And in their hands was a little boy called Jessie. Redheaded. Freckled on the tiny part of his face that wasn’t damaged. He was intubated, heavily anaesthetised. He’d been lucky he hadn’t drowned in his own blood.
Every person in the room was totally tuned to what they were doing. This was the most important job in the world, saving a child’s life … piece by piece …
Lily thought briefly of a case she’d worked on three years back. A professor in Adelaide, trying to save a man’s lips. Problems with drainage afterwards. Like Luke, the professor’s total attention had been caught in what he was doing, but afterwards he’d talked through what might have helped.
She turned to the closest junior nurse.
‘Slip out and find Dr Lockheart,’ she said. ‘Tell her we may need medical leeches. Tell her priority one.’
‘I don’t have authority …’ the girl said, casting a worried glance at Luke, but Luke’s attention was all on what he was doing. He might not have the head space to think beyond his current actions, Lily thought.
The anaesthetist, the registrar, the senior scrub nurse were totally focused as well.
‘Just say leeches are needed urgently,’ she told the nurse. There was no need to say the agency temp had ordered them. ‘Be it on my head if they’re not.’
And it would be her head, too, she thought. Leeches were kept in only a few medical facilities around the country. Her order might well involve helicopter, urgency, cost.
So sack me, she thought grimly, and went back to what she was doing. Elaine, the senior scrub nurse, needed to back off a little; there was only so long that she could hold the suction tube steady, that her fingers would do as she bid.
Luke’s fingers didn’t have a choice, they had to keep going.
‘Lily, move in,’ Luke growled, and he’d sensed it too, that the older nurse was faltering.
She moved in and kept on going.
Two hours later her decision was vindicated. The flap of skin was finally closed around the nostril and left lip. Luke was working under the little boy’s eyelid but he rechecked the lip and swore.
‘The blood’s coagulating,’ he said. ‘I need drainage. Hell, I didn’t think we’d get this far.’
‘We have leeches on hand if you can use them,’ she said diffidently, and the nurse in the background was already unfastening the canister.
‘How the … ?’ Luke was momentarily distracted. ‘Did Dr Lockheart order these?’
‘Lily did,’ the junior said, and grinned, the atmosphere in the theatre lightening as the outlook improved. ‘She’s not bad for an agency temp, is she?’
‘Not bad at all,’ Luke said, and caught Lily’s gaze and held, just for a moment, a fleeting second, before he went back to work.
Lily went back to work, too, but she was flushing under her mask.
Not bad at all.
His glance had unnerved her.
Luke Williams was a womanising surgeon, she told herself. She was here as a temporary nurse, knowing no one, wanting to know no one.
But his gaze …
It did something to her insides. Twisted …
She didn’t have time for anything to twist.
Work. Anonymity. Just do what comes next.
At five in the morning she was totally drained.
‘Go home,’ Dr Lockheart told her. ‘We’ve thrown you in at the deep end tonight. I know you’re not off duty until six but no one’s expecting anything more of you now.
‘And if you’d like to change agency nursing for permanent nursing at the Harbour, you’d be very, very welcome,’ Elaine said warmly. ‘Dr Williams is already asking that you be made a permanent member of the plastics team.’
‘I don’t want to be a permanent member of anything,’ she said wearily, and went to change and fetch her gear from her locker.
Home.
Problem. She didn’t actually have a home. Not until ten o’clock.
She’d arrived in Sydney yesterday, fresh from her mother’s dramas, wanting only to escape.
Her mother was, even by Lily’s dutiful daughter standards, an impossible woman. She drifted from drama to drama, and the small town they lived in had labelled her as trash, for good reason. She wasn’t trash, Lily thought. She was … needy. She needed men. And in between needing men, she needed Lily.
This last fling, though, had pushed the townspeople to the limit. It had pushed Lily to the limit. Two days ago—had it really been only two days ago?—the wife of the local vicar, a woman who was also the head of the hospital board, had stormed into Lighthouse Cove hospital and slapped her. As if her mother’s actions were Lily’s fault.
‘Get your mother away from my husband. You and your mother … She’s a slut and you’re no better. She needs a leash! You think you can be a respectable nurse in this town while your mother acts as the town’s whore?’ She’d slapped Lily again. A couple of patients’ relatives had had to pull her away and she’d collapsed in shock and in fury. Lily had caught her as she’d fallen, stopped her from hurting herself, but there had been no gratitude. No softening of the vitriol.
Why would there be?
‘Get out of my sight,’ the woman had hissed as she’d recovered. ‘Get out of our hospital. Get out of our town.’
She’d had no right to sack her. It was her mother who’d played the scarlet woman, not her.
But in a tiny town distinctions blurred.
She’d sat in the nurses’ station with her stomach cramping, feeling sick, knowing she couldn’t live with this stress a moment longer. She was being unfairly tarred with the same brush as her mother, and she knew she didn’t deserve it. But it was a small town and so far she’d always stuck up for her mother … that couldn’t go on.
On the way home she’d stopped to buy groceries. Walking into the general store had been a nightmare. Shocked, judgmental faces had been everywhere.
The Ellis women.
Then she’d tried to use her card to pay for groceries. ‘Declined: Limit exceeded.’
Her mother had been using her credit card?
Speechless, she’d gone home and there was the vicar, pudgy, weak and shamefaced, but totally besotted with her mother.
‘Make yourself scarce for a while, there’s a good girl,’ her mother had said. ‘We need time to ourselves. It’ll be okay, dear,’ she’d cooed as Lily had tried to figure what to do, what to say. ‘We were going to go to Paris but we’ve run out of money. It doesn’t matter. If Harold can just borrow a little bit more from his relatives we’ll leave. We’re in love and everyone just needs time to accept it.’
Enough. What had followed had been the world’s fastest pack. She’d driven eight hundred and fifty miles from Adelaide to Sydney. A seventeen-hour drive, her stomach cramping all the way. She’d had cat naps at the side of the road, or she’d tried to, but sleep had refused to come. She’d arrived in Sydney late in the afternoon, trying to figure how she could survive on what little money she had.
She’d walked into the nursing agency before it had closed and they’d fallen on her neck.
‘All