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Malcolm asked Sam, 'Any neck pain?'

'No, not really.'

'Difficulty in swallowing?'

'No. Heck, how do you guys keep all this stuff straight?'

'Good question! I'm glad
you
kept it straight enough to be suspicious and come in. It really doesn't sound like Chiari, but it
does
sound like something. Possibly something called... No, I won't get you any more confused with names! But I think you may have developed some fluid-filled cysts in your spinal cord.'

'Doesn't sound good,' Sam joked, but Lucy could see that he was tense now.

He knew enough about shunt failure to know it could be dealt with. This was something new. She reached out and took his hand and, instead of pushing it away—as she'd half expected him to—he clung to it, with his eyes fixed on Malcolm's face. Against her own wrist, she could feel the tickle of his new medical alert bracelet.

'I thought your big lecture a while ago was about how I'd be OK if I took my condition seriously,' he accused, his voice a little shaky.

'And you did take it seriously, and you will be OK,' Malcolm answered firmly. 'It's just another drainage problem, basically. Maybe it's the new shunt and Nick Blethyn will need to tinker with that a bit more. Or maybe the shunt, even if it's performing well, isn't adequate and you'll need a second one lower down to drain fluid from the spinal cord.'

'Shunt stuff.' Sam nodded. 'OK. You're right. I can handle shunt stuff. Roll me on in, then. Surgery, here I come!'

'Hey,' Malcolm said. 'Hang on a tick! Want to hear a bit more about how you're doing first, since you've allowed us the luxury of time for a chat this visit.'

'Full run-down?'

'Full run-down, thanks!'

It turned out that Sam wasn't living on his own any more. He'd moved back to his parents' house.

'Felt like a failure for a while,' he admitted, 'but I've got another plan now. I'm really working on doing everything for myself back at home. Then in two years, when my brother's left school, we're going to share a place. And hopefully I've stopped growing now, so I won't have any more of these rotten brain problems once this new thing is fixed up.'

'That does seem the most likely explanation for why you've had such a series of things over the past couple of years,' Malcolm agreed.

Lucy phoned up to the neurological ward to check the availability of a bed, and Sam was taken up an hour later. He would have some tests done later that day in order to map the way his shunt was functioning and pinpoint the location of fluid build-up in his spine. Lucy probably wouldn't see him again. For his sake, she
hoped
she wouldn't.

It was the same with most of their patients. This department was a way station. You did the best you could for them, then sent them on, either to a ward or to surgery or back home. The ones you
did
see repeatedly were usually not people whom you could welcome warmly. Drug overdoses, delirious alcoholics...

Time and again, Lucy helped Malcolm fight grimly for a patient's life when some might have argued that it wasn't worth the effort.

'There's always a chance something might happen to turn a person around,' he told a new nurse one day.

They were dealing with a heroin overdose, the third time this particular patient had turned up in as many months. Malcolm injected a drug which would act quickly and effectively to block the uptake of the heroin, but unfortunately on this occasion more was needed. The thin young woman had breathed in her own vomit and had contracted aspiration pneumonia. She would need to be admitted to the respiratory ward and put on antibiotics, but whether this enforced break from her drug would help her break the cruel habit remained to be seen.

As she was wheeled away, Malcolm said to Lauren Sandler, 'Don't take on the task of giving up hope on their behalf. That's wrong. And it's not your decision.'

Giving up hope. The words stuck in Lucy's mind. When it came to her feelings about Malcolm it was, as he'd said in a very different context, 'not her decision'.

Because she simply didn't have a choice. To stop loving him might have been the sensible approach, the road to self-preservation, but she just couldn't do it. Her love had been kindled into existence more than six years ago, and it was as much a part of her now as was her love for Charlotte, the daughter they shared.

You couldn't make yourself stop loving someone just because it was painful.

And, of course, it wasn't always. Some of the time— much of the time—it was fabulous. They went out together quite a lot, but the presence of two little daughters rendered each occasion into something safe and innocently fun, with none of the raw, conflicting emotions that had flared down at Lucy's parents' place in March.

Autumn in Canberra was a glorious season, the sort of open secret which all the locals knew and the tourists were happy to discover. Crisp mornings softly slid into bright blue days, with the evergreen eucalypts contrasting against the European and North American trees as they flared into rich autumn colour.

Against this backdrop, Malcolm and Ellie and Lucy and Charlotte went to the adventure playground at Kambah, where they slid down the giant slide and zoomed on the 'flying fox'. They had a sausage sizzle at Weston Park and sandwiches in the botanic gardens, and on an unseasonably warm day in late May they strolled through the outdoor sculpture garden at the National Gallery, looking at bronze figures and abstract metallic shapes, and the two girls got happily saturated in the Japanese fog sculpture.

Lucy and Malcolm stood in the cool, ever-changing drifts of its mist for a minute or two as well, and laughed as hard as Ellie and Charlotte, although they drew the line at shrieking and running.

On a handful of occasions, these daylight pleasures spilled over into the evening, when Jenny or her daughter would babysit, either at Lucy's or at Malcolm's, and the two adults would go out to dinner or five music or a movie. Each time, it was easy enough to use Jenny or Clare as a buffer between them at the end of the evening, with diligent parental questions about bedtime and behaviour.

It could have happened the other way, too. It would have been very easy to usher the babysitter out the door, close it firmly and have an hour...two hours...or the whole night...alone together as they willingly explored the vibrant landscape of their physical connection.

But it didn't happen. Lucy could read Malcolm very easily on the issue. The chemistry between them was stronger than ever, but he wasn't going to act on it no matter what it cost him to maintain that control. As for what it cost her...

In this way, they reached the end of May. Daylight saving had ended. The first frost had come and gone. The nights were drawing in much earlier now. Winter was on the doorstep.

Lucy was thinking this as she moved around her kitchen one Friday night, cooking a spaghetti sauce and pasta and tossing a salad for the evening meal. It was only just after half past five, but already, looking out of the window above the kitchen sink, it was almost dark.

Charlotte was still in the back garden, and she probably wasn't quite warmly enough dressed now. She had been very busy and very self-contained after school today.

'No snack,' she'd said. 'We made pancakes at Afters.'

'Change out of your uniform, please.'

'I have, already. Can I go outside?'

'Back yard?'

'Yes.'

'Then of course.' Since the back garden was completely fenced, Lucy had no qualms about letting her play there alone.

It gave her a very peaceful half-hour until the time had come to start the spaghetti. She began to tackle the difficult pattern on the front of the pullover she was knitting for Charlotte, and kept a background awareness of her daughter's movements. Quite a bit of toing and froing.

The back screen door banged numerous times, and once Lucy asked, 'What is it you're playing so busily?'

'Dolls. They've discovered an island, but there are pirates.'

Which sounded fine. But it was time to come inside now. She called this information from the back door, and a voice in the bushes answered, 'Not yet.'

'Yes. Yet. I bet you don't have a jacket on.'

'I'm not cold.'

Lucy sighed. 'Two more minutes, just so you can finish up the game.'

'OK.' And obediently, after a somewhat stretchy two minutes, here she was.

And here was someone else, too, at the front door, not bothering with the bell but hammering so loudly and urgently that Lucy had a moment of sheer panic and a vivid flashback to that day over two months ago when Mary Sisley had attacked her with the gun. There was definitely a limit to what post-traumatic counselling could achieve! The hammering continued, and she didn't dare to answer.

Then she heard Malcolm's voice. 'Lucy! Lucy!'

He lunged inside the moment she opened the door, and he was white and shaking and completely distraught. Only one thing could have made a parent look like that. Lucy's legs seemed to turn to rubber and her throat was so tight she could barely breathe. It was as if all the oxygen had suddenly been taken out of the air.

'It's Ellie, isn't it?' she managed. 'What's happened?'

'She's gone. Just
gone,
Lucy! I've called the police. They're going door to door and searching up in the nature reserve as well, through all the part that was burnt and the thicker bush as well. Jenny is utterly devastated. I gave her a sedative.'

'You mean it happened while—?'

'It must have,' he confirmed, striding through into her living area with a restless purpose that had nothing to fix itself to. He wheeled around, and she saw the agony in his face as she'd seen it six yeas ago, more than once. 'I got home a bit early and asked where she was. Playing in her room, Jenny said. Jenny was in the kitchen. It wasn't her fault. She was cooking curry. I
hate
her for cooking curry while my child went missing!'

He swore painfully.

'We've tried to think,' he went on. 'To work it out.

She
can't
have been abducted from her room. She must have gone outside. You know how they're always messing around with sticks and leaves, or they leave their toys out there. And Jenny didn't hear her go. And for some reason she didn't come back, but whether it's that she's got lost in the darkness, or...or...'

'And you've looked,' Lucy said stupidly, 'and called?'

'Of
course!'
he rasped. 'All through the house. I thought perhaps she was playing hide and seek and fell asleep in a cupboard. And we've looked in the garden. Under the house. Up the back, although she's been told never to go through the back gate and anyhow it's kept locked. To both the next-door neighbours, even though she only knows them slightly and they don't have kids and I doubt she'd ever go there. We searched and called for a good twenty minutes or more before we realised it was real. I kept thinking that in another minute I'd be clutching her and scolding her at the same time for giving us a silly scare, but she really was gone.

'Now that twenty minutes is torturing me. If it turns out to make a difference... And who knows how long she'd been gone before I got home? I hate Jenny. No, I don't. Of course I don't. Lucy, this is my worst nightmare in living form, and I'm going mad. Anyone could have taken her by this time. I came here to ask—'

'To ask Charlotte.' Lucy nodded quickly, as if finishing his sentences for him might spare him a fraction of the pain.

Back to this again. Sparing Malcolm from pain. Only this time hers was almost as acute. She'd loved Ellie as a fragile newborn, and now she'd come to love her as a six-year-old child. And Ellie was Charlotte's half-sister.

'She might have an idea,' Malcolm was saying. 'Something they've talked about. Running away to join the circus, or something.'

'I know. They're always—'

'I love their vivid imaginations—'

'But not today,' she agreed. 'Today I wish they were the most—'

'Ordinary, unadventurous girls in the world.' His voice shook.

'Charlotte? Charlotte, love...'

No answer. For one horrible moment, Lucy looked down a gun-barrel of stark fear. She and Malcolm both heard the keening of an ambulance siren on its way to the hospital, and she shuddered. But then the sliding door to Charlotte's room rumbled slowly open and there she was, staring up with huge eyes.

'Ellie's daddy came,' Charlotte said, stating the obvious.

'Yes, darling,' Lucy answered, 'because we need to know. Have you and Ellie talked about anything lately, like...like climbing Black Mountain in the dark, or running away to join the circus?'

'No...'

'No?'

'No.' She shook her head vigorously. Dark golden blonde hair went flying back and forth. Then big eyes looked steadily upwards again.

'Because, you see...' How much to tell her? How to tell it? 'Ellie isn't at home, and Ellie's dad is worried.'

'Not very worried.'

'Yes,
very
worried.'

'But she'll be all right.'

'Can I talk to her?' Malcolm was coming up behind them. Lucy could hear his shaky breathing even from several metres' distance.

'I've already asked,' she said, turning to him. She wanted to hold him, but he looked so tight, as if he were encased in bands of steel. She knew he couldn't have borne any touch at that moment. He'd have pushed her away.

'I know.' He nodded jerkily. 'But I have to ask her myself.'

There was a ring at the door, deflecting their attention. Hurrying to answer it, Lucy found that her mind was jangling with conflicting hope and fear. No news was good news. Who would this be?

The police. 'Is this—?'

'Yes, Malcolm is here.' She practically pulled the two uniformed officers inside. 'Does this mean—?'

'I'm afraid not.' The older of the two men shook his head. 'But—'

Malcolm came up behind him. She felt his hand clutch at her bare forearm, where she still had her sleeves rolled up from washing the cooking dishes. His fingers were clammy and ice-cold.