After spitting up half her breakfast, Emma could well be hungry again by the time they got to the paediatric clinic’s waiting room. The last thing Zoe needed was having to try and cope with a fractious baby under the watchful gaze of all the other mothers who would be there.
Mothers who would probably all be like that dreadful support group John had talked her into going to on one occasion. Women who adored their babies and knew what they were doing. Women who never ever felt an inkling of the panic and despair that Zoe had lived with every day since Emma’s birth five months ago.
Before that, even. Well before that. Right back in the earliest stages of this whole nightmare when she had agonised over whether even to continue with the pregnancy or not. And when it had all become too much and James had simply walked away. Not that she could blame him. They’d been doing no more than dating casually when she’d become pregnant and while they’d tried to make a go of a relationship, there had been no way James was cut out to deal with the emotional wreck Zoe had morphed into.
Just like her mother.
Oh … rubbish. Zoe parked the car and made a determined effort to park that train of thought at the same time. If she didn’t she might blurt something out in her session with John and that would be worse than having Emma screaming inconsolably in the waiting room. She wasn’t going to discuss her mother with anyone. She wasn’t even going to allow herself to think about her.
The waiting area was packed to the gills this morning. The place was cluttered with prams and strollers, toddlers fighting over the rather sad collection of toys available and babies crying. One distressed infant was pacified quickly by the offer of a breastfeed and Teo smiled at the mother.
Another baby was crying more loudly. Teo took a glance over his shoulder before he disappeared into the examination room.
And then he paused with his hand halfway to pushing the door open and took another look.
It couldn’t be.
But it was.
Zoe Harper was in the waiting area and it was her baby who was distressed. Zoe was pacing back and forth, with the infant upright in her arms, tucked against her shoulder. Her head was bent, almost as if she was shielding the baby from view but Teo could see the way Zoe was scanning the area in an oddly furtive manner. She seemed embarrassed that her baby was crying but why? That’s what babies did. It was part of their job description.
Maybe Zoe wasn’t, in fact, the mother.
Teo dismissed the thought as he entered the examination room. Either the woman he’d seen in total command of a major incident the other day had an identical twin or Zoe had been left in charge of someone else’s baby. Her sister, or a friend perhaps, who’d ducked off to go to the loo. That would explain the total lack of confidence he had sensed.
It took only a minute or two to confirm that his registrar had, indeed, picked up an abnormal murmur in a toddler’s heart sounds. It took several more to reassure the parents that it wasn’t necessarily anything to panic about but then Teo was able to leave the room, confident that his registrar could arrange the urgent tests needed so they would know exactly what they were dealing with. He knew he’d been a little abrupt compared to the time he would normally have spent on a consult like this but he would see the parents again as soon as the results came in.
And he had the strongest desire to check the waiting room again on his way back up to the ward.
This was Zoe’s worst nightmare.
The clinic appointments were running late, the area was getting more and more crowded and she just couldn’t stop Emma crying. It felt like it had been going on for hours now and the looks she was getting from other mothers had gone from sympathetic to pitying to frankly annoyed. Emma’s shrieks had changed as well and the wails were now interspersed with that hiccupping sort of sound that advertised pure misery.
She’d changed her nappy, cuddled her, walked her up and down and now she was trying to feed her with the bottle of formula she’d mixed before leaving. Emma was having none of it. Her tiny hands were shoving at the bottle containing milk that had a totally unacceptable lack of warmth and small legs were kicking in outrage. Zoe could feel herself being watched. She could feel her face flushing and her shoulders hunching.
‘Please, Emma,’ she whispered. ‘Please have a drink.’
Her baby’s face took on a deeper crimson hue as Emma went rigid in her arms, arching her little back to produce the loudest crying Zoe had ever heard. What was wrong with her? What was she doing that was so wrong? Despair was enveloping her now and, to her horror, Zoe felt tears slipping down her own cheeks. She squeezed her eyes shut as she sensed someone approaching. A staff member, probably, coming to take her child away and give it to someone who could be a better mother.
The touch of a hand on her shoulder was so unexpected that Zoe’s eyes snapped open. And then she blinked. Crouched in front of her, so that he was on the same eye level, was Teo Tuala. He wasn’t looking at her as if she was some kind of a monster mother either. He was smiling.
‘Someone’s not happy,’ he said. ‘Maybe I can help?’
Zoe had noticed what a big man Teo was but having him hunched in front of her like this made him seem like a huge, solid rock of a man. And he had the most extraordinarily dark brown eyes. Eyes that reflected his smile but with a depth that told her he understood that it wasn’t just the baby that was so unhappy.
And he wanted to help. Zoe’s brain provided a snapshot of the day she’d met Teo. When he had been standing in the middle of a chaotic accident scene holding a stranger’s baby and looking as if it was nothing out of the ordinary. As if there was nothing about babies he couldn’t cope with. Enjoy, even.
Something else came with that flash of memory. An instinctive sureness that she could trust him. And he was a paediatrician. Something had to be wrong with Emma for her to be crying like this. Without giving herself any time to think of the possible consequences, Zoe pushed her baby towards him. She didn’t say a word. She couldn’t. If she opened her mouth she would probably start sobbing as hard as her tiny daughter was.
Teo didn’t even blink. He took Emma and made her look as tiny as a newborn in his big arms. He got to his feet and peered down at the baby as he rocked her.
‘What’s the story, little one?’ he asked casually. ‘It’s not so bad around here, really.’
Emma hiccupped, staring up at this new person. And then, miraculously, she stopped howling.
Zoe could hear the sigh of relief coming from more than one of the other mothers around her.
And she had never felt more of a failure. She’d been doing her very best here for so long and it had taken less than thirty seconds for someone else to soothe her baby. A man.
She couldn’t look at Teo. She stared down at the bottle of unwanted milk in her hands, her vision blurred by tears.
‘Hey …’
Teo was still smiling, she could hear it in his voice. It was a gentle, soothing word that meant nothing but managed to contain an entire message. A ‘here we are and it’s not really all that bad, is it?’ kind of message.
Emma was probably smiling back at him by now.
‘Zoe?’
Looking up, Zoe knew instantly that the ‘Hey’ had been directed at her and not Emma. But she couldn’t respond. He might think things weren’t so bad because Emma had stopped crying but, for her, things were even worse.
And he knew that. Holding Emma securely with one arm, he reached down and picked up the handle of the car seat. ‘Come with us,’ he invited softly. ‘You can bring the bag.’
Zoe still felt she could explode with the emotion she was trying to contain but she had no choice. She had to follow because ‘us’ was this paediatrician and her baby. And everybody, absolutely everybody in this waiting room, was watching. All the mothers, a sprinkling of fathers,