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EMILY FORBES began her writing life as a partnership between two sisters who are both passionate bibliophiles. As a team, ‘Emily’ had ten books published. One of her proudest moments was winning the 2013 Australia Romantic Book of the Year Award for SYDNEY HARBOUR HOSPITAL: BELLA’S WISHLIST.
While Emily’s love of writing remains as strong as ever, the demands of life with young families have recently made it difficult to work on stories together. But rather than give up her dream Emily now writes solo. The challenges may be different, but the reward of having a book published is still as sweet as ever.
Whether as a team or as an individual, Emily hopes to keep bringing stories to her readers. Her inspiration comes from everywhere, and stories she hears while travelling, at mothers’ lunches, in the media and in her other career as a physiotherapist all get embellished with a large dose of imagination until they develop a life of their own.
If you would like to get in touch with Emily you can e-mail her at emilyforbes@internode.on.net
www.millsandboon.co.uk
Dedication
For my fabulous brothers and sisters-in-law:
Andrew, Tim, Michelle, Brigid, Terry,
Rebecca, Nick, Alexandra, Duncan, Nick, Rachel,
Luke, Danielle, Ben and Kiera—with love.
Table of Contents
Cover
About the Author
Title Page
Dedication
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
Copyright
PROLOGUE
Sunday, 14th December
RUBY HAD ALWAYS known she’d have to grow up one day but she’d suspected it would be a gradual process, like growing out a fringe or recovering from a broken heart. She never expected to have to grow up overnight.
A few hours earlier she’d been asleep in her bed. Now she was about to walk into an intensive care unit halfway across the country and she was terrified of what she would find. She didn’t know if she was strong enough to deal with this crisis. She suspected she was a flight-not-fight type of personality. In fact, she knew she was. She’d always run away when the going had got tough.
Perhaps being able to cope with traumatic situations was a sure sign of maturation. The trouble was she was afraid of what she was about to see and afraid she wouldn’t cope.
Maybe this disaster would be the catalyst that forced her to grow up. Maybe it would trigger her development into the sort of person others could depend on, but she really wasn’t sure if she had that level of resolve.
She waited as her sister’s fiancé keyed the security code into the door and held it for her and then she trailed in Jake’s footsteps as he crossed the room.
Ruby could see her sister, Scarlett, and their mother sitting side by side. Scarlett was holding their mother’s hand and Ruby knew she was comforting Lucy, not the other way around. Scarlett had always looked after all of them, their mother included.
Seeing her family huddled together threatened to damage the wall around the well of emotion that she’d been trying to keep under control since she’d left Byron Bay in the early hours of the morning. Throughout the flight to Adelaide, and even on the short trip from the airport to the hospital, she’d fought to keep her emotions in check. She hadn’t wanted to fall apart in front of a plane full of strangers or in front of her sister’s fiancé—she didn’t know him well enough yet and she couldn’t let him see that she wasn’t as brave or as strong as Scarlett was.
Scarlett stood up the moment she saw Ruby. She came towards her with her arms open and wrapped Ruby in her embrace. Ruby relaxed into her older sister’s comforting hug. She could feel the tears welling in her eyes and gathering on her lashes ready to spill over as she soaked up Scarlett’s reassurance.
She and Scarlett were of similar height but Ruby’s skinny frame was always a sharp contrast to Scarlett’s curves. Even more so today, thought Ruby as she felt Scarlett’s rounded belly, firm and hard and stretched tight as a drum, pressing into her. Ruby stepped back out of Scarlett’s embrace to take a proper look at her. Scarlett was into the final trimester of her pregnancy and it was the first time Ruby had seen her in several months, the first time she’d seen her looking pregnant. It suited her.
But seeing Scarlett’s new curves served as another little push to Ruby’s subconscious, another little hint that times were changing and she might have to change along with them. Scarlett had always been there for her. They’d always been close because Scarlett had made that her priority. Their relationship had been nurtured, and on occasion saved, by Scarlett’s determination and perseverance. She’d been there for all of them at one time or another but now she had another person totally dependent on her. Her fiancé and their baby would be Scarlett’s priorities now.
Ruby knew that didn’t mean that Scarlett would abandon any of them. Not her, not their mother and certainly not Rose, their younger sister and the reason they were all here in the ICU, but Scarlett couldn’t be expected to shoulder all their worries. Rose needed them and they needed to look out for her. She needed to look out for Rose.
She’d never really given much thought to how her family was faring. She’d chosen her own path at the age of sixteen and hadn’t spent much time considering others. She realised now how selfish she’d been. It was time for her to step up.
She hugged her mother next. Anyone watching may have thought it strange that she greeted her sister before her mother but Ruby and Lucy didn’t have an easy relationship. Ruby had always felt far more comfortable sharing her thoughts and feelings with her sister, but she recognised that the sometimes stilted relationship she had with her mother was her own fault. She’d always pushed her mother away. Ruby had always wanted to assert her independence and it had backfired on her in spectacular fashion during her teenage years but she’d been too proud then to admit her mistakes. She wasn’t sure if she’d changed all that much in the ensuing years.
‘It’s good to have you home.’ Lucy welcomed her with open arms.
Her mother would say she was home but Adelaide hadn’t been home to Ruby for almost eleven years. She wasn’t sure where she would say home was. But she wasn’t going to argue over semantics now. It wasn’t important. She was going to be mature and agreeable. Whether she called Adelaide home or not was irrelevant—she was here now. A week earlier than planned. She’d had flights booked for the end of the week, scheduled for Scarlett and Jake’s wedding, she hadn’t planned on making a middle of the night dash to the bedside of her critically ill little sister.
Ruby could hear the soft click and hiss of the ventilator behind her. So far she’d avoided looking at Rose and still she hesitated. She wasn’t sure if she could handle seeing her younger sister lying in a hospital bed connected to machines.
She let go of her mother and asked, ‘Have the doctors been back? Have they said anything more?’ She asked the question even though she was unsure about whether she was ready to hear the answer.
She knew the question was just another delaying tactic. When Jake had met her at the airport he’d told her what they knew about Rose’s condition so far. Which wasn’t much and not nearly enough to thaw the icy fingers that had gripped her heart since Scarlett had phoned her in the middle of the night. She knew the doctors suspected meningitis and had put Rose into a medically induced coma and started her on a course of antibiotics, but Jake hadn’t been able to tell her anything further.
She had directed her question at Scarlett and was struck again how she automatically turned to her sister and not their mother in a crisis. Scarlett, as the eldest of the Anderson sisters, had always been the level-headed one. The one who everyone in their scrambled family turned to in times of crisis, but Ruby had a premonition that this crisis might be too big for Scarlett to handle alone and she suspected she would have to be prepared to stand up and be counted too. The only issue was she didn’t know if she was capable of that.
Up until now Ruby had done a very good job of avoiding major responsibility but it seemed times might be changing. She was going to have to be prepared to take some of the burden from Scarlett.
She’d had plenty of experience of her life changing around her without warning or consultation. It had been something that had shaped her into the woman she was today, one who wanted total control over her own life. One who didn’t want to give anyone else an opportunity to upset her apple cart. Taking control hadn’t always worked out so well for her but at least her mistakes, downfalls and dramas had been of her own making.
But even though recently she’d been doing a relatively good job of controlling her own little world she wasn’t able to control the world that existed around her, and the wider world had a habit of intruding when she didn’t want it to and throwing curve balls her way.
Scarlett shook her head in reply to Ruby’s question. Jake and Scarlett were both doctors yet they had no more insight into Rose’s situation and the lack of information frustrated Ruby.
Ruby herself wasn’t a stranger to hospitals. All the sights and sounds and smells, which to many others would seem unfamiliar, were nothing unusual for her. She was a nurse, she’d had plenty of experience looking after patients and their families but she’d never been on the other side. She’d never had to sit by and watch while someone she loved was on life support and being cared for by a team of doctors and nurses. It was a very different situation and, for reasons she didn’t fully understand yet, it made her uneasy. She knew it was, in part, due to exhaustion. She was tired and emotional but she had to face her fears. She’d been on the go since four this morning and lack of sleep wasn’t making things any rosier.
Rose.
She needed to face her fears. She needed to see Rose.
She could feel anxiety gripping her chest, adding to the pressure of those icy fingers around her heart as she forced herself to look at her younger sister. She knew she was nervous, worried about the sight that was going to confront her. She turned to the bed.
Half a dozen various tubes and leads connected Rose to monitors and to life. Ruby tried to ignore the mechanical sounds of the ventilator as she focused on Rose. The pale skin of her arms was covered in a purple rash that was indicative of septicaemia but the rash didn’t appear to have spread to her face. Ruby didn’t know how she would have reacted to that. Rose had always been unbelievably pretty and Ruby didn’t want to face such a stark and obvious sign of Rose’s affliction. She looked as though she was sleeping and Ruby was grateful for small mercies.
But she still didn’t understand why nothing was happening. Everyone was sitting around, waiting. If the doctors wanted to run more tests, where were they? Why wasn’t someone doing something? What were they waiting for?
‘Where are the doctors?’ She turned away from Rose and, out of habit as much as anything else, once again directed her question to Scarlett. She forced herself to look at Lucy next. Forced herself to include her mother, but Lucy looked as though she was in shock and Ruby doubted she’d even heard her question.
Her mother looked tired. Lucy had always been beautiful. Scarlett had inherited her looks but although Lucy often looked tired, Ruby had never thought she looked older than her years. Until today.
Lucy had been only eighteen when Scarlett was born and they were often mistaken for sisters. But Ruby knew people wouldn’t be making that mistake today. Sitting side by side, their similarities were still obvious but so was their age difference. Growing up, Ruby had longed for their colouring, longed for their dark hair, dark eyes and flawless fair skin. She had the fair skin but she’d hated her red hair, even though her mother had insisted it was strawberry blond, and the smattering of freckles that were strewn across the bridge of her nose.
Ruby could see some strands of grey in Lucy’s dark hair, which she didn’t remember seeing before. She knew she had caused some of the lines on her mother’s face but there were more of those too than there used to be. Definitely more than there had been a few months ago when Ruby had last come back to Adelaide, and she suspected the events of the past twelve hours had put them there.
But this wasn’t about her or her mother now. It was about Rose, and she needed to stay calm and positive. Biting back a scream of frustration, she looked back at Scarlett, wanting someone to answer her.
‘They’re waiting for the results of the blood tests,’ Scarlett told her.
‘I thought they’d diagnosed meningitis?’
Scarlett nodded. ‘They’re treating her for septicaemia and bacterial meningitis but they haven’t identified the strain yet.’
Ruby knew that bacterial meningitis was more serious than the viral form and she also knew that the prognosis varied widely between the different strains of bacteria and between different people. What she didn’t understand was how Rose could have caught the disease.
‘How did this happen? How did Rose get sick?’ As she asked yet another question she wondered if they should be talking in front of Rose. She believed that coma patients could hear conversations going on around them but she figured Rose had probably heard everything else that had been discussed so far this morning.
‘No one can really say,’ Jake answered, ‘but the most likely scenario is that Rose picked it up at work in the after-school care facility. The bacteria can’t live outside the body for long so people need to be in close contact.’
Rose was studying to be a primary school teacher and her practical work plus her part-time job in an after-school care facility would give her plenty of exposure to all manner of bugs.
‘But it’s also reasonably common in young adults aged between fifteen and twenty-four so it’s almost impossible to tell where she came into contact with it.’ Jake shrugged.
Rose was twenty-one, six years younger than Ruby, and her age put her right inside the high-risk age bracket.
Ruby glanced at Scarlett as a realisation hit her. ‘Is it safe for you to be in here?’ she asked. Scarlett’s pregnancy was definitely showing but Ruby couldn’t remember enough about the disease to know if Scarlett was putting herself or her baby at risk.
Scarlett nodded in reply. ‘I’m fine. It’s passed through sneezing and coughing via droplets in the air.’ They both looked at Rose. Attached to the ventilator, she wasn’t doing either of those things.
‘Has anyone else from the school fallen ill?’
‘We haven’t been told but anyone she had contact with at school will be given antibiotics as a precaution, but there are other possibilities that complicate things further in terms of treating other people but don’t really affect Rose’s treatment. What the doctors need to do now is identify the strain of bacterium.’
‘Rose was out at a lunch for a friend’s birthday yesterday. She came home early and said she wasn’t feeling well and went straight to bed.’ Lucy added to Jake’s tale. ‘We assume she was already infected when she went to lunch but because there can be such a short period of time between becoming infected and presenting with symptoms it’s adding to the confusion. When she came home she had a temperature and a headache but it didn’t seem anything out of the ordinary. She didn’t complain about a stiff or sore neck or a rash. I didn’t see any of the red flags for meningitis so I just assumed it was a flu virus.’
Lucy was also a nurse but she worked in aged care, and meningitis wasn’t something she saw much of.
‘She got up to go to the bathroom around midnight and I heard her collapse. When I reached her she was having trouble breathing and that’s when I noticed the rash. I rang the ambulance and even though they arrived quickly, by the time we got to the hospital she had gone downhill rapidly. She was in cardiac failure, her blood pressure was too low to register and she had no pulse. The rash on her body was spreading before my eyes. I just wish I’d suspected something more sinister than flu to begin with.’
‘I’m not sure that anyone would have, Lucy. You know how variable the signs and symptoms can be and how often they’re missed.’
Jake’s words were meant to be reassuring but Ruby doubted anything would ease her mother’s conscience. Not yet. Not until they knew Rose’s prognosis and maybe not even then. But Ruby was grateful to Jake for being there to support them all. She knew Scarlett and Lucy would be struggling with the situation as much as she was and it wasn’t fair to expect Scarlett to support them all. They couldn’t expect Scarlett to have enough strength for all of them. Not always.
Ruby was pleased that Scarlett now had Jake to take care of her. No one was looking to lean on Ruby but neither was anyone offering a shoulder to support her. She had always rebuffed offers of help or support so she supposed no one thought she might need some now.
Before she could follow that train of thought any further they were interrupted by one of the ICU nurses and a trio of doctors.
‘The doctors want to do a lumbar puncture,’ the nurse explained.
Four pairs of eyes swivelled to the doctors.
‘Now?’ Lucy asked.
The doctors were nodding. Ruby wondered who they all were and what they did, but no one seemed to think it was important to introduce her.
‘We really need to identify the bacterium responsible for the infection as the outcomes can be vastly different.’ The doctor who spoke looked easily the more senior of the three. Balding and carrying some extra weight, Ruby assumed he was the specialist. ‘There are increased mortality rates and poorer outcomes with the pneumococcal strain compared to meningococcal. It’s fatal in about ten per cent of cases and one in seven will suffer a permanent disability.’
Ruby had heard enough now. She wished he’d stop talking.
‘We don’t know yet whether there’s any permanent damage to her heart and some of her other major organs are showing signs of stress. We’re hoping to minimise the damage to her vital organs and her extremities but we need to make a proper diagnosis in order to implement the right treatment.’
Ruby was feeling sick. She didn’t want to think about the consequences of Rose’s illness. She didn’t want to think about what else could go wrong. She wanted to believe that Rose would get better and that everything would go back to normal.
So much for being positive and grown up.
‘The next thirty-six to forty-eight hours are critical.’
And Ruby knew immediately what the doctor meant.
Rose had to get through the next two days if she was going to have any chance of surviving.
CHAPTER ONE
EVERYONE ELSE HEARD the unspoken words too and Ruby watched as Scarlett turned to Jake.
It seemed she was right, Scarlett couldn’t be expected to support them all. This was one time when she needed someone to support her. Lucy wouldn’t be able to lean on Scarlett, she had enough to deal with. Ruby might need to be the one to offer her mother comfort now.
As the medical team began to set up for the lumbar puncture Ruby found herself, along with the rest of her family, being ushered out of Rose’s cubicle.
The ICU had suddenly become a hive of activity and Ruby had to stop and wait as another patient was wheeled in and she was separated from the others by the barouche. As the bed was pushed past her she caught a glimpse of a solidly built man and she immediately wondered what had happened to him.
What had brought him to the ICU? There were usually only a couple of reasons why young men ended up here—accidents, usually involving vehicles, or serious illness. She turned her head, watching as he went past. Despite the oxygen mask covering his face, he looked too well to be seriously ill. His face was tanned and his colour was good and the one arm that she could see poking out from under the blankets was also tanned and well muscled. He looked robust and healthy enough.
She could see the outline of a cradle that was keeping the weight of the blankets off his leg and was suggestive of a lower-limb fracture. A motorbike accident, she decided before she ducked around the end of his bed to catch up with Scarlett and their mother.
They were hovering in the corridor, looking lost. They looked unsure what to do as they waited for the doctors to finish with Rose. Ruby was exhausted. It had been a crazy day—emotional, upsetting and stressful. She didn’t want to pace the hospital corridors, waiting for Rose’s procedure to be completed, she needed a shower and some fresh air to give her some strength to face what was yet to come.
‘Does anyone mind if I go and have a shower while the doctors are with Rose?’ Ruby asked.
She knew Lucy would wait and she knew Scarlett wouldn’t let her wait alone. Ruby also knew that she should offer to stay too. Hadn’t she just told herself she would need to be the one to offer support to her mother? But she couldn’t do it. She knew she’d go crazy with the tension of waiting and that would inevitably lead to her picking a fight with Lucy, something neither of them needed. She told herself it was best for everyone if she got away from the hospital and cleared her head before she exploded.
‘I’ll give you a lift to our place, if you like,’ Jake offered, when no one insisted she stay.
‘Don’t you want to wait with Scarlett? There’d be a shower in the hospital I could use, surely?’ She knew Scarlett would be able to organise a shower for her in the staff facilities at the hospital but she would prefer to get outside. She really wanted a chance to get some fresh air at the same time.
‘It’ll be nicer to shower at our house,’ Scarlett replied.
‘It’s only five minutes to home and your bag is still in my car,’ Jake said. The two of them were giving her permission to leave and she wasn’t going to argue further.
‘Are you sure you don’t mind ferrying me around?’ she asked him, as they left the hospital and returned to his car.
‘Not at all. I’m just doing whatever needs to be done at the moment—chauffeur, cook, liaison person.’
‘Liaison person?’
‘Between your family and the medical team,’ he explained. ‘It’s difficult for Scarlett and your mum to ask the right questions, they’re too close. It seems to work best if I do it.’
‘How can you do all that and go to work?’
‘I was already on holidays leading up to the wedding. I’ve quit The Coop.’
‘You’ve quit?’
Jake laughed. ‘In case you haven’t noticed, I’m about to become a husband and a father. I think my nights spent working in a strip club have been numbered for a while. It’s time to move on to the more responsible stage of my life. I start my internship in three weeks. Quitting The Coop now was supposed to give us time for a honeymoon. So I am at your service. Anything you need, just ask.’
Ruby appreciated the offer. She had come to think of Jake as the brother she wished she had.