‘So, what’s your next assignment anyway?’ Mattie asked.
‘I’m supposed to be DS for a training exercise on Salisbury Plain.’
A few months ago he would have relished this task. It had to mean something that he couldn’t muster up an ounce of enthusiasm for it.
‘Supposed to be?’
Mattie narrowed her eyes, but Hayden was grateful that she was too preoccupied with her own thoughts of Kane to really be concentrating on what he’d said.
The truth was that he’d rather be somewhere else than the UK entirely. Somewhere thousands of miles away. Somewhere with a certain person. It was the most bizarre sensation. Certainly not one he’d ever had to contend with before.
Who would have th
ought that one woman could have turned his whole life on its head this way? And it had happened so quietly, so stealthily that he hadn’t seen it coming for even a second.
Bridget Gardiner.
If he wasn’t to change the dialogue with her, he was going to have to find a new approach. Soon, thanks to requests from the various charity project coordinators he had met in his time out there, his CO would be sending out a new contingent to the region for ongoing support. They would carry out similar infrastructure work to that they’d carried out at Jukrem, but this time at other camps such as Rejupe, and further afield.
Only one question remained: was he willing to?
* * *
Snatching up one of the few remaining paediatric units of O negative from the refrigerator unit in the lab, Bridget began decanting the blood into the sterile bags for paediatric use before taking a sample in order to allow her to conduct a bedside cross-match.
‘You paged?’ Justin, the doctor, hurried in as Bridget was back at the child’s bedside.
By the looks of it, he had just woken from what had probably only been his first hour’s sleep in about the last twenty hours.
‘You look like hell,’ Bridget offered by way of apology. ‘Patient is an eighteen-month-old baby, presented about ten minutes ago very pale, low oxygen, bloody diarrhoea, and a haemoglobin of two point nine.’
‘How much blood have we got?’ he asked grimly.
‘Not a lot. But there are at least three donors out there so we’ll screen them as quickly as we can.’
‘Okay.’ He began to examine the baby, no doubt taking in the same muscle-wasting, anaemia and malnutrition that she had. ‘It’s going to be hard to find a vein.’
If by hard he meant basically impossible, she concurred.
‘IV line to normal saline?’ she suggested.
‘I knew you were here for a reason.’ Justin nodded grimly. ‘I know you’ve been on duty all night but you’re the best cross-matcher we have.’
‘I’m not going anywhere,’ Bridget assured him, pushing back against the wall of exhaustion that threatened to crash over her.
‘That’s good, because the new army units are due in today.’
For a fraction of a second Bridget froze. And then she threw herself into her task, but this time the wall threatening to crash over her wasn’t one of exhaustion but of memories—forceful but unwelcome. Thinking of the new army units arriving made her think about Hayd, whom she couldn’t think about without her chest feeling as though an entire herd of elephants was sitting on it, crushing it.
What made it all the more laughable was the fact that the charity had only decided to extend its working relationship with the British Army because they’d been so impressed with how well the relationship had worked in Jukrem.
Now other medical camps in the region were getting Royal Engineers to work on infrastructure, whilst the relationship between Hayden and herself had died a pitiful death.
And still an even more foolish part of her had half imagined that now Operation Ironplate was over for him, Hayden might have tried to come out on one of the new charity/army operations, this time in her area. But he hadn’t, and she hated herself for that traitorous voice stirring things up.
She hated herself even more for the other voice that told her it was merely telling the truth.
Four months, and she still hadn’t learned. But volunteering out here had always brought one thing back to her more than anything else. Life was too short for grudges.