‘And you?’ he probed.
‘The island’s never been my home. I love it but I never thought of living anywhere but here.’ She attempted a smile but it was a pretty shaky one. ‘I guess I have more than a bit of my mother in me somewhere. I like excitement, cities, shopping…life.’
‘Like me.’
‘My excitement levels don’t match your excitement levels,’ she told him ruefully. ‘I like being a surgeon in a bustling city hospital. I don’t dangle out of helicopters in raging seas, plucking—’
But Grady wasn’t to be distracted. The background had been covered. Now it was time to move on. ‘Morag, what’s wrong?’ His deep voice cut through her misery, compelling. Doctor asking for facts, so he could treat what needed to be treated.
Her voice faltered. She looked up at him and then away. His hand tightened on hers—just as she’d seen him do with distressed patients. For some reason the action had her tugging away from him. She didn’t want this man treating her as he’d treat a patient. This was supposed to be special.
This was supposed to be for ever.
For ever?
The prospect of for ever rose up, overwhelming her with dread. Somehow she had to explain and she had to do it before she broke down.
‘Beth has renal cancer,’ she whispered.
She’d shifted her hand back to her side of the table. Grady made a move to regain it, but she tucked it carefully under the table. It seemed stupidly important that she knew where her hand was.
He didn’t say anything. She swallowed while he waited for her to go on. He was good, this man. His bedside manner was impeccable.
And suddenly, inexplicably, his bedside manner made her want to hit him.
Crazy. Anger—anger at Grady—was crazy. She had to force herself to be logical here. To make sense.
‘I haven’t been back to the island for over a year,’ she managed. ‘But last time I went Beth seemed terrific. She had a bad time for a while. She married a local fisherman, and he was drowned just after Dad died. But she was recovering. She’s thirty-nine years old and she has a little boy, Robbie, who’s five. She seemed settled and happy. Life was looking good.’
‘But now she’s been diagnosed with renal cancer?’ His tone was carefully neutral, still extracting facts.
‘Mmm.’
‘What stage?’
‘Advanced. Apparently she flew down to Melbourne last month and had scans without telling anyone. There’s a massive tumour in the left kidney, with spread that’s clear from the scans. It’s totally inoperable.’
And totally anything else, she thought bleakly as she waited for Grady to absorb what she’d told him. He’d know the inevitable outcome just as clearly as she did. If renal cancer was caught while the tumour was still contained, then it could be surgically removed—removing the entire kidney—but once it had spread outside the kidney wall, chemotherapy or radio-therapy would make little difference.
‘She’s dying,’ she whispered.
‘I’m sorry.’
Her eyes flew up to his. He was watching her, his eyes gentle, but she wasn’t imagining it. There was that tiny trace of removal. Distancing.
‘I need to go to the island,’ she told him. ‘Now.’
‘Of course you do.’ He hesitated, and she could see him juggling appointments in his head. Thinking ahead to his frantic week. It was what she always did when something unexpected came up.
Until now.
‘Do you want me to come with you?’ he asked.
Did she? Of course she did. More than anything else in the world. But…
‘I can call on Steve to cover for me for the next week,’ he told her. ‘If we could be back by next Sunday—’
‘No.’
His face stilled. ‘Sorry?’
And now it was time to say it. It couldn’t be put off one moment longer.
‘Grady, this isn’t going to happen,’ she said gently, as if this would hurt him as much as it hurt her. And maybe it would.
‘My sister’s dying. She has a little boy and she’s a single mother. She has a community who depend on her.’
His face was almost expressionless. ‘What are you saying?’
‘That it’ll be a lot…a lot longer than a week.’
‘Can you take more than a week off?’ His face changed back to the concerned, involved expression that was somehow turning her away from him. It was making her cringe inside. It was his doctor’s face.
‘I guess you must,’ he said, thinking it through as he spoke. ‘The hospital will organise compassionate leave for you for a few weeks.’ He hesitated. ‘I’ll come for a week now, and then again for—’
‘The funeral?’ she finished for him, and watched him flinch.
‘Morag…’
She shook her head. ‘It’s not going to happen.’
‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said—’
‘Oh, the funeral’s going to happen,’ she said, her anger directed squarely now against the appalling waste of cancer. ‘Inevitably it’ll happen. But as for taking compassionate leave…I can’t.’
He frowned, confused. ‘So you’ll come back in a week or so?’
‘I didn’t say that.’ She lifted her hands back onto the table and stared down at her fingers, as if she couldn’t believe she was about to make the commitment that in truth she’d made the moment she’d heard her sister whisper, ‘Renal cancer.’ It was done. It was over. ‘I’m not taking compassionate leave,’ she said bluntly. ‘I’m going to the island for ever.’
It shocked him. It shocked him right out of compassionate doctor, caring lover mode. All the things he was most good at. His brow snapped down in surprise, and his deep, dark eyes went still.
‘You can’t just quit.’ Grady’s job was his life, Morag thought hopelessly, and she could understand it. Until an hour ago she’d felt the same way. But she had no choice.
‘Why can’t I quit?’ And then, despairingly, she added, ‘How can I not?’
‘Surely your sister wouldn’t expect you to.’
‘Beth expects nothing,’ she said fiercely. ‘She never has. She gives and she gives and she gives.’ Their meal arrived at that moment and she stared down at it as if she didn’t recognise it. Grady leaned across to place her knife and fork in her hands—back to being the caring doctor—but she didn’t even notice. ‘Petrel Island needs her so much,’ she whispered.
‘She’s their only doctor?’
‘My father and then Beth,’ she told him. She stopped for a minute then, ostensibly to eat but really to gather her thoughts to continue. ‘Because my father was a doctor, more young families have come to the island, and the community’s grown. There’s fishing and kelp farming and a great little specialist dairy. But without a doctor, the Petrel Island community will disintegrate.’
‘They could get someone else.’
‘Oh, sure.’ It was almost a jeer. ‘A doctor who wants to practise in such a place? I don’t think so. After…after Beth dies, maybe…I’ll try to find someone, but it’s so unlikely. And Beth needs my promise—that the island can continue without her.
‘So you see,’ she told him, cutting her