‘Am I going crazy?’ Marigold whispered.

‘I don’t think you’re going crazy.’ Joss was watching her closely, his mind obviously in overdrive. ‘You’re very thin. Have you always been this thin or have you lost weight recently?’

‘I’ve lost a bit,’ she admitted, looking fearfully up at him. ‘I’m so tired. I can’t be bothered cooking.’

‘So you’ve lost weight and you’re constantly tired?’

‘I am seventy-three, dear.’

‘You’re a spring chicken compared to those in the nursing home.’ He tilted her chin and ran his hand down her throat, gently feeling. ‘Mrs Waveny, do you have any family history of thyroid trouble?’

‘I…’ She thought about that and finally nodded, not sure what he was getting at. ‘Maybe I do. My mother had to take iodine for something. Would that be it?’

‘Maybe it would.’ Amy handed Joss a stethoscope, and he held it to Marigold’s chest and listened. There was silence. Bertram wuffled and snuffed beside the fire, a dog at peace, but there was no peace on Marigold’s face.

‘It’s bad, isn’t it?’ she whispered as Joss finished listening.

Joss hesitated, thinking it through. He wasn’t a physician. He was a surgeon, for heaven’s sake-but he was practically sure he was right.

‘Marigold, you have what we call atrial fibrillation,’ he told her. ‘It’s a fast, irregular heartbeat.’

She gasped. ‘Is that bad?’

‘It’s not good. But I don’t think you’re dying. I suspect…’ Once more he ran his hands down her throat, feeling the swelling. ‘I suspect you have an overactive thyroid. I can’t be sure until we run a blood test-which I’d imagine we can’t do here-but for the moment I’m going to assume that’s the case.’

‘I… The thyroid is causing heart failure?’

‘You don’t have heart failure. Your heart isn’t failing-it’s just running on overdrive. Now, I’m not certain, but you have all the signs. You’re tired, your neck seems a little swollen. You’re short of breath, you’re agitated, you have pains in the chest and you have a fast, irregular heartbeat. If I’m right-if this is just an overactive thyroid-then it can be controlled with tablets.’

She stared, torn between disbelief and hope. ‘You’re kidding.’

‘I’m not kidding.’

There was a silence while she took that on board, her face lighting up by the moment.

‘I’m not mad?’

‘You’re not mad.’

‘Then what do I do about it?’ She gazed from Joss to Amy and then back again. ‘I guess…forget about it until I can see the doctor from Bowra?’

‘No.’ Joss shook his head. ‘Marigold, we can’t completely rule out heart disease, and until we do then we assume the worst. If you had someone living with you, maybe you’d be OK, but as it is you need to stay at the nursing home until we have some answers.’

‘But…’ Her distress level was rising again. ‘I will be able to go home again?’

‘Of course.’ He rose and took her hand, pulling her up after him. ‘If you like, I’ll drive you home now. We’ll pick up a nightie and a toothbrush and I’ll take you in to hospital. I’d imagine Amy has Lanoxin in the drug cupboard? Am I right, Amy?’

‘Sure.’ She was almost as dumbfounded as Marigold.

‘Great. Lanoxin slows your heart rate, Marigold. It’ll make you feel a whole heap better-and we’ll give you some sleeping pills, too, so you can get a decent sleep tonight. The combination will make you feel fantastic. Is it OK with you if you leave your car here? There’s a bed available, isn’t there, Amy?’

‘I…yes.’ Amy felt as stunned as Marigold looked at the speed with which things were being organised.

‘There’s no need-’ Marigold started, but Joss shook his head.

‘There is a need,’ he said firmly ‘Amy, will you ring Mary and let her know we’re coming? Let’s go now.’


Just like that…

Amy was left staring out at the departing pink Volkswagen feeling hornswoggled.

She would have coped.

Maybe she would have coped. If Marigold had come to her, she would have popped her into hospital and rung the doctor in Bowra. But Marigold wouldn’t have come to her.

There was a huge difference in people’s attitudes to a nurse and a doctor. The locals knew Amy was overworked and they knew she only had nurse’s training. If Joss hadn’t been here, Marigold would have waited. If it had been heart disease…

It could well have been a disaster.

Iluka needed a doctor.

It was never going to have one, Amy thought sadly. Joss would leave and they’d be back to where they’d started. But for now…

But for now, she’d eaten better than she had for months, she had a warm, comfortably furnished house, a doctor caring for her patients.

She felt so good she could almost burst.

‘Let’s go for a walk,’ she told Bertram, picking up pad and pencil and scribbling Joss a note. She needed to walk some of this happiness off before Joss returned.

It was still raining.

‘That’s what raincoats, galoshes and umbrellas are for,’ she told Bertram. She looked at the dog’s eager face and knew without being told that Bertram was as eager for a walk as she was.

‘Then what are we waiting for?’ She took a deep breath. ‘I need to get rid of some energy. Get rid of… I don’t know. Something. Because otherwise your master’s going to walk in the front door and I’ll kiss the guy.’

And that would never do. Would it?


Joss returned to find Amy gone.

‘Bertram and I are at the beach,’ the note told him. He stared at it for a while as if he didn’t know what to do with it.

He had work to do.

He’d just done some work. Marigold was nicely settled in a room next to Lionel. She felt wonderfully at home, she had a diagnosis that she could cope with, her husband was by her side and she was with friends.

Would that city hospitals could be this good.

Could he ever be happy as a country doctor? He thought about it. Tonight had felt good. The whole damned thing. Hospitals where everyone knew each other…

But this would be an impossible place to set up a practice.

Whoa! What was he thinking about? Setting up here as a country doctor? He was a surgeon. He lived in the city.

Amy was here.

Amy was engaged to be married.

The whole damned thing was a figment of a stupid fancy. Get a grip, Braden, he told himself. What the hell was happening to him?

Amy was happening to him. Quite simply she was the most gorgeous woman he’d ever met. She affected him as no one else had ever done.

He didn’t react to women this way.

Women were ancillary to his life. He’d decided that long ago. He liked having women around but he didn’t do the love thing. The commitment. He had his father’s example of what happened with commitment and there was no way he was travelling down that path.

So, tempting as it might be to commit himself to some woman-a house, babies, a mortgage, country practice…

No. It wasn’t tempting in the least. So why was he thinking about it?

Maybe it was because Amy was so patently unavailable.

That was it, he decided, and he was a bit relieved to discover a reason. She was engaged to another man. She couldn’t leave this place if she wanted to, so she was absolutely unattainable. Which was probably the reason he wanted her.

But that nice sensible reason didn’t help much at all. He flicked on his laptop and stared down at his conference notes.

Life-threatening haemorrhage can be caused by aortic dissection extending into the media of the aorta following a tear in the intuma, resulting in true and false lumina separated by an intimal flap…

What the hell was he talking about?

He’d written this a week ago. A lifetime ago. Tonight it wasn’t making any sense at all, because tonight all he could think of was Amy.

She was down on the beach. With his dog. While he was sitting up here like a fool with some stupid conference notes that no one wanted to hear.

‘They’re important,’ he told himself. They represented work he’d been committed to for the last three years.

‘I’ll worry about them when I get back to Sydney.’

‘You told Dad and Daisy you needed to stay here to get them written.’

‘So I lied. I stayed here to be near Amy.’

‘Amy’s engaged to another man.’

Damn.

He was going nuts, he decided. With a groan he pushed away his laptop, grabbed a coat that he’d seen hanging in the back porch and headed out the front door toward the beach.


The beach was wonderful. She always loved it. The seashore here was wild and windswept. In the summer millionaires parked their sunbeds here and concentrated on their tans but in winter she had it all to herself. The sand stretched away for miles in either direction. Her beach.

And tonight she had Bertram. That was special. The rain had eased a little-it was still stinging her face but not so much that she minded. She’d jogged down to the beach, Joss’s dog loping beside her, and by the time she reached the sand she was warm and flushed and triumphant.

It had been a truly excellent day.

She’d helped deliver a baby. The weight of her financial need had been lifted by magic. She had furniture, she had heating, she had enough to eat…

‘He’s solved all my problems in one fell swoop,’ she told Bertram, hurling a stick along the sand and watching in delight as the big dog went flying through the rain to fetch it back for what must surely be the hundredth time.

He loved it as much as she did.

Maybe she could get a dog.

Did Malcolm like dogs? She thought about that and decided probably not. Bertram hurled himself into the waves after another stick and came lunging back up the beach to her, then shook himself, sending seawater all over her.

No. Malcolm would definitely not like dogs.

Malcolm…

He hadn’t rung tonight, she thought, frowning. He always rang, at seven every night. If he didn’t find her at home he rang her at the nursing home.