‘Would you collect Summer for me?’
‘What?’ Was he crazy? Surely he was kidding. ‘I’ve never met your daughter,’ she retorted, but even in her flustered state she realised there was something he hadn’t considered. ‘I doubt the school would send her home with a complete stranger. Why don’t you go and I’ll start the last case?’
‘The last case is a breast lift.’
Abi knew that, she was supposed to assist for that surgery too.
‘How many of those have you done?’ he asked, and judging by his tone she knew he already knew the answer.
Exactly none. She stared at Damien and her silence was all the answer he needed.
‘That’s what I thought. I need to finish off here. Would you please collect her?’
‘Why doesn’t Summer’s mother pick her up?’
‘That’s a good question,’ he replied with a sigh. ‘She was supposed to but apparently she is on her way to New York.’
Apparently? ‘New York? Didn’t you know?’ Had it just slipped his mind that his wife was away and he was supposed to be picking up his daughter? Was it something he forgot on a regular basis and now he was trying to make it her problem?
Abi didn’t think so. It didn’t seem to fit with his character and he seemed to be genuinely upset and to be struggling for solutions. She believed this had come out of the blue for him too.
Damien shook his head. ‘Brooke told the school that she told me I would have to make arrangements but I haven’t heard from her. This is the third time she has done this.’
‘What did you do the other times?’ she asked, as the anaesthetist began to reverse the anaesthetic.
‘Once I collected her and another time she went home with a friend. But school finished forty-five minutes ago so those mothers would have left, and I don’t have any of their numbers. Please, Abi, I wouldn’t ask you if I had any other options. My daughter is five years old. You remember being five, don’t you? I don’t want her to feel abandoned.’
That word cut Abi to the core. Abandoned was the one word to use if he wanted her sympathy and cooperation. But he couldn’t have known that. That would be impossible. It had just been a comment. But of course she remembered being five.
She also remembered having no one to pick her up. Day after day she would get herself home from school. On a good day it had been because her mother had been working, but on a bad day her mother would be passed out on the sofa, hungover or drunk.
Abi had had no one to rely on when she’d been five or seven or nine. She’d had no one until she’d joined the army at seventeen and had gone to medical school. She’d had no one really until she’d met Mark and even then she’d still ended up alone. There had never been anyone she could rely on. She knew exactly what Damien was talking about.
She started to cave in. ‘I’d do it but I really don’t think the school would let me.’
Damien had an answer for that. ‘I’ll ring them and I’ll get Freya to email your staff ID photo to the office. You’ll just have to show some ID when you get there. Please? I don’t know what else to do. The school is ten minutes from home. If you could just pick her up and I’ll collect her from your place as soon as I’m done here.’
He knew she lived in his neighbourhood, which would put her home close to the school. His plan made sense but Abi didn’t know if she could do it, although it was hard to refuse when he was looking so distressed and imploring her with his dark, dark eyes. If she acquiesced she knew it would be stressful. Could she handle it?
But she remembered what it felt like to be five years old and know that no one was coming for you, knowing that you were on your own. She’d hated that feeling and she knew she couldn’t put someone else in that position.
She sighed and said, ‘Let me make a call.’ She threw her gloves and mask into the bin as Damien signed the surgical notes. She was careful not to agree to his crazy plan just yet. She still didn’t know if she was capable of agreeing to his suggestion. She needed a second opinion. She needed to run it past her psychologist but that wasn’t a conversation she was prepared to have in public. She pushed open the door into the scrub room and went to fetch her cellphone.
She dialled the emergency number, the one Caroline had promised to always answer. Abi wasn’t sure what Caroline termed an emergency exactly but, for her, going unprepared into a new environment that was not only large but filled with people and knowing she would have to introduce herself to strangers without time for any research or reconnaissance definitely fell into the emergency assistance category. Abi had no idea how she was going to manage this and she needed Caroline to give her some contingencies to help her cope.
Caroline answered on the third ring and Abi explained the situation.
‘I assume,’ Caroline said, after listening to Abi’s predicament, ‘that you would actually like to do this favour for your boss?’
Would she? Part of her worried that if she agreed she would be setting a precedent and part of her also worried that she was letting him take advantage of her. But she could also remember what it was like to be left to find her own way home because her mother was incapable, again. Back then nobody had noticed if you weren’t collected from school, lots of kids made their own way home, but not many primary school children had that freedom now. They were bundled off to after-school care before anything untoward could happen to them. Abi remembered all too well that feeling of abandonment and if she could help by collecting Summer she would. It didn’t matter that Summer didn’t know her; she imagined just knowing her dad had sent someone would be better than being forgotten. Abi wasn’t doing this for Damien.
‘I’m not doing this for my boss, I’m doing it for his daughter,’ she explained. ‘She was expecting her mother to collect her and I don’t want her to feel that she’s not important.’ Abi knew that Caroline understood her reasons and where they stemmed from. They’d been over a lot of old, and new, ground together and Abi didn’t have many secrets left that Caroline hadn’t heard. Damien, however, was a new topic and not one they’d discussed, and neither did she intend to. Abi felt it was best, safest to leave him in the category of work colleague. There was no reason to go into any detail about him, he was of no consequence. ‘But I have never met Summer, I don’t know the school, I don’t know the staff and they don’t know me. It’s making me nervous.’
‘The school is close to your house, though?’ Caroline asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Why don’t you go home and collect Jonty?’ the psychologist suggested. ‘Take him with you. You’ll feel better and if Summer likes dogs it will break the ice with her too.’
Abi took a deep breath. She could do this. ‘That’s a good idea. Thanks.’
She felt better when she ended the call, far more confident. This might just work.
* * *
Abi pulled her 4x4 into the school car park. The building was long and low and stretched out before her, but fortunately the car park was virtually empty and she was able to put her car two places from the front entrance. She took a moment to survey her surroundings, not that she really expected any danger but it was a habit she had formed over the past six months and it was proving hard to shake. There was no one around and she could see nothing suspicious. She was in the middle of suburban LA, she reminded herself. It wasn’t Kabul and she was unlikely to encounter a suicide bomber here. But her paranoia still got the better of her and she reached across to her right and opened the passenger door, letting Jonty jump out first. He sniffed the air and once she was certain he was showing no signs of distress she took a deep breath and stepped