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For the first time, she wondered whether Malcolm would thank her for keeping her secret as she had. She'd done it out of love, but might he see it differently, now that they were a part of each other's lives once more?

'You're right, Malcolm,' she went on, after a pause. 'I do need to think about it. Thank you for understanding that before I did.'

'You're hardly in a fit state to think about anything right now,' he pointed out, and they smiled tentatively at each other.

He was about to touch her. She could sense it, although he hadn't moved from his position, standing near the narrow examining table on which she sat. Her skin already crawled with need. But then there was a knock at the door and Jean Jarrett, from the front desk, poked her head around the door.

'The police are here, Malcolm,' she said. 'They want to interview both of you, and have a look at the gun.'

'Me first, if that's all right with them,' he answered. 'Lucy badly needs to get something to eat. Would you like one of us to bring it for you, Lucy?'

A mask had descended over his face now, not hostile or distant, but he was definitely back in his role as the head of the department. It made her realise just how easily and comfortably and honestly they could communicate on a personal level.

'No, I'm fine,' she told him, with the same new professional distance. 'I'll go to the cafeteria and have something hot and filling, I think. I...need to get out of here for a while, and if I don't have a big meal I'll never get rid of this foggy feeling from the brandy and I'll be useless the whole afternoon.'

'Lucy, for heaven's sake, I'm not expecting you to come back to work!' Malcolm said. 'Get an early start on your weekend away.'

But she shook her head firmly. 'I was brought up on a farm. I know the importance of getting straight back on a horse after a fall. This situation is no different, and I can't afford to be scared about the patients.'

'Point taken.' He nodded. 'Still, don't hurry back from lunch, and enjoy every minute of your weekend.'

Lucy did. It was the first weekend in March, the sea was warm and the weather was gorgeous. Charlotte revelled in this wonderful new thing, the ocean, which she hadn't seen since she was two years old and couldn't remember at all. Lucy told neither her parents nor her daughter about the woman with the gun. This was made easier by the police having reported, after examining the gun on Friday afternoon, that although real and potentially deadly it hadn't been loaded.

'Which doesn't mean you can't press charges,' they'd told her.

But Lucy had been firm on that point, and they'd agreed that, even aside from the woman's physical condition, a hospital had been far more appropriate than a remand centre in this instance.

In the late afternoon, just before she'd been ready to leave for the day, Malcolm had reported that the woman's surgery had been safely and successfully completed. She'd still been in Recovery at that time, and was to be under heavy sedation with morphine for the next few days to deal with the pain, as well as broad-spectrum antibiotics to treat any remaining infection in the other leg.

After discharge from hospital, once the woman's mental condition had been stabilised, she would go to a rehabilitation centre for some weeks, where she would be fitted with a prosthesis and would learn how to manage her day-to-day life.

There had as yet been no further clues as to her real identity or where she'd obtained the gun, and the police continued to be involved as they investigated both these questions.

Lucy spent as little time thinking about it during the weekend as she possibly could. Instead, she swam in the surf with Charlotte and paddled with her in the tidal lake nearby. They ate ice cream and played deck quoits on Granny's and Grandad's front lawn. They helped with some gardening. Dad couldn't handle the exertion as he once had, though he never complained. Both Lucy and Charlotte were thoroughly spoiled with love.

And on Saturday evening after dinner, as she'd told Malcolm she would, Lucy took her long solitary walk, and found that she wasn't dwelling on Friday's terrifying incident, but on what had happened afterwards when Malcolm had asked her out.

I feel as if a door has opened for me, she thought. Opened just a crack, and there's some exotic landscape on the other side. What I can glimpse of it looks beautiful and wonderful, but what if that's a deception?

What if, just out of sight, the beauty ends and it all looks grim and dreadful? Do I dare to take the risk and go through?

It wasn't until Sunday night, back home, that she made up her mind.

I can't close the door without at least opening it wider, she decided. That's not how I've lived life in the past, and I don't want to start doing it now.

Accordingly, she found a private moment with him on Monday morning and said to him, 'I'd like to spend an evening with you, Malcolm, if you haven't changed your mind?

'I haven't,' he said. 'What's more, I have a very big-eyed, beseeching invitation from Ellie to Charlotte. Can she please,
please
come and play on Saturday afternoon?'

Lucy laughed. 'You have the intonation down perfectly! How could I say no?'

'And afterwards I can bring them back to your place, we can give them a quick dinner there, then Jenny or her daughter can come and babysit. It will save you getting a sitter of your own, and makes the logistics simpler.'

'It sounds perfect,' she agreed. 'I have a folding bed I can set up in Charlotte's room, and Ellie can stay the whole night, if she'd like to, rather than you having to wake her up to take her home.'

'I'll check,' he answered. 'It would be her first sleep-over, but I suspect I'll be the only one who has any fears about her missing me!'

With all of this arranged, the working week seemed to pass quickly, and Lucy had no private time with Malcolm. She didn't mind. She sensed that their working relationship had already gone about as far as it could go. Generally, they worked well together, understanding each other's needs with few words, the way any two experienced members of a medical team might have done.

Occasionally, there were some irritated exchanges, misunderstood instructions or a painful bump as they got in each other's way. Again, though, these were the sorts of things that could happen with anyone, and they were relaxed enough with each other to let the incidents slide at once, leaving no unpleasant aftertaste.

Only on Friday did she start to get a sense of anticipation building inside her. She didn't voice it aloud. Adults tended not to! But Charlotte wasn't nearly so restrained. 'Ellie day tomorrow, Ellie day tomorrow,' she sang over breakfast, adding unnecessarily, 'I'm
so
excited, Mummy, and so is Ellie. We've never had a sleep-over before. Well, last weekend at Granny and Grandad's, but that doesn't count, and Ellie hasn't even ever had that.'

'Not at her own grandparents'?'

'She doesn't have grandparents.'

'Doesn't she?'

Lucy remembered that Malcolm's mother had died some years ago, and that his father had been in poor health when she'd known him before. Bronwyn's parents had been cold, distant people. New Zealanders, they'd come over to spend two weeks with their dying daughter, but had told Malcolm, dry-eyed and with a very tight kind of anguish in their faces, that they didn't want to keep up any contact with him or with Ellie after Bronwyn's death. It would be 'too painful' and would 'only confuse the child'.

Malcolm had reported all this to Lucy one night after his in-laws' departure, clearly angry about it and not able to comprehend such an attitude. She could only assume now that Bronwyn's parents had kept to their decision, and that Malcolm had been too emotionally distant from them to challenge it on Ellie's behalf.

'I said she could come and have a sleep-over at my Granny and Grandad's soon. That would be OK, wouldn't it, Mummy?'

'I expect so,' Lucy answered automatically. She was still thinking about Malcolm, and only took in the meaning of Charlotte's words after she'd answered.

Oh, dear! Not quite a promise, but
almost,
and Charlotte would be bound to view it that way. Already, after only a few weeks, they were so strongly knitted into the fabric of Malcolm's and Ellie's lives. If her dinner with Malcolm tomorrow was a disaster...

She didn't try to think too much about the possible consequences.

The working day, fortunately, brought a good omen. It was exactly a week since the dramatic incident with the homeless woman and the gun, and Malcolm had been relaying any news he received about her condition to the rest of the staff in the department.

Physically, Alphonsine was doing well. The site of the amputation was healing as it should, and her course of antibiotics had eliminated the infection in her other leg. Mentally, she was still not making complete sense, although the medication she was on had calmed her, and she'd had two or three periods of moderate lucidity. She had spoken of someone called Mary, seeming upset that Mary wasn't there, but hadn't yet been able to explain who Mary was.

On Friday morning, however, Jean Jarrett took a phone call from a young woman, asking about emergency admissions. Had they treated anyone called Mary Sisley? Or anyone who couldn't give her own name and who seemed confused or mentally ill?

'I transferred the call up to the surgical ward where they've got our friend La Comtesse,' Jean reported to the rest of the staff. She was a cheerful woman in her late fifties, who took a rather ghoulish but ultimately harmless interest in the unit's more dramatic cases.

'Do you know who the caller was?' Malcolm asked.

'Her niece, apparently. I didn't hear any further details.'

Two hours later the full story was revealed, when a young, pretty redhead in her early twenties came up to the reception desk, said her name was Mary Sisley Jones and asked if she could speak to Lucy and Malcolm in private in connection with her aunt, who had been calling herself Alphonsine de Crespigny.

'I'm so sorry about it all,' she said, once the three of them were closeted in Malcolm's office. 'What you must both have felt! May I tell you the full story?'

'Please, do,' Malcolm said.

'Auntie Mary was doing fine until six months ago, when my grandfather died. She'd been living with him for some years, and he always made sure she took her medication. She'd had to give up teaching—she was a French teacher, quite an inspirational one, as you might have gathered. But her mental health wasn't quite strong enough for that any more. She was happy and lucid most of the time, though, and largely in touch with reality.

'But then, as I said, Grandpa died. He was eighty-seven. She didn't cope too well, and it fell to me to deal with everything. She insisted on selling the house and all the furniture. She has all the money from the sale still in the bank! But I just couldn't get her to make any plans about the future, and I didn't know what to do.

'The house backs onto the nature reserve, and she set up a little camp there for herself in a wild gully on the slopes of Black Mountain. She always loved camping, and had all her own equipment. Technically, I suppose she was homeless.'

'Yes,' replied Malcolm. 'It was fairly obvious she'd been living rough.'

Her camp must have been quite close to his own house, which backed onto the Black Mountain reserve as well.

'But she seemed happy,' Mary Jones continued, 'and I let her stay there because the weather was warm, and I wondered if it was a way of dealing with her grief. She sometimes got angry if I came to visit her and she thought I was interfering, trying to get her to move into a flat or, heaven forbid, a hostel or halfway house, "pestering" her about her medication. So I'd just sort of wander past every couple of days, as if I was enjoying a walk in the bush, to check that she was all right.

'Then I got married a month ago. She wouldn't come to the wedding, and she said I was... Well, she called me all sorts of things and said she never wanted to see me again.
That's
when I should have insisted she get help, even if she wouldn't take it from me, even if it meant involving the police. Because she'd have kicked and screamed, I know, if anyone had tried to take her away!

'So I left it. I admit, I was angry, too! And frantic over the wedding, and buying a house. We've been on our honeymoon. We just got back yesterday. I went to check on her this morning, and her camp was wrecked. The old tent was all torn, and most of her gear had been stolen. I was terrified about what might have happened to her.

'And I was right, of course—she hadn't been taking her medication. Oh, I
shouldn't
have let her stay there on her own while I was away!'

'Do you know how her legs could have got so bad?' Malcolm asked. 'The infections, I mean.'

'Burns from her campfire? Scratches from the scrub? Who knows?'

'The amputation was the result of peripheral vascular disease, as you may have been told.'

'Yes, she's always smoked like a chimney. But I heard what happened, what she did when she came in here for treatment, and, of course,
that's
my fault, too. It was Grandpa's gun, and I knew he had it, but we couldn't find it when we dealt with all his things. Auntie Mary told me it was lost, but I should have known. At least she hadn't taken the bullets! I found them first and got rid of them, thank goodness!'

'Did her seeing you have any effect on her mental state?' Lucy asked.

The young woman's face brightened. 'Yes! She recognised me at once.'

'She'd been asking about someone called Mary, apparently,' Malcolm said.

'Yes, that's me. Mary Sisley Jones I am now. I was named after her, and I'm terribly fond of her. Silly! If I
hadn't
been so fond of her, I might have been tougher on her, but I really thought that her little camp up at the back of the house might be what she needed.'

'Perhaps it was, too, until she stopped taking her medication,' Malcolm suggested.