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'Oh, yes,' she said huskily. 'I found it very painful.' It had taken her years to recover, and only recently had she begun to realise that by leaving when he had he'd done the best possible thing for both of them. Any longer and the damage he'd inflicted might have been permanent. 'I thought I'd never stop crying.'

'Clearly you did.'

'Clearly,' she agreed. 'You left on the Friday night and I had to be at work on the Monday. I had to pick myself up and get on with living my life.' She spread her arms, refusing to feel guilty about the defensive way she was downplaying the extent of the grief she'd suffered. 'As you see, here I am.'

'Happy?'

'Of course.' She frowned at the doubt in his tone. 'Very happy,' she stressed. 'I've never been more content. I have a lovely home, I enjoy my work and my life is very pleasant.'

'Including a new fiancé?' he asked. 'Did you accept Clancy's proposal this morning?'

'I'm fond of Geoffrey.' She found herself avoiding answering his demand directly. 'He's a nice man. He's been good to me.'

Luke's eyes had narrowed and grown darker as she'd been speaking, and when she'd finished he said abruptly, 'Your life is
pleasant
.' The sudden harshness of his tone startled her. 'You're
content,''
he continued, equally scathingly. 'Clancy's a
nice
man. He's been good to you. You're
fond
of him. My God, Annie. You used to have passion and fire to match your hair, but look at yourself now and listen to what you're saying. What the hell's happened to you?'

Clearly—
thankfully
—not expecting any answer, he simply sent her a searching look then turned away from her and stalked out of the theatre, leaving her staring after him open-mouthed with bewilderment as to why her simple little remarks, could have provoked such a strange reaction.

Annabel lifted a trembling hand to the hair he'd referred to so violently. Never mind what had happened to her, she thought dazedly. What had suddenly got into
him
?

Despite
Annabel's invitation, Luke didn
't
turn up to her clinic that afternoon and she heard from Geoffrey later that he'd been in a meeting with representatives from the department of surgery.

Daisy Miller, when she called in to see her on her ward round the next morning, looked cheerful. 'How was the movie?' asked Annabel.

'Great.' Daisy beamed. 'Well, from what I remember. I was too excited about all the famous people in the audience to notice much. And I was back on time,' she told her, dimpling a little when Annabel's registrar rolled her eyes tellingly. 'Well, maybe twenty minutes late, but that's all. And I'm in good shape today, Dr Stuart. I promise. My breathing's almost normal this morning and my heart's been fine. At least as fine as it ever is. I hardly even feel tired after last night and I haven't had any real problems since Monday. Can I go home?'

'Let's have a look at you.' Annabel examined her heart, the back of her chest then the pulsation level in one of the veins in her neck—the height of the pulsation gave her an indication of Daisy's fluid levels.

'Your ECHO yesterday wasn't as good as I was hoping it was going to be,' she conceded when she'd finished. One of the key indices they examined when they did the scan was the percentage of blood inside the heart's left ventricle ejected at each beat, and Daisy's result yesterday had shown a decline from the last time she'd been in hospital. 'Your ejection fraction's dropped again,' she told her patient, going through the figures since Daisy's understanding of her disease was intelligent and advanced. 'But you're not looking too bad so I suppose I'm happy for you to leave us.'

She smiled at Daisy's delighted whoop. 'Why so keen? What have you got planned?' She remembered that Daisy was dating a professional footballer. 'Another night out with the man with the great body, is it?'

'Clubbing tonight if I can convince him, and I said I'd come and see him play on Saturday,' Daisy revealed. 'I haven't seen him playing before, not properly, and it's a big game.'

'Have fun.' Annabel glanced over the chart her registrar had picked up for her to inspect. 'Your blood pressure's good. Oh, I had a word with Tony Grant last night,' she added, referring to Daisy's transplant surgeon. 'He said he'd be in first thing to say hello so you'd better wait around to see him before you go. I'm surprised he's not been in already. The surgeons are normally up and about round here by seven.'

'He did a transplant last night,' Daisy told her. 'He's probably slept in.'

'Did he?' Annabel raised her brows at her juniors, surprised she'd not heard anything about it. Normally word of such events got around the hospital fairly quickly. 'Who did they do?'

'Daniel McEanor,' Mark, her SHO, told her.

Annabel nodded. Daniel wasn't one of her patients but the consultants at St Peter's conferred frequently about their patients at case conferences and she'd been on call several times when Daniel had been admitted so she knew him fairly well. A nine-year-old with heart and lung complications secondary to a congenital heart condition, he'd been on home oxygen therapy, awaiting a heart and lung transplant for over a year, and critically ill in Intensive Care with both heart and lung failure at St Peter's for a week.

Annabel said her farewells to Daisy and organised for her to come to see her in Outpatients for a follow-up ECHO the following week. Outside in the corridor, she asked her registrar about Daniel's surgery.

'He's still touch and go, apparently,' Hannah told her gingerly. She waggled her hand in the air in a demonstration of the delicacy of the situation. 'Danny was already very ill before they started. It was a difficult operation, then they had trouble starting the heart and they had difficulties pacing it post-op. Without Danny in what passes for him as peak condition, it can't have been easy.'

'They couldn't have denied him the chance,' Annabel said quietly, blinking quickly.

She understood the dilemma the transplant team must have faced once a suitable heart size and tissue match for Danny had become available. In an
ideal world precious, very scarce hearts would only be transplanted into people with highly realistic chances of survival but the reality was that it wasn't easy to veto critically unwell patients. Children, particularly, were difficult to turn down when the potential benefits were so clear. She'd seen patients who'd otherwise have died within hours granted years of new life by the sudden availability of a transplant. With a child of Danny's age it would have been extraordinarily difficult to deny him that same chance, however slim the odds might have seemed of him surviving.

She finished her round just before nine then headed for her office. For three Wednesday mornings out of every four she held a clinic at St Joseph's, one of the outlying district hospitals affiliated to St Peter's, but today she was free to spend the three hours on administrative work and paperwork.

Her bleeper sounded as she got to her office and she answered it, expecting it to be Hannah about someone they'd inadvertently missed on the ward round, but her insides tightened when Luke answered.

'Annie, I was on call overnight,' he told her briskly, sounding as if he was in a hurry. 'I know we don't usually take cold referrals from GPs but I accepted an admission from a local one for a twenty-three-year-old woman with chest pain because he was convinced she's having a heart attack. She's arriving now on M and the nurses are getting her on a trolley and doing an ECG. I know you're on call for today so I'm letting you know out of courtesy, but I'm on the ward so I'll see her—'

'I'm free,' Annabel said quickly. 'I'll come and see her with you.' The chance of a twenty-three-year-old woman having a heart attack was so remote she suspected the woman's pain was more likely to be secondary to a muscle strain or indigestion, but it could be an embolism, a blood clot on her lungs, so she might still require immediate treatment.

When she ran onto M, one of the nurses at the main desk directed her to the first side room. The room was crowded. Two nurses were drawing up drugs and organising oxygen and fixing monitor leads to their patient's chest, and Luke was inserting an intravenous line into the fair-haired, pale and very distressed-looking young woman.

Luke looked up briefly when Annabel came in and nodded her towards the completed ECG now sitting on top of the portable machine just inside the door. 'Tamsin, this is Annabel Stuart, one of the other heart doctors who works with me,' he said briskly as he slid his venflon into place. 'Annabel, this is Tamsin Winston and her baby, George. Tamsin started getting severe left-sided chest and arm and back pain two hours ago. Her breathing is fine but she feels sick and she's vomited once.'

'Hello, Tamsin.' Annabel did her best to keep her smile reassuring as she reached for the cardiogram. 'What a lovely baby,' she murmured, one eye on the sleeping infant in a cot beside the bed, the other on the heart monitor above the bed. She read the ECG quickly, followed by the GP's letter beneath it, then put both away and reached urgently for her stethoscope to examine Tamsin's chest. 'How old is he?'

Tamsin shifted the oxygen mask Luke had obviously prescribed for her. 'Nine days,' she gasped.

Annabel adjusted the mask back into place. 'He's gorgeous.' She bent over Tamsin and put her stethoscope to her chest. 'You must be very proud.'

She checked Tamsin's heart and lungs then lifted her head. Luke was instilling a syringe full of clear fluid into the line he'd inserted. The nurse assisting him held up a glass ampoule for him to check and Annabel saw he was giving their patient morphine.

'Heart sounds normal,' she told Luke crisply. 'No extra sounds. Chest clear.' She looked up at the monitor recording Tamsin's heart rhythm and paled. VT, or ventricular tachycardia, was an abnormal rhythm that could quickly lead to cardiac arrest. 'Luke, VT on the monitor.'

Luke followed her eyes and nodded. 'Unsustained,' he said quietly, when the rhythm resolved on its own a few seconds later. 'This should help the pain,' he told Tamsin, his expression revealing none of the concern Annabel was feeling as he looked at their patient. 'It should work quickly. I've given you something for your nausea as well.'

'I'm feeling a little better already.' Tamsin spoke hoarsely, her voice muffled a little by her mask.

A radiographer began pushing her X-ray machine into
the room to take a chest X-ray, and at the same time the nurse who'd given Annabel directions put her head around the door. 'I finally managed to get hold of your husband and he's leaving work now,' she told Tamsin. 'He'll be here in about twenty minutes.'

Annabel, still very worried about Tamsin's heart rhythm, tore her eyes away from her monitor long enough to see the other woman's nod of acknowledgement. She was still pale and unwell-looking but Annabel thought her face looked a little less strained and she put that down to the morphine beginning to take effect.

Luke took the shield the radiographer offered him, clearly intending to stay in the room while the X-ray was taken, but he directed Annabel, along with the two nurses, outside onto the ward away from the radiation.

'What do you think it is?' the younger of the two nurses asked Annabel. 'I haven't seen the ECG yet. Is it an embolism?'

'Her GP was right about her having a heart attack.' Annabel had brought the ECG out with her and she passed it to her to study.

'What?' The other woman looked shocked. 'At twenty-three?'

'Rare but not unknown in the first two weeks after giving birth,' Annabel explained. She reached for the telephone on the wall outside the room. 'It's probably secondary to damage to one of the arteries supplying her heart. Luke will want to do an angio,' she added, referring to a test where contrast was injected into the vessels around the heart so they could visualise them. 'Depending on what that shows, she'll probably need bypass surgery this morning.'

When X-Ray answered she warned them they'd be needing an urgent angio and requested porters to help transfer their patient. She bleeped the on-call surgeon for the day and warned him of Tamsin's condition and the possibility that they'd need to refer her for emergency surgery.

'Call me, Annabel, as soon as you get the pictures,' he told her briskly. 'I'll come straight down and see them. I'm in Theatres now so I'll let the charge nurse and duty anaesthetist know there's a chance we're going to have to operate.'

In Tamsin's room, Luke had obviously just finished explaining what he suspected was happening with her because Tamsin looked stunned. 'What happens for heart attacks?' she gasped hoarsely. 'Pills? Or will I have to have an operation?'

Luke said, 'We'll know for sure after the heart X-rays. But there is a chance you'll need an operation today, yes.'

Perhaps sensing his mother's distress, Tamsin's baby had started to cry. Annabel picked him up in his little blanket and rocked him slightly, murmuring words of comfort, and thankfully he quietened. Luke was busy changing Tamsin's infusion but when Annabel, who'd been watching the monitor, made a small sound he glanced up, registered the briefly unstable rhythm again and met her eyes for a tense second of mutual understanding. He left the drip and pulled Tamsin's bed out from the wall. 'Time to move,' he ordered.

'X-Ray's expecting us,' Annabel told him quickly as the nurses scrambled to help as he began pushing Tamsin's bed out of the cubicle. 'Porters should be on their way up. And I've spoken to Simon Rawlings,' she added, referring to the surgeon she'd contacted, hurrying to catch up with Luke and the nurses as they wheeled the bed along the ward. 'He'll come to X-Ray once we've got pictures.'

'Thanks.' They reached the foyer outside the ward. Luke punched in the code number that summoned an urgent lift then turned back to Annabel, his eyes briefly narrowing on
the way she still held their patient's baby cradled against her chest. Unaccountably Annabel felt herself flushing, and she saw him note that before his eyes veered away from her as the lift chimed to indicate its arrival.