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By then, Bronwyn had already made the impossible decision which had very possibly cost her her life. Lucy knew it had been Bronwyn's decision, not Malcolm's, to refuse treatment for her cancer in order to continue safely with her pregnancy. Bronwyn herself had been very clear about that.

'
I
wanted it this way! And I'm
not
going to admit defeat! I'll have my baby
and
my life!'

She kept on saying this when everyone else, including Malcolm, knew that there was no hope. Lucy suspected there were some terrible fights between the two of them. They were both strong people. Seeing the anguish in Malcolm's face day after day, she began to share his suffering more and more. She didn't, then, have the slightest idea about the real depth of her feelings, or what they meant. She thought right until the end that it was purely empathy tor his situation.

Time passed. During the Christmas season, the Lamberts and Bronwyn's doctors agonised over how long to let the pregnancy continue. At first, Bronwyn was the one to argue passionately for waiting longer.

'I won't
risk my baby's health and life by inducing her too early!'

Then, abruptly, in the middle of January, she changed her mind, and it was, at last, an acceptance of the inevitable. 'I want to be with her, know her just a little, before it's too late.'

They admitted her to Black Mountain Hospital and induced labour on 16 January, at thirty-four weeks' gestation. On the 26th, both mother and baby were ready to come home, with Lucy's continued attendance. For four weeks, she and Malcolm both worked themselves into the ground to fulfil the very different needs of a terminally ill mother and her fragile new baby.

Lucy still vividly remembered the ragged nights, the baby's cries, the constant fight to adjust Bronwyn's pain medication and the moments when she and Malcolm
would meet in the kitchen at some unholy pre-dawn hour and sit in exhausted silence over hot chocolate or coffee.

Then, on 28 February, Bronwyn Lambert finally gave up her fight.

Five days later, an exhausted, grief- and guilt-stricken Malcolm Lambert told Lucy that she should leave, in torn, incoherent sentences which, too, she could still remember with painful clarity, just as she could remember her own responses.

'What sort of a man am I?' His head, with dark, unkempt hair that looked as if it hadn't been brushed in days, was buried in his hands. 'I should have done everything differently. I love my daughter, but should I have let my wife sacrifice her own life so that Gabrielle could be born?'

'Malcolm, you didn't have a choice,' Lucy answered urgently, racked by the inadequacy of her own power to help him. She ached to touch him. Just a squeeze of his hand or a press of his shoulder, but even that was out of the question. Especially now. Oh, Lord, especially now! 'Bronwyn would never have consented—'

'I could have argued harder! Did I love her enough, I wonder? Perhaps I didn't. I can't have, if—'

'Malcolm—'

'Don't! Don't take any notice.' His burning storm-grey eyes swept upwards to fix on her, then closed as he covered them once more with his hands. 'It's not your problem. It's not your fault.
None
of this is your problem. You know that, don't you?' There was a white-hot urgency to the question.

'I—'

'I'm planning to leave Canberra as soon as I can,' he went on, not waiting for her answer, thank goodness.

'There's a job in Brisbane. Lucy, Gabrielle doesn't need a trained nurse any more, and after—'

'I can't stay. I know that,' she agreed quickly, before he could finish. 'My God! The last thing I want is for you to think I was expecting to
stay!'

'I've already arranged my resignation from the hospital,' he told her. 'I'll care for Gabrielle myself until we're settled in Brisbane. Please, leave as soon as you want to.'

And as it was quite unbearable to stay, she packed her things and said goodbye to Gabrielle and Malcolm that same day...only to realise then, finally, as she travelled the long hours to her parents' farm, that the reason she ached so badly for Malcolm, with all that had happened, wasn't simply out of sympathy for what he'd
been through.

It was because she loved him.

In hindsight, it wasn't very fair to Brett, a young motor mechanic from Brewarra, the modest-sized town nearest her parents' farm. She went out with him on the rebound, only it felt far more desperate and confusing and
necessary
at the time than that shallow phrase could express. She wasn't using him. But their relationship could never have worked in the long term, and she could hardly blame him for wanting no part of Charlotte's future.

So there it was. The most painful, turbulent period of her life—and, no doubt, of Malcolm Lambert's as well—and by returning to Canberra she'd walked right back into her memories of it, like walking into a brick wall in the dark, because she hadn't even considered that he'd have had any reason to come back here himself.

'And our daughters are best friends,' she whispered aloud at ten o'clock as she climbed, wrung out, into her solitary bed. 'Just how impossible is this going to be?'

'I
know
I'm not the man you want to hear from at four o'clock on a Sunday afternoon,' said Matt Grady at the other end of the phone.

'It's not a social call, then?' Malcolm answered. He had known Matt for years, and the two of them now held equivalent positions, Matt at a regional hospital in a nearby country town and Malcolm at Canberra's largest hospital.

'I don't make social calls,' Matt replied. 'My wife makes those! No, but don't get too alarmed. I'm putting
you on the alert just in case. We've got a report from the State Emergency Service of a big bushfire around Tumut, with probable casualties coining in. One volunteer firefighter is already on his way to us with facial burns and smoke inhalation. The fire's still out of control, with no change forecast until tomorrow, so the S.E.S. says we can expect some drama for at least the next forty-eight hours.'

'You'll be the first port of call for casualties, presumably?' Malcolm guessed. 'Since you're closer to the action.'

'Yes, but we're not well set up to deal with burns or major trauma,' Matt answered.

'What about Westmead?' Malcolm asked, naming the large hospital in Sydney's west end which received serious injuries flown in from a wide catchment area.

'Preferably not,' Matt answered. 'There are more fires
in the Blue Mountains and they're expecting to be squeezed pretty tightly with those.'

'Then—'

'As I said, don't react too strongly at this stage. For now, loll by the pool, spoil your lady-friend and keep those peeled grapes coming, but your department may get roped in to this later.'

'OK, thanks for letting me know, Matt.' Malcolm closed up his mobile phone and put it back in the canvas beach bag that sat on the picnic table in front of him.

Then he smiled. Matt had been joking, and there were no peeled grapes in the picture, but he was, in fact, sitting by the pool and spoiling his lady-friend.

Well, his daughter, actually, but they
were
friends, he considered, and he was proud of their relationship. It was easily the most important thing in his life.

He watched Ellie for a moment as she made serious inroads into her chocolate ice cream. There was a sticky brown tideline all around her mouth now, the ice cream was melting fast and she was having to concentrate hard in order to get each piece of chocolate coating safely into her mouth before it slid off the creamy part beneath and dropped to the ground. Malcolm didn't have the tidemark, but he was having a similar struggle with his own chocolate bits now. They'd got a head start on melting while his mouth had been out of action on the phone.

They'd had a nice weekend together, he and Ellie. Quiet. Technically, as Matt Grady's phone call had just proved, he was on call all the time as head of Black Mountain Hospital's Accident and Emergency Department, but, in fact, a call like Matt's was a rare event, and most of his weeks involved regular hours, Monday to Friday from eight until six, with the occasional overnight to cover gaps in the roster.

Ellie's babysitter, Jenny, was almost always available to stay over on those occasions, and if by chance she wasn't, she had a grown up daughter, Clare, studying at university, whom Ellie liked—and he trusted—almost as much, and who was happy to fill in.

Ellie slid the wooden ice-cream stick between her lips to remove the last of the chocolate goo, then did it again just to make absolutely sure that she wasn't missing a bit. Then she inspected it very seriously.

'Are you keeping it?' he asked her, knowing the answer would be yes. At home, she had a plastic takeaway food container almost full of them now, destined for some as yet undetermined on but very important craft project. 'Here...'

He took it from her and put it in a side pocket of the canvas bag, then wiped the chocolate from her face with a small cloth brought for that purpose. Ice cream was a regular feature of their frequent swims at the local outdoor heated public pool.

Was it a little shocking that Ellie had
so
many icecream sticks in her collection, though? He felt a moment's twinge of guilt, then let it go. He loved to watch Ellie eat, and in general he was careful about the makeup of her diet. He got an active pleasure from seeing her relishing her food and taking something like an ice cream so seriously. She'd been so very delicate as a baby.

Inevitably, he found himself thinking of Lucy Beckett and their startling meeting, out of the blue, on Friday. Ellie's health, his love for his child, Lucy's role in his life, grief and guilt... It was all tangled up together. The grief was perhaps the least of it now. As he'd told
Lucy, year by year for six years Bronwyn's loss had become a little less acute.

He'd certainly battled with it at the beginning, though...

'Are we having another swim, Daddy?' Ellie wanted to know.

'Are you all warmed up?'

'Yes.' She nodded firmly.

With so little padding on her bones, she felt the cold, but usually refused to emerge from the water until her lips were purple and her teeth chattering...only to turn, with no sense of incongruity, to filling her stomach with an ice cold treat.

'Ok, then, another swim,' he conceded. 'But I won't come in the water this time, possum.'

There was a large shadecloth-covered children's pool, where Ellie was well within her depth and quite safe as she splashed about and practised her sketchy swimming strokes.

'OK, Daddy. Do you have to ring the hospital?' She always associated his mobile phone with the demands of his work.

'No, I have to ring Jenny. I'm going to ask her to stay the night in case I have to go in to the hospital later.'

'Is someone hurt?'

'Some people might be, some time. They're fighting a big bushfire. We'll hope they're all OK, though.'

'Yes,' she agreed easily, and they walked along the cement path back to the children's pool with no further comment from her on the subject. She was splashing her way into the middle of the pool seconds later.

Malcolm didn't like her to dwell on the harsher realities of his work. In fact, he actively protected her
from such things, and he often envied her her youthful ability to live in the moment. He was grateful, too, for the fact that she forced
him
to do so as well. In the months following Bronwyn's death, caring for Ellie was possibly the only thing that had kept him sane.

He was definitely thinking about it all much more this weekend, after seeing Lucy...

She, too, had been one of the vital factors in keeping him going six years ago, until he'd so abruptly sent her away. It hadn't even occurred to him until afterwards? how cruel that might have been. To do it so suddenly when she'd already been so attached to Ellie. It had been typical of her maturity, her generosity and her sense of honour, he considered, that she'd agreed so quickly to what he'd asked and had made her departure so smooth and unfussed.

But, then, honourable as she'd been, perhaps she'd been as tormented by guilt and regret as he d been, and had been just as anxious to be free of his presence.

They'd slept together.

Even now, he couldn't fully understand how it had happened. 'Slept together' wasn't right, anyway. What an inaccurate euphemism that could be! There had been no
sleep
involved during that single, impossible episode. No real
togetherness,
either. They'd actually been far closer, emotionally and in spirit, at other times during Lucy's period of employment as Bronwyn's nurse. Still, it had been the physical thing that had felt like the betrayal.

It had happened just four days after Bronwyn's death, at the point where the engine of nervous energy that had kept him going for months through Bronwyn's pregnancy and illness, and through the funeral and var
ious other practical arrangements, had finally run down, leaving him totally empty, totally vulnerable.

Stupidly, and not in character at all, he'd turned to alcohol. Not enough to knock himself out, unfortunately, just enough to completely impair his judgement and his control.

He remembered talking to Lucy in the kitchen—imprisoning her there, really, with his slurred, repetitive, anguished words—then saying goodnight to her. It must have been well after midnight. She'd gone along to her room to get ready for bed. He had... He couldn't remember what he'd done at this point...

Then they'd both met outside baby Gabrielle's room later, intending to check on her, and somehow...perhaps it was better that he couldn't remember...he'd taken her into his arms and ravished her with clumsy, desperate kisses...kisses which had soon led on, beyond control, to a feverish interlude of love-making—another inaccurate euphemism—on the hall carpet.