This was what she remembered. The meltdown. The sheer delight in kissing Tom, in being kissed by him. She was floating, getting warmer by the second. Her body responded like a drought-stricken plain—hot sensations flooding over her, washing away the long, lonely nights.
A groan escaped Tom’s lips.
She blinked. Paused mid-kiss. What was she doing? Setting herself up for more heartbreak? There could be no future in this. One stolen kiss, or more, wouldn’t solve a thing. For either of them. She leaned backwards, slowly pulling her lips from Tom’s beautiful mouth.
‘Fi?’ Slowly Tom opened his eyes, looking startled to find her watching him. ‘Oh, hell, I’m sorry. So much for the talk I gave myself half an hour ago.’
He lifted her off his thighs and scrambled upright. Leaning down, he offered her a hand, tugged her up onto her feet. ‘I don’t know what to say,’ he added softly, shaking his head in a bemused fashion.
Fiona reached a hand to his face, touched him lightly. ‘It takes two, Tom.’
His answering smile was brief and filled with guilt. ‘Sure.’
Fiona bent down to retrieve the photo that had started this. She studied it, her heart squeezing. ‘I guess all mothers think their baby is gorgeous, but Liam really was.’
‘I think all mothers say exactly that. Of course he was gorgeous. We wouldn’t have been normal parents if we hadn’t been blinded to any imperfections.’
She swung around. ‘Imperfections? What do you mean?’
Tom lifted his hands and shrugged, a warm smile teasing his lips. ‘See? You defend him instantly. That’s great. And anyway, he was perfect. Apart from the sleepless nights he gave us.’
Relaxing again, she placed a kiss on Liam’s head and placed the photo upright on Tom’s dressing table. ‘I miss you so much. Every day.’
‘You’re talking to Liam, right?’
Fiona blinked. Gazed at her son. Yes. She was. But had she been talking to Tom as well? Not intentionally. But truthfully? The breath she hadn’t realised she held oozed past her lips, lips now swollen from Tom’s kisses. Yes, she’d missed Tom every single day and night since the moment she’d left him. Even during the years she’d spent fully focused on medicine and helping others there had been a feeling of loss that she couldn’t entirely pin on Liam.
Turning to Tom, she murmured, ‘Of course.’
The chilly room caused her to shiver. Gathering up the quilt folded over a chair, she wrapped herself in it and curled up on the end of the bed. She really should move out into the kitchen or the lounge, but she couldn’t bring herself to leave that photo just yet.
Her voice wobbled when she said, ‘Tell me about what you did, where you went, after I left town. I mean, how did you get from working in the paediatric department at Auckland Hospital to opening your own hospital in the South Island?’
The bed dipped as Tom sat at the opposite end and shuffled his backside up onto the pillows. Leaning against the headboard, he clasped his hands behind his head and gazed at the ceiling. ‘I think the idea began bubbling away at the back of my mind as I worked with children at Auckland. I saw so many of them needing to get together with other kids coping with similar problems. Their parents needed that sort of contact too. But after we split up I first took a position at Christchurch Hospital.’
‘The one city you always said you’d never live in.’
‘I needed to get out of Auckland for a while. Quite frankly, I didn’t care where I went, so when a job came up in Christchurch I applied.’ He looked wistful. ‘I loved working in Auckland, but I couldn’t focus any more. I figured a change would do the trick.’
‘Did it?’ It hadn’t for her. Not initially, anyway.
He lowered his eyes to look at her. ‘Yes and no. I immersed myself in work, but that wasn’t enough to fill in the long, empty hours when I returned to my flat at night. So I began toying with my dream of setting up a specialist hospital. Almost overnight the dream grew into reality. Sometimes I thought it had become a monster, but it did keep me busy and the images of Liam and you at bay.’
‘Are you happy, Tom?’
‘There are degrees of happiness. Considering what happened to me…us…yes, I think I am content.’ A shadow crossed his eyes.
‘You don’t sound convinced.’ What was missing from his life? A woman? Family? Of course that had to be the answer. He came from a good family, and he’d always wanted to emulate that with her and Liam. The void in his heart would be huge.
‘Let’s drop this, Fiona.’
‘No, let’s not. We’ve dropped too many hard issues in the past when if we’d worked our way through them instead we might never have separated.’ Steady, she warned herself. Don’t get uptight. Drawing a rough breath, she squeezed out the words she’d needed to say for a long time. ‘Tom, I’m sorry for leaving that day, for the way I just up and went. Driving through that red light and crashing the car was the last straw. Suddenly it seemed imperative I get away and try to straighten my head out. At the time I wasn’t going for good, just for however long it took to sort myself out. Unfortunately it took a lot longer than I’d ever imagined.’ Years longer.
He reached for her hand, gripped it between his, his warmth seeping into her. ‘I should’ve tried harder to hear what you were really telling me. I couldn’t understand you at the time. It seemed that everything I tried to do for you was wrong. The paediatric unit became the one place where I did get things right, and so I spent more and more time there. When you left I knew I’d failed you by not being able to help you through your grief.’
‘Tom, all I wanted from you was for you to tell me your feelings. Now, after hearing about Billy, I understand why you couldn’t talk. You’d been brought up to hold everything in.’
He dropped her hand as though it was poisonous. ‘My son gone and you wanted to know how I felt?’ Pain deepened his voice, darkened his grey eyes to coal. His hands were clenched on his thighs.
‘Of course I knew.’ She took both fists in her hands. ‘But I needed you to share those feelings. I told you about my pain and I got nothing back. We created Liam together, through our love. We were together when he came into the world. But we mourned him separately.’
His fists opened, clasped both her hands. ‘I thought I was helping you by being outwardly strong. I wanted to be your anchor, carry your grief as well as mine.’
‘Was I truly so selfish that you thought I wouldn’t help you?’
With one hand he brushed an errant strand of hair off her face. ‘No. You have to understand that’s the only way I knew how to cope. By focusing on your grief I avoided my own.’
‘You seemed so remote. I’d lost not only my son but the only man I’d ever loved. So I left you to think things through.’
‘Fi, I waited for you to come back.’
He had no idea how often she’d nearly returned, only she’d been afraid to face him and see the hurt she’d caused written in his eyes. And then there had been her guilt…
He continued, ‘I rang your father daily, asking if you were with him, but he always fobbed me off by saying you wanted time to yourself. No one at the hospital knew where you’d gone, only that you’d resigned abruptly.’
‘I did want time to myself. That’s why I left in the first place.’
‘I couldn’t believe you’d disappear from my life so completely. At first I was angry with you, then as the days passed I blamed myself, felt I’d failed you in some way and that was why you’d left. As the years went by and I got really busy with this place I figured I’d only be raking up old wounds if I tracked you down. They were best left alone by then.’ He stared at his hands, recalling the anguish of those weeks. ‘Where did you go when you left me?’
‘I got an apartment on Auckland’s Viaduct, overlooking the harbour. It should’ve been soothing and healing; instead I found everything to be cold and sterile.’ She shivered. ‘I’d lost the two most important people in the whole wide world. Almost overnight my reason for livi
ng had gone. Looking back, I wonder if I didn’t go a little bit crazy…I took my plane and flew the length and breadth of the country, trying to break every private pilot record standing. But it didn’t dull the pain one iota. So I took up aerobatics. I became careless of myself. Unfortunately, or thankfully, I’m a natural when it comes to flying. No matter how hard I pushed all the bound-aries I couldn’t get it wrong enough to write myself off.’
Once more Tom hooked her up in his arms and drew her close, cuddled her. ‘You idiot,’ he muttered, but understanding laced his voice.
‘Yep. A total fool. Then one day it all caught up with me.’ She snapped her fingers. ‘Just like that. I fell apart. Completely. I cried for six months. I lost so much weight my father had me hospitalised and fed intravenously. But in the long run it worked out for the best.’
‘How’s that?’
‘One day the television in my hospital room was tuned to the Discovery channel, and I didn’t have the energy to get out of bed to find the remote and change the channel. One of the nurses used to deliberately leave the remote out of reach so I’d have to make an effort. Her ploy didn’t work very often. So this day I lay watching how the poverty-stricken women of the Sudan coped with raising their children in appalling conditions. I’d always known about third world countries. Who didn’t? But I’d never really taken it in other than on a superficial level. That day I did. My wealthy, self-indulgent lifestyle shamed me. That programme changed my life, and gave me a focus for getting out of hospital.’
‘So you went to London?’
‘I still hadn’t sorted out my feelings about what had happened to us, so I thought I needed to put as much space as possible between you and me. I couldn’t get much further away than England and still be able to finish my training. That’s where I heard about Global Health. The rest, as they say, is history. My history, anyway.’