gratitude that, whatever she'd felt that night in his arms, she'd somehow understood enough of what he'd felt to take herself out of his life with no drama.
    If she'd been married to Charlotte's father, he could have evolved a casual sort of friendship with both Lucy and her husband, based on their daughters' friendship. As the situation stood, however, and with the prospect of seeing her frequently at work, he had the strong intuition that it wasn't going to be so easy.
    'Look at me going underwater, Daddy!' Ellie commanded, then ducked beneath the water and held her breath for a whole five seconds.
    'Fabulous!' Malcolm told her. 'You're getting so brave about that now. Remember last summer when you wouldn't do it at all?'
    'I'd only turned five last summer,' she answered, scorning her younger self.
    Malcolm hid a smile, and felt his priorities shift back into place. Ellie mattered. And if Lucy was going to matter in future, it would be as the mother of Ellie's friend. If he kept that fact in view, then neither of them...none of them...had anything to worry about.
    Taking his mobile out of the beach bag, he dialled Jenny Boyd's phone number.
    *
    'Normally, you'd get a better orientation than this on your first day,' Malcolm apologised hurriedly to Lucy the following Monday morning at eight-fifteen.
    He looked tired, the phone on his cluttered desk was ringing, and already there was a junior doctor in the doorway, anxious for his presence at a patient's bedside. It was typical of the man, Lucy considered, that he hadn't mentioned on Friday that he was, in fact, the head of this entire department.
    He had over forty medical and administrative staff under his supervision, rotating to cover the full twenty-four hours, seven days a week. His department was the first port of call in any emergency, major or minor. Ultimately, when patients died here, as inevitably they sometimes did, he was the one who had to ask himself whether he and his staff had done everything they could.
    'Dr Lambert...?'
    'I'm coming,' he promised the young doctor.
    'Look, I know about the bushfires,' Lucy told him.
    'It's not only the fires, unfortunately,' he explained. 'There's been a serious crash involving a minibus and a van, and we've got another patient who's arrested twice in the past half-hour. I've been in here since two a.m. Look, I'm going to put you in the cubes and free up someone else to work the trolleys for today,' he went on quickly. 'If things get quiet, go over to Personnel, as you're supposed to do, and fill in all the forms and so forth, but meanwhile I just can't spare you—I'm sorry—and Personnel will have to lump it.'
    'The cubes...'
    'Non-urgent cubicles. Normally, given your experience, you won't be doing those, but as yet, since you don't know our procedures, our staff—'
    'It's fine, Dr