A Proposal to Remember

‘I wouldn’t be so sure. He’s a pretty confident guy,’ Kim said. ‘He’s going to go after what he wants.’

‘But he didn’t want me,’ Zan said in a choked voice. ‘Not really. I was just a novelty. Someone who didn’t know who he was.’

But now she knew the truth.

Their whole relationship had been false.

* * *

Zan awoke on Boxing Day with a terrible headache and a hollow feeling in her stomach. Nursing a cup of coffee in Kim’s sitting room, it seemed as if the Christmas decorations had somehow lost their sparkle.

Like her life.

She’d never experienced such extremes of emotion in such a short space of time. She’d gone from being ecstatically happy to utterly miserable in less time than it took to say ‘mistletoe’.

Deciding that the only way forward was to just get on with her life, she borrowed one of Kim’s uniforms and went to work with her head held high.

She wasn’t going to cry.

Fortunately no one but Kim knew about her relationship with Carlo, so there wouldn’t be any pitying glances.

There was no clinic because it was Boxing Day, so she was sent to work on the labour ward, which was frantically busy.

‘Can someone go out and look for a warm stable?’ one of the midwives quipped. ‘There’s no more room at the hospital.’

‘I feel sorry for all these babies born at Christmas,’ Kim said as she fixed her antlers in place for the second day running. ‘Imagine—they’re facing a lifetime of joint presents. Talk about cruel.’

Despite her smile, Kim was looking tired and worried, and every now and then she gave Zan a searching look, checking that she was OK.

Zan tried to smile back, telling herself not to be so pathetic.

A week ago she hadn’t even met Carlo and she’d been happy enough then. Surely it wouldn’t take long to get back to normal?

But a week ago she hadn’t been in love.

The sister in charge took her to one side. ‘There’s a patient in Room 3 who’s requesting that you take care of her. She wasn’t registered with us, so I suppose she must be a friend or something.’

Zan frowned. She didn’t have any pregnant friends.

‘Her name is Abby Santini. Ring any bells?’

Zan sucked in a breath. A relative of Carlo’s? But why would she be asking for her?

‘Her husband is a top paediatric cardiac surgeon,’ the sister told her. ‘He actually worked here for a short while and I remember him vaguely. Scarily brilliant and doesn’t suffer fools—you know the type.’

My brother is a doctor.

Zan racked her brains to remember what Carlo had told her about his family and didn’t come up with much.

He’d hardly told her anything, she realised dully. He’d managed to dodge most of her questions and she really knew next to nothing about him.

‘I don’t know them.’

The sister frowned slightly. ‘Well, they asked for you by name, and they need someone good, so unless you’ve got a problem with it you can be their midwife.’

She had a big problem.

Spending a day with Carlo’s family wasn’t part of her rehabilitation. And if his brother’s wife was in the unit then that must mean that Carlo would turn up at some point, and when that happened she didn’t want to be near the place.