Fairytale on the Children's Ward. Meredith Webber

all need to be there. It was a very small room. Angus was apparently open to the suggestion, for he was already holding the door for Clare.

      But it was Oliver she should be talking to. As hateful as his words had been earlier, she had to tell him! Not that she could tell him in a hospital canteen…

      Although where could she tell him?

      Was there an optimal place for telling a man he had a nine-year-old daughter?

      ‘Yes, I’m glad that first one’s over,’ she said to Angus in reply to his polite conversation about the op. But as they reached the canteen she knew she had to stop asking herself impossible questions about the Oliver situation and toss the conversational ball back to Angus.

      ‘I’m using the same machine, but did you find the set-up much different to the way you worked in the States?’

      After that it was easy, normal conversation about work, but although Angus was a very good-looking man with dark hair and eyes and a soft Scottish accent that should be sending ripples up her spine, neither looking at nor listening to him did anything to her.

      He was a nice man, she decided, a little reserved and without the magnetism that drew her to Oliver, but very nice all the same.

      Magnetism?

      Oliver?

      Wasn’t her reaction to him—the physical attraction thing—just a hangover from the past?

      And how could she even think of being attracted to a man who thought so little of her?

      There were no ripples up her spine from Angus because she was totally spineless!

      ‘I really should go back,’ she said as, coffee finished, the conversation dried up. She needed to escape, preferably to a dark cave where she could hide out while she sorted out her life.

      Or at least until she worked out how to tell Oliver her child was also his.

      A week ago, life had seemed so simple, been such an adventure. She and Em coming back to Australia, setting up house, just the two of them, for the first time. Now everything had erupted into chaos.

      ‘Are you all right?’ Angus asked, and Clare realised she’d been twisting her table napkin so tightly it had curled into something that looked very like a miniature noose.

      ‘Nervous about the baby,’ she said, hoping her voice wouldn’t reveal her lie.

      ‘So, let’s check on him together,’ Angus said.

      Together was good. She wouldn’t be on her own if they ran into Oliver.

      Which they didn’t, although the baby—now named Bob—had his parents with him at the moment, so Clare contented herself with sitting by the nurse on duty at his monitor, watching the information feeding out from all the paraphernalia attached to him.

      Oliver didn’t reappear, which was both a relief and a cause of anxiety. She had to talk to him!

      But just imagining that conversation filled her with such apprehension she found herself literally shaking. Bob was doing well and she had no excuse to hang around so she made her way to the team tea room, thinking another strong coffee might settle her nerves and, once they were settled, surely her brain would start working again.

      No, that was the coward’s way out. Oliver wasn’t in the PICU, but he’d have an office somewhere in the unit rooms. On his first full day of work, he wouldn’t be seeing patients but he was likely to be in his office, reviewing files of children he would be seeing later in the week, patients he’d be taking over from the specialist who’d left the team.