Hearts of Gold: The Children's Heart Surgeon. Meredith Webber

father looked at her for a long moment, then he shook his head.

      ‘You worried about what you might be getting that fellow into?’

      Annie nodded.

      ‘I think you’ve got reason to be,’ her father said, then he sighed. ‘Though I don’t know for sure, Annie. We’ve never known for certain why Dennis has been so keen to find you, but my experience and that of other people on the force, and people I’ve spoken to in Social Services who deal with this stuff—it all points to someone as persistent in trying to find you as Dennis has been, being at least borderline dangerous. What he’s done, with his private investigators roaming around the country, is tantamount to stalking. Stalking by proxy but still stalking. You took nothing from him—no money, clothes, passport, nothing—so it’s not as if he’s looking for you to get something back.’

      ‘Is he still looking do you think? Has Uncle Joe said anything?’

      Her father looked surprised.

      ‘Why mention Uncle Joe?’

      Annie smiled—a sad effort but a smile nonetheless.

      ‘Dad, did you think I wouldn’t figure out why you go off on your solo jaunts once or twice a month? Why you drive up to the Gold Coast or fly down to Melbourne? Why would you do it, if not to contact Uncle Joe from somewhere out of Sydney to find out how everyone is?’

      ‘Think you’re clever, I suppose,’ her father growled. ‘I assumed you’d think I’d headed off for a naughty weekend. But you’re right, I do keep in touch with Joe. I let him know we’re OK and find out what’s happening over in the west. I phone him at work—no way all the calls to the internal investigations division in Perth could be traced—but I phone from other cities just in case.’

      He sighed.

      ‘Dennis is still looking. One of those PIs visited your grandmother just last week. A different firm this time. Your gran asked him to leave his card and whether his firm had contacts in the US because she hadn’t heard from you for a long time and she thought she might hire someone to find you.’

      ‘Good old Gran. I’m glad she knows we’re OK,’ Annie said, thinking of the tears she’d shed over not being able to contact her grandmother.

      But right from the start, when a private investigator rather than Dennis himself had contacted her father, two days after she’d left the hotel, he’d been insistent she shouldn’t see or talk to anyone from her past. She’d been cared for by the wife of the policeman she’d first spoken to and then passed on to an organisation that miraculously looked after women in her situation.

      Through them and, she was pretty sure, illegally, she’d eventually flown back to Australia, or rather Annie Talbot had flown back. Then a similar though much smaller organisation in Australia had helped her father disappear—though as a policeman he’d needed less help—to re-emerge in Sydney as Rod Talbot, and take up the writing he’d played at for years, scoring a hit with his first published novel.

      ‘But we’re off the subject. Am I putting Alex in danger by seeing him?’

      She sat down on the floor by her father’s chair and rested her head on his knee.

      ‘I like him so much,’ she confessed quietly, ‘that I couldn’t bear for harm to come to him through me.’

      Her father stroked her hair and Henry, perhaps sensing her deep need, moved so he could put his big head on her lap.

      ‘I can understand that, love,’ her father said. ‘But maybe it’s not your decision to make. Maybe you have to tell him all about it, and let him decide for himself.’

      Annie thought about that for a while then shook her head.

      ‘That’s not going to work, Dad, because if we’re not absolutely certain there’s a risk to us, why would he think there’d be one to him? We don’t know