The Heart Surgeon's Secret Child. Meredith Webber

for her and Joe to lead independent lives but close enough to be there for Joe when Lauren was working.

      ‘I’m just going down the road, Mum,’ she said. ‘Something I need to talk about with the new surgeon. Can you watch Joe?’

      Her mother agreed to come down, used to the fact that, with the strong medical contingent in the neighbourhood, people popping in and out of each other’s houses was quite normal.

      Lauren let her mother in and was about to walk out the front door when she realised she was still in the old clothes she’d pulled on when she’d got home from work.

      So?

      She shook her head but raced back to her bedroom where she grabbed her favourite jeans and a dark green top that Theo had told her made her eyes look greener.

      Stupid, stupid, stupid. The words echoed in her head as she showered and rubbed herself dry. They grew louder as she brushed her hair until it shone, and louder still as she smeared foundation over her freckled skin, and touched lip-gloss to her lips.

      But what was wrong with looking as attractive as she could?

      She had no answer, although the excitement that had begun inside her when she’d decided to visit her new neighbour was now turning to a fluttery feeling in her stomach.

      More akin to panic than excitement.

      The make-up was for courage, she decided as she let herself out of the house and headed for number 26.

      But make-up or not, her footsteps faltered and doubts grew like mushroom clouds in her mind.

      He probably won’t be at home.

      She pushed her feet along the pavement, her reluctance now mixed with fear.

      He might not know.

      That was what was really worrying her.

      For ten years that part of her life had been a blank—retrograde amnesia caused by a hit on her head. And though most of her memory had returned over time, the period immediately preceding the injury—six weeks, her mother had told her—remained tantalisingly hidden away.

      What puzzled the doctors was that it was such a long period of time. It wasn’t uncommon for memory of the twenty-four or even forty-eight hours preceding a head injury to be lost, but six weeks?

      It might be due to some earlier trauma just before she was buried under the bricks, they suggested, but to Lauren that was hardly reassuring.

      Now here she was, about to talk to someone who had been there. But did she really want to find out what happened—did she want to fill in all the blanks?

      She did and she didn’t…

      She had to!

      Pushing open the gate to 26, her hands trembled.

      ‘Of course you want to know—you need to know,’ she told herself, angry that she was becoming so emotional about it. ‘And, anyway, he might not be able to tell you much—he might only have been passing through.’

      ‘Ah, so you still talk aloud to yourself.’

      The voice made her turn, to see Jean-Luc, green supermarket shopping bags dangling from his fingers, standing right behind her. She stared at him, unable to take in not the sight of him but the words he’d spoken. It wouldn’t have been more shocking if the camellia bush by the path had spoken.

      ‘You know that?’ she whispered, stiff with fear and a weird reluctance.

      ‘Come on, move along, don’t block the path!’

      A woman’s voice! The tall, blonde beauty was right behind Jean-Luc, so Lauren had no choice but to step off the path and let the couple pass by with their groceries.

      She looked behind them, expecting to see the trailing two point four children but none appeared, although knowing the new surgeon was married was a very different thing to supposing he would be.