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He smiled again and Abi’s breath caught in her throat. ‘All your recognition will come from your reconstructive work and there will be plenty of that. We have an arrangement with the Bright Hope Clinic to do some charitable work for the underprivileged children who are treated there and that, along with the other external referrals that come to us for reconstructive surgery, will keep you occupied most of the time. But this cosmetic work on the celebrities and their partners, and the Hollywood heavy hitters and their mistresses, wives and girlfriends, and the cash they are prepared to part with for the best medical care and for our discretion means that we are able to do that charity work, and I suspect that will appeal to you.
‘You will get paid for any charity work that you do but The Hills, by which I mean James, absorbs those expenses. We are strong believers in giving back to the community. It’s a win-win situation. So, does that make you feel better about today’s list?’
Abi nodded. She hadn’t really thought about the ramifications of the clinic’s location on the client base but Damien’s explanation did ease her conscience. Besides, the surgical procedures were the same no matter what you called them. Although the surgeries were performed for different reasons, aesthetics or function, the actual operations were similar and giving them labels such as cosmetic or reconstructive was really just semantics.
‘Okay,’ Damien continued, ‘on today’s list we have two blepharoplasties, one neck lift, two liposuctions, a breast lift and an arm lift. I have to warn you, a couple of our patients are men. One is a very well-known actor who has decided to treat himself to a neck lift and the other patient has recently left his wife and is planning on unveiling his much younger girlfriend at the awards and he wants to take a few years off his face with an eyelid lift. But remember, discretion is something we guarantee at The Hills and I know it’s been written into your contract but I need to know that you can rock a poker face. It doesn’t matter what we think about cosmetic surgery, these patients have their reasons for undergoing this work and we need to be discreet and respectful.’
Abi had plenty of her own insecurities. While she didn’t think she’d ever resort to cosmetic surgery, as her insecurities weren’t really physical, she could understand people’s need to change or to make a better version of themselves to boost their confidence, and she wasn’t going to judge them for their choices. She understood that different things worked for different people and she certainly wouldn’t criticise a patient’s decision, although, given the opportunity, she thought she might try to dissuade some of the people some of the time.
She wondered what the clinic’s policy on that was. Was honesty considered the best policy or was the bottom line the main consideration? But she wasn’t going to ask that question on her second day. She would toe the line for the moment, there would be time to find out later just how much she was expected to keep her opinion to herself.
‘Don’t worry about me,’ she said as she finished her coffee. ‘I understand how this works.’
The day ran smoothly and the time passed quickly, as it always seemed to when she was immersed in surgery. She was impressed with Damien’s skill but also with the way he related to the theatre staff. He treated everyone with respect and she could tell that the nurses adored him. She had done a large percentage of each of the surgeries under Damien’s watchful eye and he’d been encouraging and complimentary about her skills. As far as she could tell, there was not a vast difference between cosmetic surgery and regular reconstructive surgery, although it was perhaps always important to make sure the stitches were as tiny and neat as possible, and preferably hidden, in all cosmetic procedures. But neat stitching was one thing she had always prided herself on.
They were finishing off the second blepharoplasty and there was one more surgery still to come when the theatre phone rang. The blepharoplasty was something different for Abi. She was used to repairing eyelids, stitching eye injuries and even, on one occasion, making a new eyelid, but to do an eyelid lift purely to make someone look younger was novel.
The scrub nurse had answered the phone and Abi could see her looking at Damien. ‘Dr Moore, it’s for you, it’s your daughter’s school. Apparently no one has come to collect her.’
He had a daughter?
She didn’t know why she was so surprised. She knew he was a ‘we’ but a daughter was more than she’d expected.
‘Can you finish up for me, Dr Thompson?’ Damien asked as he tied off the last stitch. Abi glanced at the clock on the theatre wall. It was already after four in the afternoon and she wondered what he was planning on doing. ‘She needs ointment applied to her eyelids before they are bandaged,’ he continued.
‘I can do it,’ the theatre nurse offered. Abi wasn’t sure if she was offering because she saw Abi’s vague expression and took pity on her or whether she was trying to get into Damien’s good graces, but Abi wasn’t about to let her take over. She could do this.
‘I’ve got it,’ she said.
She listened in to Damien’s conversation as she applied the ointment. He could have taken the call on another phone but he seemed quite happy to have the conversation in front of the staff.
‘This is Dr Moore,’ Damien said, as the scrub nurse held the phone to his ear. He could feel the pressure building in his chest as anger rose in him. What was Brooke up to now? She was supposed to be collecting Summer from school. Had she forgotten again? What was the point of making arrangements with her if she was so unreliable? He worked hard to accommodate his ex-wife, he wanted to make sure that their daughter got to spend time with both of them, but sometimes Brooke made it impossible.
‘Summer hasn’t been collected,’ the woman on the end of the phone told him. ‘She has been sent to after-school care and I need to notify you. I need to make sure she is picked up by six o’clock.’
‘I’ve been in surgery all day, I’m still in surgery and I won’t be finished by then.’ Damien was aware that all the theatre staff could hear his conversation quite clearly but it was too late for secrets now. Abi was busy bandaging their patient’s eyes but he could sense by her posture that she was listening just as intently as all the others, but he couldn’t worry about them. Summer was his priority, now and always. ‘Have you contacted her mother? She was supposed to collect her.’
‘Of course, but she is in New York.’
‘What? She’s where?’ God, that woman was unbelievable. What the hell was she doing in New York?
‘She told me she contacted you.’
‘What? No, she hasn’t,’ he said, but he knew what she would have done. She would have left a message on his cellphone. No matter how many times he told her he didn’t check his cell if he was in Theatre, she never listened. Brooke always danced to her own tune; other people’s lives were of no consequence to her, she didn’t make allowances or exceptions for any of them, not even her own daughter. Once again, Damien would have to pick up the pieces left by Brooke’s selfishness. ‘Can you give me five minutes?’ he asked the woman on the phone. ‘I’ll make some arrangements and call you back.’
He nodded to the scrub nurse to hang up the phone and let out another expletive.
‘What’s going on?’ the theatre nurse asked.
‘Summer hasn’t been collected from school,’ he replied. He had another couple of hours left in Theatre and just five minutes to work out a solution. He wouldn’t be finished before six so he wouldn’t be finished in time to collect Summer.
His eyes roamed the room as he tried to figure out what to do. Abi taped the last bandage in place and looked up just as his gaze settled on her. She might just be the answer to his problem.
‘Abi, do you think you could do me a favour?’ he asked.
Damien looked worried, stressed, and Abi thought it was probably best that he didn’t operate while in this state. ‘Sure,’ she replied without hesitation, expecting he was going to ask her to start his final surgery, but his question when he asked it was completely unexpected.
‘Would you collect Summer for me?’
‘What?’ Was he crazy? Surely he was kidding. ‘I’ve never met your daughter,’ she retorted, but even in her flustered state she realised there was something he hadn’t considered. ‘I doubt the school would send her home with a complete stranger. Why don’t you go and I’ll start the last case?’
‘The last case is a breast lift.’
Abi knew that, she was supposed to assist for that surgery too.
‘How many of those have you done?’ he asked, and judging by his tone she knew he already knew the answer.
Exactly none. She stared at Damien and her silence was all the answer he needed.
‘That’s what I thought. I need to finish off here. Would you please collect her?’
‘Why doesn’t Summer’s mother pick her up?’
‘That’s a good question,’ he replied with a sigh. ‘She was supposed to but apparently she is on her way to New York.’
Apparently? ‘New York? Didn’t you know?’ Had it just slipped his mind that his wife was away and he was supposed to be picking up his daughter? Was it something he forgot on a regular basis and now he was trying to make it her problem?
Abi didn’t think so. It didn’t seem to fit with his character and he seemed to be genuinely upset and to be struggling for solutions. She believed this had come out of the blue for him too.
Damien shook his head. ‘Brooke told the school that she told me I would have to make arrangements but I haven’t heard from her. This is the third time she has done this.’
‘What did you do the other times?’ she asked, as the anaesthetist began to reverse the anaesthetic.
‘Once I collected her and another time she went home with a friend. But school finished forty-five minutes ago so those mothers would have left, and I don’t have any of their numbers. Please, Abi, I wouldn’t ask you if I had any other options. My daughter is five years old. You remember being five, don’t you? I don’t want her to feel abandoned.’
That word cut Abi to the core. Abandoned was the one word to use if he wanted her sympathy and cooperation. But he couldn’t have known that. That would be impossible. It had just been a comment. But of course she remembered being five.
She also remembered having no one to pick her up. Day after day she would get herself home from school. On a good day it had been because her mother had been working, but on a bad day her mother would be passed out on the sofa, hungover or drunk.
Abi had had no one to rely on when she’d been five or seven or nine. She’d had no one until she’d joined the army at seventeen and had gone to medical school. She’d had no one really until she’d met Mark and even then she’d still ended up alone. There had never been anyone she could rely on. She knew exactly what Damien was talking about.
She started to cave in. ‘I’d do it but I really don’t think the school would let me.’
Damien had an answer for that. ‘I’ll ring them and I’ll get Freya to email your staff ID photo to the office. You’ll just have to show some ID when you get there. Please? I don’t know what else to do. The school is ten minutes from home. If you could just pick her up and I’ll collect her from your place as soon as I’m done here.’
He knew she lived in his neighbourhood, which would put her home close to the school. His plan made sense but Abi didn’t know if she could do it, although it was hard to refuse when he was looking so distressed and imploring her with his dark, dark eyes. If she acquiesced she knew it would be stressful. Could she handle it?
But she remembered what it felt like to be five years old and know that no one was coming for you, knowing that you were on your own. She’d hated that feeling and she knew she couldn’t put someone else in that position.
She sighed and said, ‘Let me make a call.’ She threw her gloves and mask into the bin as Damien signed the surgical notes. She was careful not to agree to his crazy plan just yet. She still didn’t know if she was capable of agreeing to his suggestion. She needed a second opinion. She needed to run it past her psychologist but that wasn’t a conversation she was prepared to have in public. She pushed open the door into the scrub room and went to fetch her cellphone.
She dialled the emergency number, the one Caroline had promised to always answer. Abi wasn’t sure what Caroline termed an emergency exactly but, for her, going unprepared into a new environment that was not only large but filled with people and knowing she would have to introduce herself to strangers without time for any research or reconnaissance definitely fell into the emergency assistance category. Abi had no idea how she was going to manage this and she needed Caroline to give her some contingencies to help her cope.
Caroline answered on the third ring and Abi explained the situation.
‘I assume,’ Caroline said, after listening to Abi’s predicament, ‘that you would actually like to do this favour for your boss?’
Would she? Part of her worried that if she agreed she would be setting a precedent and part of her also worried that she was letting him take advantage of her. But she could also remember what it was like to be left to find her own way home because her mother was incapable, again. Back then nobody had noticed if you weren’t collected from school, lots of kids made their own way home, but not many primary school children had that freedom now. They were bundled off to after-school care before anything untoward could happen to them. Abi remembered all too well that feeling of abandonment and if she could help by collecting Summer she would. It didn’t matter that Summer didn’t know her; she imagined just knowing her dad had sent someone would be better than being forgotten. Abi wasn’t doing this for Damien.
‘I’m not doing this for my boss, I’m doing it for his daughter,’ she explained. ‘She was expecting her mother to collect her and I don’t want her to feel that she’s not important.’ Abi knew that Caroline understood her reasons and where they stemmed from. They’d been over a lot of old, and new, ground together and Abi didn’t have many secrets left that Caroline hadn’t heard. Damien, however, was a new topic and not one they’d discussed, and neither did she intend to. Abi felt it was best, safest to leave him in the category of work colleague. There was no reason to go into any detail about him, he was of no consequence. ‘But I have never met Summer, I don’t know the school, I don’t know the staff and they don’t know me. It’s making me nervous.’
‘The school is close to your house, though?’ Caroline asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Why don’t you go home and collect Jonty?’ the psychologist suggested. ‘Take him with you. You’ll feel better and if Summer likes dogs it will break the ice with her too.’
Abi took a deep breath. She could do this. ‘That’s a good idea. Thanks.’
She felt better when she ended the call, far more confident. This might just work.
* * *
Abi pulled her 4x4 into the school car park. The building was long and low and stretched out before her, but fortunately the car park was virtually empty and she was able to put her car two places from the front entrance. She took a moment to survey her surroundings, not that she really expected any danger but it was a habit she had formed over the past six months and it was proving hard to shake. There was no one around and she could see nothing suspicious. She was in the middle of suburban LA, she reminded herself. It wasn’t Kabul and she was unlikely to encounter a suicide bomber here. But her paranoia still got the better of her and she reached across to her right and opened the passenger door, letting Jonty jump out first. He sniffed the air and once she was certain he was showing no signs of distress she took a deep breath and stepped out of the car.
She showed her ID at the office and was taken to the after-school-hours area, where about two dozen kids were engaged in various activities. She spotted Summer straight away. Three girls were jumping rope and one of the girls turning the rope was a miniature, female version of Damien. Dressed in pink she had her dark hair tied in two short pigtails that stuck out from the sides of her head but there was no mistaking that gene pool.
‘Summer,’ the school secretary called to her, getting her attention. ‘This is Dr Thompson. She works with your father and she’s come to collect you.’
‘Please, call me Abi. And this is Jonty.’
‘A dog! You brought a dog in.’ All three girls, Summer and her two friends, immediately surrounded Abi. Jonty lapped up the attention. Caroline’s advice to bring him had been spot on.
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