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A Marriage Meant To Be
Josie Metcalfe
Con and Callie Lowell have the perfect marriage…or so it seems. In reality, years of failed in vitro fertilization treatment have left them heartbroken and distant.Callie believes Con wants a woman who can give him a child, so she decides to run away–leaving behind nothing but a note and a bewildered husband.Con is determined they can make their marriage work, with or without children. As he sets off to find his wife, he realizes he must prove his love. Because he knows their marriage is meant to be!



“There isn’t going to be any divorce!
“Not if I have any say in the matter, and certainly not before I’ve had a face-to-face meeting with Callie to find out why she’s taken off like this.”
Con scrubbed his free hand over his face, wondering when he was ever going to get a good night’s sleep again. He’d already spent months lying in the darkness beside Callie, listening to her toss and turn. He’d tried to comfort her in the days after she’d come out of hospital, but she’d still been totally overwhelmed by the disaster. While she had often gravitated toward Con during the brief hours she’d slept, the rest of the time she had pushed him away—physically and mentally.
“Where are you Callie?” he muttered aloud.
Dear Reader,
The more I look around me, the more I realize that even in the happiest of marriages there can be secret tensions, unspoken longings and regrets. In such situations it would be frighteningly easy for a simple misunderstanding to lead to broken hearts and shattered dreams.
Callie is certain she knows what Con wants, what he needs to make his life complete, and she finally admits that it’s the one thing she can’t give him: a family. She loves him so much that she knows she has to be unselfish and set him free.
Con is distraught when the woman he loves disappears from his life without a word of warning, but he’s not the sort of man to give up without doing everything he can to find her. His love is so deep that it’s an essential part of everything he is, and he’s determined to persuade Callie that their relationship is more important than anything else.
Each of them in their own way is convinced that love is what matters most, but first Con has to find Callie.
I hope their journey touches you the way it absorbed me when I was writing it.
Happy reading,
Josie
A Marriage Meant to Be
Josie Metcalfe


www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)

CONTENTS
PROLOGUE (#u11a8cbc9-b1a9-579c-b8d5-40c20f8a26b3)
CHAPTER ONE (#ucd0e9716-37d7-55e5-9c0b-d52c89ea8c74)
CHAPTER TWO (#u08bb45cf-78bd-5ce9-b711-621f3eb49a03)
CHAPTER THREE (#u5bf6e74b-c4bf-50cf-8f72-bf452113db5b)
CHAPTER FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SIX (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)

PROLOGUE
‘WHAT on earth’s wrong with Con?’ demanded one of the junior nurses as she entered the staffroom.
‘Sue and I just saw him in the car park and said hello,’ said her companion as she shrugged out of her coat, ‘but he walked straight past us without a word…and he looks dreadful.’
‘Haven’t you heard?’ someone said in hushed tones that still somehow managed to carry to everyone in the room. ‘Callie lost their baby…a stillbirth.’
‘No! Oh, she must be devastated!’ Sue said with a gasp of dismay. ‘It’s taken them so long to get pregnant, and just when everyone thought it was all going to be fine this time…’
‘Only the other day I overheard Con teasing her about how much the baby was kicking. He said something about this one being the start of their five-a-side football team,’ someone else piped up. ‘Why do such rotten things happen to such nice people? The two of them would be wonderful parents.’
‘To say nothing about what gorgeous children they’d produce,’ said another. ‘They’re both slim and elegant-looking and they’ve both got that beautiful dark hair. The only toss-up would be whether the kids got his blue eyes or her grey ones.’
‘How long will it be before they can start another round of IVF?’ Sue asked the room at large.
‘Months, I expect,’ her friend said grimly. ‘They’ll probably have to wait for her body to recover from the pregnancy before they can try again.’
‘That’s if they can face going through it another time,’ a fresh voice said coolly. ‘It must be frustrating for him to know that he’s firing on all cylinders and could have had his football team by now if he were married to someone else.’
With that comment there was a distinct change in the atmosphere of the staff room—a sour note that hadn’t been there before—and it wasn’t long before everyone was hurrying off in their different directions, leaving the nurse who had made the comment all alone.
‘Well, I was only saying aloud what everyone else knows,’ she muttered, tight-lipped. ‘He’s a good-looking man in a good job with the prospect of being made consultant in the not-too-distant future. Of course he wants a family…and a wife who can give him that family.’
She turned towards the mirror, watching herself with a calculating smile as she fluffed her blonde hair around her face.

CHAPTER ONE
‘WHERE are you, Callie?’ Con muttered aloud, his concern increasing by the second as he put the phone down again. ‘What on earth’s happened to you?’
It wasn’t like her to let people down like this. She should have turned up for her shift nearly two hours ago, and it didn’t matter how many times he’d tried to contact her, there had been no answer, not at home or on her mobile.
‘Con, can you come and have a look at Mrs Fry for me?’ said an all-too-familiar voice at his elbow, and he sighed, dragging his fingers through his hair with frustration.
‘Isn’t there anyone else free, Sonja?’ he asked as he turned to face the willowy blonde nurse who seemed determined to dog his every step these days. ‘I’m trying to make some phone calls.’
‘She’s an elderly lady who’s had a fall,’ Sonja said earnestly, clutching his arm with a determined hand. ‘She’s obviously broken both wrists but it’s the wound on her head I’m worried about. She must have hit it pretty hard to gash it like that. We’ve stemmed the bleeding but she seems very confused. I need to know whether she should go for an MRI.’
He sighed again, knowing he was going to have to look at the poor lady, even though his concern for Callie was growing by the minute.
‘Which cubicle is she in?’ he asked, resigned to the few minutes’ delay before he could contact their neighbour.
Jan should be home any minute if she’d followed her usual routine of doing her shopping when she finished her shift, and he was certain she wouldn’t mind going next door for him. If there was no answer, she had an emergency key to let herself in. If Callie had been taken ill or had some sort of accident that prevented her getting to the phone…
‘Thank you for doing this for me,’ Sonja gushed, and he rolled his eyes behind her back as he followed her along the corridor. Sycophancy was something he’d never been able to stomach, especially when he had too much else on his mind…like his precious, vulnerable Callie.
‘Hello, Mrs Fry. I’m one of the doctors here. What have you been doing to yourself?’ Even as he approached the elderly lady his eyes were beginning their primary survey, noting how pale and shaky she was and wondering how much of that was normal for her.
‘I fell coming in from the hens,’ she quavered, peering up at him from under the bulk of a pressure bandage wound tightly around her head. ‘Hit my head and broke both my eggs.’
‘No, dear, it wasn’t your legs you broke; it was your wrists,’ Sonja corrected in the annoyingly bright tone some people adopted with children and the elderly.
Con threw her a quelling glare and turned back to the little woman who seemed far from confused to him, despite her age and the recent trauma.
‘Eggs,’ the woman repeated stubbornly, fixing her pale blue gaze on Con. ‘I’d been out to the hens and was bringing the eggs back into the house when I missed the step.’
‘Ouch!’ Con said sympathetically, as he took a peep under the bandage and saw the size of the gash on her forehead. He wouldn’t disturb it too much until it was time to stitch it, not while the newly formed clots were slowing the bleeding to a sluggish seep. ‘There was one step you should have missed. Are you in a lot of pain?’
‘I’m eighty-two, doctor. At my age I’m always in pain. Everything’s wearing out.’
‘What about your hands? Can you move your fingers for me?’ he asked, as he pressed on a nail bed of each hand to check that her circulation wasn’t being compromised by the broken bones.
‘I can, but I don’t want to because they hurt,’ she said with a stubborn glint in her eyes.
Con grinned at her. ‘If I give you something to take the pain away, will you move them for me?’
‘I might,’ she conceded. ‘But when can I go home? The ambulance people wouldn’t let me clean the broken eggs off the step. It’ll be a terrible job to do if it dries on. And they shut my dogs Floss and Nell in the kitchen. They’ll be needing to go out to do their business.’
‘You won’t be able to go home for a little while, Mrs Fry,’ he said gently, delaying the moment he’d probably have to tell her that she was going to have to be admitted. With two broken wrists most people would need help to take care of themselves, let alone an eighty-two-year-old with chickens and two dogs to take care of. ‘First, we need to take some pictures. Then we can sort out your hands and fix the cut on your head.’
‘But how soon can I go home?’ she demanded, clearly determined to get an answer. ‘I haven’t even given the dogs their breakfast, yet.’
‘Have you had anything to eat this morning?’ he sidestepped, not wanting to upset her with the bad news until he knew exactly what they were dealing with.
He quickly scrawled his signature on the paperwork for an MRI of her head to rule out any injury to her brain and X-rays of both wrists to find out exactly how many breaks there were in there. Depending on what each revealed, the poor woman might even have to go to Theatre for Orthopaedics to patch her up.
‘Haven’t eaten anything yet. That’s why I was out getting the eggs. I was going to boil one and have it with some toast—I still make all my own bread,’ she added with a spark of pride, ‘and my own marmalade, too.’
Con’s stomach gave a sudden noisy growl and he chuckled. ‘You can’t imagine just how delicious that all sounds at this time of the morning,’ he said, even as his thoughts automatically flew to Callie and the way she always insisted on setting a place at the table for him before she came out to work. There would be no breakfast for him any time soon—not until she turned up to start her shift. They were far too short-staffed during this early-morning rush of patients for him to feel comfortable taking off just because it was past the end of his own shift. As long as the department manager didn’t spot him…
‘Dr Lowell! Your shift ended two hours ago,’ said a stern voice behind him as he was making for the nearest phone, and he turned with a rueful grin to meet the unsmiling eyes of Selina Drew.
She wasn’t a big woman by anybody’s standards but there was absolutely no question about who ruled St Mark’s A and E department.
‘I know, Selina, but—’
‘But nothing! There’s no point thinking you can soft-soap me,’ she continued firmly. ‘You had a tough shift last night and you know as well as I do that you won’t be able to do your job properly when you come on shift again if you don’t get a proper rest.’
She was right, but under the circumstances…
‘I wasn’t just staying on for the fun of it,’ he said, uncomfortably aware that there was definitely a defensive sound to his voice. And he was tired…oh, so tired. Sometimes it felt as if the weariness had penetrated right to the marrow of his bones. ‘Callie hasn’t arrived yet, and I was just…’ He shrugged.
‘You were just keeping busy while you waited for her to turn up?’ she suggested kindly, obviously understanding far more of his situation that he’d realised. ‘Well, Con, as of this moment, you’re officially off the clock. I’ve just been informed by the office that your wife’s reported off sick today. Now, get yourself home and take care of each other.’
She started to turn away from him then changed her mind.
‘How is Callie really doing, Con?’ she asked, and with this lion-hearted woman he knew that the question came out of genuine concern rather than any other reason. ‘It’s just that…well, she seemed to be coping reasonably well since she came back to work, right until the last few days.’
Con blinked, puzzled. ‘What do you mean? What’s been happening the last few days? I didn’t know she’d been having problems. She hasn’t said anything to me.’
‘Not problems, exactly.’ She pulled a face, looking as if she now regretted saying anything. ‘It’s almost as though…as though she’s had something weighing on her mind. You know how it is when you’re trying to make a decision about something?’
‘Did she give you any idea what it was about?’ he asked.
It didn’t feel quite right to be pumping Selina for information, but if there was something that Callie was worrying about—something that was actually affecting the way she did her job—then it was something he needed to know about. They’d spent the last three years going through hell and high water together as they’d tried to start a family the hard way, and he couldn’t believe that there was anything they couldn’t talk about any more.
‘I was going to ask you the same thing,’ she admitted, then paused a second as though worried about encroaching on private territory. ‘Con, I didn’t know if perhaps the two of you were trying to make a decision about calling a halt…if you’d decided that she’d been through enough?’
He closed his eyes and sighed, pressing his head back against the wall, knowing that if he didn’t consciously keep his knees locked he would probably slide right down into a heap on the floor.
When he was busy, he could almost forget, but as soon as the memories surfaced, the devastation was enough to cut him off at the knees. He could only guess how much worse it was for Callie. The first two pregnancies hadn’t even progressed far enough to show, and she’d broken her heart over each of them. The third one—third time lucky, they’d told each other as the weeks had gone past—had been more than halfway to term when the routine ultrasound had failed to pick up a heartbeat and they’d learned that the baby had died before they’d even held him.
‘I tried to talk about it the other day,’ he murmured, feeling the warmth of her concern as she stood silently beside him. ‘Because we just can’t go on in…in limbo like this, but she said she just wasn’t ready yet. You know this one was just such a shock…’
He couldn’t go on. His eyes were already burning with the threat of tears when he remembered the tiny boy she’d finally given birth to after six hours of induced agony, and how perfect he’d looked in every way. It still tore his heart out by the roots to think that his son would never open his eyes or smile or walk, that his precious life had been over before it had begun.
‘Go home, Con,’ Selina said with a gentle pat on his arm. ‘If she hasn’t turned up at work this morning it’s because she’s still at home and she needs you with her. Just one thing, though. If the two of you need an extra day or two to get your heads on straight, let me know so I don’t end up without any staff at all! I’ll need some time to call in favours.’
‘Will do, boss!’ he said with a flip of a salute, suddenly eager to get home. He had no idea why Callie wasn’t answering her mobile phone—unless she’d forgotten to charge the battery again—but Selina was probably right. He’d get home and she would be sitting in the kitchen-diner they’d remodelled together with a pot of coffee and a pile of freshly made toast…no, make that a scattering of crumbs on the plate, because she wouldn’t have sat there looking at hot buttered toast for long without tucking in.
And while she was waiting, she’d be going over in her head exactly what she wanted to say, and as soon as he walked in she would stand there and deliver her little prepared speech the way she always did once she’d weighed everything up and come to a decision….
And all the while he was driving, a little corner of his brain was doing calculations and lining up facts and figures, deliberately cross-checking the tests he’d ordered on the patients he’d seen…anything to stop him trying to second-guess what she was going to say. After all, it was her body so ultimately it was her decision whether to put it through yet another round of IVF…or whether to finally abandon the attempt at having the child she desperately wanted.
The short distance to the spacious home they’d bought when they’d first got married—chosen both for its proximity to the hospital and because they’d thought they would have no problem filling it with children—was long enough for him to recall that it was nearly five months since their son had been stillborn.
In that time they’d both spent far too many nights staring into the darkness, alone with their thoughts even though they still shared the same room and the same bed they always had. Yet, in spite of that surface closeness, in all those weeks he’d been very careful not to let Callie know how much he’d missed the ultimate intimacy of making love with her, their joining not just the sexual one of bodies but of hearts, minds and spirits, too. He’d been determined to wait until she was ready, but she’d only ever shown that she would welcome his attentions once, and with his emotions on a hair trigger with the months of abstinence, that had hardly been an outstanding success.
He’d hoped that his consideration would help to show her how much he cared for her but now he wondered if it might have been a mistake to put a lid on what he was thinking, how he was feeling and what he wanted. If she’d spent all that time waiting for him to make the first move…
He chuckled wryly when he realised that was all too possible. He had been Callie’s first and only lover, and while she was a generous and passionate woman she still remained a little shy about letting him know what she liked and how she liked it when they came together.
‘Let’s hope that today marks the start of a new beginning,’ he said with an expectant lift to his spirits. Selina had seemed to think that Callie had been coming to a decision about something over the last few days, but what that decision was, he had absolutely no idea.
The thought of abandoning that last batch of fertilised eggs to their liquid nitrogen prison put a lump in his throat that threatened to choke him. She’d been so adamant that she wanted the children she carried to be their babies that she’d put herself through misery over and over again before she’d managed to produce enough viable ova.
But, ultimately, it was her choice. Her body would have to go through the punishing hormone regimen to prepare it for implantation, and they knew to their cost that getting pregnant wasn’t anywhere near the end of the road.
‘Whatever she’s decided will be OK with me,’ he said firmly as he pulled into the driveway, puzzled to see that she’d put her car away in the garage rather than leaving it in the drive ready to go to work. ‘Callie is what matters more than anything. She’s my wife and I love her. No one has an absolute right to have children. We have a good, strong relationship and a happy marriage, so a family would have just been a wonderful bonus.’
There was still the possibility of adoption, with so many children needing loving homes, but even though Callie might still be desperate for a child, it might take a while longer before she was ready to contemplate that step. For now, it was time to sit down together and talk…really talk…and to repair and strengthen the bonds that had made the two of them invincible.
‘Callie?’ he called as soon as he let himself into the house, feeling more upbeat than he had in a very long time. ‘Sweetheart? Where are you?’
The silence almost echoed around him with a strangely ominous feeling.
‘Callie?’ He could hear the sharper edge to his voice this time as his feet took him swiftly down the polished hallway along the original floorboards that they’d laboriously refinished. A quick glance in either direction as he passed the open doors told him that she wasn’t in the lounge or the spacious study they shared, or in the formal dining room they only used when they were entertaining.
‘Sweetheart?’ He pushed the kitchen door wide and shuddered when he took in the almost clinical neatness of the whole room. Every surface gleamed and there wasn’t even a teaspoon on the work surface where she always made her last cup of instant coffee before she left the house each day. There certainly wasn’t any evidence of hot buttered toast.
Panic roared through him and in an instant he was racing back down the hall and taking the stairs two and even three at a time in his desperate need to get to their bedroom and the en suite bathroom.
‘She wouldn’t,’ he told himself fiercely, fighting with a sudden nightmare vision of his wife’s lifeless body sprawled across their bed or on the bathroom floor.
It was a heart-stopping body blow to realise that he might have drifted that far away from her. He honestly didn’t know if she’d become so depressed that she might attempt suicide, but he prayed that her deep reverence for life would have prevented her taking that awful step.
‘Oh, thank you, God,’ he whispered as he clung to the door-frame, tears of relief already starting to flow when he realised that she wasn’t there…wasn’t anywhere in the house, in fact.
It took him several minutes to compose himself and a cold facecloth to remove the evidence of his loss of control before he dragged his heavy feet across to slump on the side of the bed.
‘So, where are you, sweetheart? Where have you gone?’ he asked the silent room, with a sudden memory of the laughter that had filled it when they’d been decorating it together, getting more paint on each other than the walls and then having to spend ages under the shower washing each other off…just to be certain there were no spots of paint remaining, of course.
His eyes drifted across to the photograph in the silver frame that graced the dressing-table, searching out the bright, laughing face he loved so much…and found it covered by the envelope propped against it with his own name written across it in her familiar script.
Dread wrapped around his heart as he reached for it, his hand visibly trembling as he pulled the single sheet of paper out and fumbled to unfold it.
There was no heading to the letter. No ‘Dear Con’, ‘Darling’ or ‘My Love’, the way she always began the most mundane of notes. Before he could even focus on what she’d written his heart was breaking to see the marks on the paper where her tears had fallen.
‘I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to admit that I’ll never be able to give you what you want,’ she said in the frighteningly brief missive. ‘It’s best if I go away so you can start the divorce proceedings. Let Martin know what you want to do. I won’t fight it. Be happy.’
‘No!’ he roared in disbelief. ‘Callie, no!’ And he felt his heart shatter in agony.
Callie turned her face to the window as the woman beside her got out of her seat and set off to leave the coach, the bulging photo album detailing every moment of her grandchildren’s lives back safely in her handbag.
She rested her head against the glass, hoping that her next companion on this never-ending journey would take the hint and leave her alone with her thoughts.
She didn’t want to know about anyone else’s problems. She only wanted to know how she was going to cope with her own…how she was going to find the will to draw her next breath when she’d just walked away from everything she’d ever loved.
Not that it had been an easy decision, far from it. In fact, she was ashamed to realise how selfish she’d been for so long, wasting years and an almost obscene amount of money trying to force her body to do something it would never be able to manage—give them the child they’d both wanted.
She tried to stop the image forming inside her head but it was already there, indelibly, for the rest of her life.
The tears began again as she remembered how grey and still her baby had been when he’d finally been born.
He’d been perfect. Absolutely perfect in every way, with ten tiny fingers and toes each with the most minute nail already there and growing. She would never know whether he’d inherited Con’s deep blue eyes or her own grey ones or whether he would have the mischievous dimples that punctuated her husband’s cheeks whenever he smiled.
Not that he’d been smiling much in the last four months and twenty-three days. It seemed as if they’d both forgotten how to do that when they’d seen that precious little image on the screen and realised that the heart had no longer been beating.
The memory was still so painful that she could barely draw breath, her own heart feeling as though some alien force was crushing it inside her chest. What right did it have to beat when her baby’s didn’t? Why was it that even the youngest teenage girl could manage to get pregnant, seemingly with even the most meaningless of sexual encounters, while she…she couldn’t carry a child for the man she’d loved from the first moment their eyes had met, the only man she’d ever loved.
No more crying, she told herself, suddenly remembering that she mustn’t do anything to draw too much attention to herself. Concentrate on something else—except there wasn’t much else to look at in the barren wasteland of a bus and coach depot other than the people in the queue waiting to get on.
She hastily dragged her eyes away from the young woman struggling to fold up her baby’s pushchair single-handed with the child cradled in the other arm. She wouldn’t allow herself so much as a glimpse of the perfect little face so she would have no idea if it was a girl or a boy, if it was about the same age that her…
No! Concentrate on the two girls chattering brightly together. Were they friends setting off for a day’s shopping in the next big town or was this just the most convenient way for them to get to and from work each day?
The two older women in front of them were talking equally animatedly. Were they friends taking the trip together or were each of them like her previous garrulous companion, lucky to have found someone equally inclined to chat?
And the cadaverous young man with the tattoo sprawling up one side of his grubby neck? It was all too easy after spending time as an A and E doctor to spot the fact that he was a drug addict, but whether he was using illegal Class A drugs or had gone onto a methadone programme was more difficult to tell at first glance. The ravages of what he’d been doing to his body weren’t.
Then, in front of him, there was the white-faced young woman obviously trying hard not to cry as the stern-faced man spoke to her through a mouth thinned by a mixture of anger and exasperation. It must be hard for him to keep his voice down so the rest of the queue couldn’t hear what he was saying. He looked like the sort of man used to having his orders obeyed without question.
Apparently unaware that the passengers already on the bus had a bird’s-eye view of those waiting to join them, the man took out his wallet and grabbed several high-denomination bills, folding them twice, neatly, before he tried to press them into the girl’s hand.
Initially, she refused to take them, shaking her head fiercely, and the revulsion on her face was a far clearer indication of what was happening than any words she was saying. But, of course, the older man had made up his mind and with a few terse words denied her objections and thrust the money into her hand before he abruptly turned on his heel and strode away.
And then it was time for them to board and Callie watched out of the corner of her eye to see where each of them ended up.
Thankfully, the young woman with the baby decided to sit somewhere near the front. Callie didn’t know if she could have borne it if she’d chosen to sit beside her for the next hour or two. She wouldn’t have been able to resist the temptation of looking and longing and…
The two young women chattered their way towards the back of the coach, leaving a trail of perfume in their wake, unlike the cadaverous young man. She was uncomfortably aware of holding her breath as he stood for several seconds beside the empty seat next to her, but he, too, passed on down the coach.
It was the white-faced young woman who finally slid herself into place beside her and it was only then that Callie saw what hadn’t been visible while the youngster had been part of the queue. She was pregnant.
Callie drew in a sharp breath as the shock hit her, and closed her eyes while she battled against the jealous tears with the realisation that she seemed to be showing about the same as she had, just before…
‘It’s not catching, you know,’ the young woman snapped with an attempt at bravado that was completely destroyed by the wobble in her voice.
‘Unfortunately,’ Callie muttered, even as she felt guilt that her reaction had made the young woman feel uncomfortable.
‘You…what?’ Her garishly painted mouth fell open and eyes heavily outlined with kohl grew wide. ‘Did you say…unfortunately?’
‘Yes,’ Callie admitted uncomfortably, wishing she’d either kept her mouth shut or stuck to a simple apology for her apparent disapproval. Now she was going to have to make some sort of explanation even though she knew it was going to hurt more than ripping a scab off a wound that had barely started healing. ‘I lost my baby nearly five months ago. I was just over halfway through the pregnancy.’
‘Oh…! I’m sorry if it makes you…Look, would you rather I asked someone else to swap seats with me?’ she asked earnestly, revealing a far more considerate side than the initial belligerent attitude would have suggested.
There was a sudden rumble of sound as the driver started the engine and an explosive hiss of air as he released the brakes to start the next stage of the journey.
‘It’s too late now,’ Callie said, resigned to a companion who was managing, in her early teens, to do what she, a mature professional, couldn’t do with all the expertise of her health service colleagues behind her. ‘You can’t go changing seats while the coach is moving. If the driver had to brake suddenly you might injure the baby if you hit something.’
The youngster stared at her in surprise then she pressed trembling lips together and Callie was startled to see that her eyes were swimming with tears.
‘I’m sorry. Did I say something to upset you?’ Callie was suddenly concerned that she must have inadvertently hit a sensitive nerve.
‘No. It’s just…You said that as if you actually care what happens to it…to the baby,’ she said in a choked voice.
‘Of course I do. Anybody would,’ Callie said, knowing that this wasn’t the time to talk about her own desperate longing for a child.
‘Not everybody,’ she snapped bitterly, then suddenly seemed to remember that they were surrounded on all sides and lowered her voice so that her words would be masked by the sound of the other voices around them and the rumble of the coach itself. ‘My stepfather gave me money for an abortion even though he knows it’s too far along. He said if you pay enough money any doctor would do it.’
‘Most doctors wouldn’t touch it with a bargepole even if you offered them the moon on a silver platter,’ Callie said quietly. In her days on Obs and Gyn she’d seen botched abortions go horribly wrong. ‘And why would you want to abort the baby when there are so many people desperate to adopt?’
‘I don’t want to give it away,’ she said fiercely, a protective hand curving over her noticeably swollen belly even as she lost her battle with the tears. ‘But I’ve got no way of keeping it, have I? Not at my age. I’m still at school and a Saturday job won’t pay enough to find somewhere to live.’
‘What about your mum? Won’t she help you?’
‘Not her!’ she said, bitterness and devastation combining corrosively in those two words. ‘She kicked me out when she found out. She would have killed me if she knew it was his…my stepfather’s.’
Callie thought it would have been more to the point if the mother had killed the stepfather who’d been having sex with her underage daughter, but now wasn’t the time to voice those sentiments. She fished a packet of paper hankies out of her pocket and offered them to her companion.
‘Listen, we’re going to be sitting together for at least an hour. Shall we introduce ourselves? I’m Callie,’ she said, holding out her hand.
‘Steph…Stephanie,’ she said, and blew her nose furiously. ‘I didn’t want to cry, not over them.’
‘Hey, don’t knock crying. Sometimes it’s good to let some of the emotions out.’
‘It doesn’t solve anything, though—like, what am I going to do when the coach arrives at the depot? I’ve got nowhere to go and no one to ask.’
‘That makes two of us,’ Callie said, surprising herself.
‘You…what?’ Steph blinked. ‘You’re kidding! You’re a grown-up and grown-ups always know where they’re going and what they’re going to do.’
‘Newsflash, Steph. Grown-ups are just as mixed up as anybody else. They’ve just had a bit more practice at hiding it.’

CHAPTER TWO
‘SO, WHERE do we go?’ Steph said when the two of them had been reunited with their luggage.
Callie almost smiled when she realised that they had both opted for almost identical rucksacks in which to carry their worldly belongings.
‘First, we need to find somewhere to stay the night,’ Callie said, looking out at the rapidly darkening sky beyond the enormous doorway to the coach terminus. They’d managed to outrun the threatened bad weather so far, but it didn’t look as if it would be long before they’d get soaked if they hadn’t found somewhere. ‘That might be a good place to start,’ she suggested, pointing to the internet café on the other side of the road.
‘Uh, I don’t think the café will stay open all night,’ Steph said uneasily. ‘I’ve got a bit of money to find a cheap hotel or something. I told you my stepfather gave it to me for the abortion but I reckon it was a bribe, too, so I wouldn’t tell Mum it’s his.’
Callie chuckled. ‘I’m far too old to want to spend the night sitting in a café,’ she said. ‘I was actually going to go on the internet and see what I can find around here without having to march up and down in the dark.’
‘You can do that?’ Steph marvelled with all the arrogance of the very young for those they consider too ‘past it’ to cope with modern technology, and Callie suddenly felt as old as Methuselah’s grandmother.
‘Let’s find out,’ she suggested, and they set off into the chilly evening.
They reached the other said of the road and Callie was just stretching out a hand to open the door when there was the sound of running feet approaching. Before she could even shout a warning their malodorous fellow passenger had barged into Steph, sending her slamming into the pavement as he made off with her rucksack.
‘Steph! Are you all right?’ Callie demanded, as she dropped to her knees beside the dazed youngster.
‘Callie…?’ she quavered, clearly shocked. ‘What…? My bag!’ she gasped, and started to struggle against Callie’s hold. ‘It’s got all my money in it.’
‘Steph, stay still!’ she warned. ‘You hit your head pretty hard when you went down. Let me check you over before—’
‘But he’s stolen my bag,’ she insisted. ‘He’s getting away.’
‘Sweetheart, he’s gone. We’ll never find him,’ Callie said gently, while she held both of Steph’s shoulders to try to stop her from moving. ‘Now, please, let me check your head to see if there’s any damage.’
Perhaps it was the calm insistence in her voice that finally got through the young girl’s distress, but with tears already leaking out of the corner of her eyes and running into the too-black hair she stared up at Callie with a beaten expression in her eyes.
‘Oh, Callie…What am I going to do now?’ she whispered.
Behind them Callie heard the shop door open and looked back over her shoulder to see a gangling young man looking down at them.
‘I saw what happened and phoned for an ambulance. The police are on their way, too,’ he said. ‘Should I make her a cup of tea? That’s supposed to be good for shock, isn’t it?’
‘Thanks for making the call to the emergency services, but it’s better not to give her anything to eat or drink until she’s been checked out, just in case anything’s broken,’ Callie explained, as she performed a swift primary survey.
It was light enough, there on the pavement where the lights from the shop shone brightly, to see that Steph’s pupils were equal and reactive to light and she didn’t seem to have broken anything. There was a painful place where the back of her head had met the ground and the start of a goose egg, but she didn’t even seem to have broken the skin, let alone be losing any untoward fluids.
‘Can you remember what happened to you?’ she asked gently, and Steph threw her an old-fashioned look.
‘Callie, I haven’t got concussion or amnesia. I’ve been mugged and had all my stuff nicked and I’m all alone in a city I’ve never visited before with nowhere to stay for the night. Oh, and I can remember the date and who’s the prime minister.’
Callie chuckled when she saw the face Steph pulled. ‘Not your type?’ she teased. ‘Well, I don’t think you’ve done yourself any major damage, but for the baby’s sake I think you ought to be checked over in the hospital.’
‘Hospital!’ she wailed over the sound of an approaching ambulance. ‘I don’t need to go there, do I? You said you couldn’t find anything wrong.’
‘Hey, Steph, look on the bright side. In the hospital it’ll be warm and dry and they’ll give you a bed to lie on.’
‘Hey, classic!’ she scoffed wearily. ‘I get mugged and lose all my money so I can’t afford even a cheap hotel but, gee, guess what? The mugger injures me so I get a bed for the night.’
Callie hoped her smile was reassuring but when she went to step aside to allow the paramedic to do his job Steph grabbed for her hand and held on tightly.
‘You won’t leave me, will you? Not until…’ Her face fell as she suddenly realised that she had no idea what was going to happen to her.
Callie’s heart went out to her, especially when she heard the tremor in her voice when she was answering the handsome young paramedic’s questions.
‘I’ll stay with you if you want me to,’ she offered, giving her hand a squeeze. ‘I haven’t got anywhere else I need to be in a hurry.’ Nowhere she needed to be for the rest of her life, if the truth be told.
‘Are you sure?’ Steph asked, seeming painfully young in her insecurity; definitely not old enough to be thrown out to fend for herself in a strange city.
‘I’m sure these nice young men won’t mind if I come for a ride with you,’ she said firmly, meeting the eyes of Mike, the good-looking young paramedic, with an authority learned the hard way during many hours of duty in a busy hospital A and E department. ‘Especially given the fact that you’re pregnant. They like pregnant mums to be calm and happy.’
‘We certainly do, Stephanie,’ he said with a broad smile, generously taking the hint without an argument. ‘So you just settle yourself back and enjoy the ride in our luxury limousine.’
‘Limousine!’ she scoffed with a dismissing glance around the functional interior. ‘Where’s the plush carpeting and the mini-bar?’
‘Hey, don’t knock it,’ Mike protested. ‘I cleaned that floor myself, just before we came out to get you, and we’ve got lots of things in here that you don’t get in a mini-bar—such as oxygen on tap.’ He gently adjusted the mask over her face as he teased her and Callie could already see some of Steph’s tension easing.
Her own anxiety had reduced the moment she’d seen how competent the ambulance crew was. Now she just needed to be certain that neither her young travelling companion nor her unborn baby had suffered any hidden injuries and she could go on her way.
Except she couldn’t really do that with a clear conscience, knowing that Steph was now without any funds whatever. Yes, she would have a free bed for the night, tonight, but after that? What resources were there for underage pregnant girls in this city? Were there any hostels or refuges? The ideal situation would be a purpose-built home where she could stay while she waited out the rest of her pregnancy, preferably with counsellors available to tell her about the options available to help her to decide whether to keep her baby or give it up for adoption.
Perhaps she would be able to find out that sort of information while she waited for the A and E staff to check Steph over. She spared a longing thought for St Mark’s, where such local gems had been collated onto the hospital database so that it would be readily to hand. Unfortunately, neither she nor Stephanie would be going back to that area again, at least not for the foreseeable future.
‘Right, ladies, hold tight and we’ll be on our way,’ the driver called as he started the powerful engine.
Callie sat herself out of the way and put her rucksack on her lap, wrapping both arms around it as she watched the paramedic check Steph’s vital signs again and note his findings on the case notes he’d started.
‘Just a few questions, Stephanie. The usual things, all right?’ he said with pen poised. ‘I need your name, address, date of birth and the name of your next of kin so we can notify them where we’ve taken you.’
Callie saw the youngster’s tension return full force.
‘My name’s Stephanie…Smith and I’m fifteen,’ she said tersely.
‘And?’ Mike encouraged, even though it was obvious she’d given a false surname.
‘And I’ve got no address and no family to notify,’ she said with a stubborn expression on her face that told Callie it would be useless to try to push her any further. The paramedic threw her a concerned glance over Steph’s head but he obviously thought the same thing if his resigned sigh was anything to go by.
‘Stephanie, that can cause problems for us,’ he said gently.
‘Why should it? I can take care of myself,’ she said belligerently.
‘You probably can,’ he agreed, ‘but according to the law, if you’re under sixteen we have to have the permission of a parent or guardian to treat you.’
‘That’s easy, then. Just stop the ambulance and I’ll get out, then you won’t have to worry about getting sued.’
‘Steph, sweetheart…’ Callie began, not really knowing what to say. She’d often had to start treating youngsters before she could get parental consent—a victim of a car crash or a child in status asthmaticus couldn’t wait for paperwork. Hopefully, Steph’s condition wasn’t life-threatening, but if it were…from the little that the youngster had told her on the coach, she was feeling too bitter at the moment to be willing to contact her family, and without a surname there was no way of tracking them down behind her back.
But if the alternative was watching a fifteen-year-old with a potential head injury disappear onto the streets without a penny to her name…
She unzipped a pocket on her rucksack and fished out the purse buried deep inside, out of the way of light-fingered passers-by.
‘Here. Will this help with the paperwork?’ she asked as she offered her hospital ID card.
She saw Mike’s eyebrows shoot up when he read it and was uncomfortably aware that in her jeans and jumper she didn’t look much like the professional photo he was looking at. But apart from that speculative look in her direction he confined himself to copying the relevant information on Steph’s form.
‘A and E,’ their driver announced cheerfully, although Callie would have bet that he’d been listening to every word going on in the back and would be grilling Mike later.
‘We hope you enjoyed your journey,’ he said as he opened the double doors at the back of the vehicle, sounding just like a holiday tour guide, ‘but sincerely hope you won’t be travelling with us again.’
‘Tony, you idiot,’ scolded one of the nursing staff waiting to receive them. ‘What have you brought for us this time?’
‘Two lovely ladies,’ he announced cheerfully, as he and Mike flipped the lock to release the wheels and slid the trolley smoothly out onto the apron and through the doors of the emergency department with Callie in their wake.
‘This is Stephanie,’ Mike said as soon as his hands were free to consult his clipboard. ‘She’s fifteen years old and approximately twenty-eight weeks gestational. She was mugged and fell, hitting her head on the pavement. Brief loss of consciousness but her obs are now all within normal ranges with pupils equal and reactive. No obvious breaks but the start of a lovely big egg on the back of her head.’
‘Are you her mother?’ the young nurse demanded, and Callie was so taken aback by the unexpected question that she hadn’t managed a word before Steph butted in.
‘No. She’s my friend,’ she announced fiercely, reaching for Callie’s hand and clinging to it. ‘She was there when it happened and I want her to stay with me.’
‘That won’t be a problem as long as she doesn’t get in the way,’ the young nurse said kindly, and Mike had to stifle a chuckle when he caught Callie’s eye. He opened his mouth, obviously intending to tell the team about her qualifications, but Callie gave her head a sharp shake, hoping he would keep the information to himself. Now was not the time to end up answering an inquisition about why she was so far from home.
She was also feeling overwhelmed by such familiar surroundings, having trouble coping with the fact that even though everything was so similar to St Mark’s, there was one huge difference—there was no chance of coming out of the cubicle and seeing Con’s familiar figure walking towards her with that sexy smile deepening the dimples either side of his mouth.
Not that she’d seen much of that sexy smile over the last few weeks and months. She hadn’t felt much like smiling, either, but in her case it had been because she’d been mourning the death of the baby that would have made her life complete. She’d thought Con had been mourning, too. It had taken blunt words to open her eyes to the true state of affairs between them.
A very junior registrar came in a few minutes later and was doing very well until he caught sight of what Mike had written on Steph’s case notes. Suddenly he became all fingers and thumbs and started second-guessing himself over every little thing until Callie couldn’t stand it any more.
‘I’ll just go out and make a call while you’re organising the ultrasound scan, shall I?’ she suggested, taking pity on the poor man’s nerves.
‘You won’t go away, will you, Callie?’ Steph demanded, looking younger than ever swathed in a voluminous hospital gown.
‘I promise,’ Callie said with an encouraging smile. ‘But I need to do something about my accommodation. We aren’t all getting free beds for the night.’
‘But you will come back, won’t you?’ she said, sounding as uncertain as a little child left for the first time in an unfamiliar place, but clearly hoping that no one would be able to hear the pleading in her voice.
‘As soon as I’ve made my calls,’ Callie reassured her, and slipped out of the cubicle.
‘Can you direct me to a phone I can use to call out of the hospital?’ she asked one of the women at the reception desk, having chosen her for the kindly way she’d spoken to the last person to approach her. ‘And do you have any sort of directory of organisations in this area who provide sheltered accommodation for runaways or pregnant girls?’
The woman blinked at the question, but Callie would have to give her points for the fact that her smile never wavered neither did her eyes stray towards Callie’s waistline.
‘I’ve got some telephone numbers on a database on the computer. I could call them for you, or would you like me to print them out?’
‘Could you print them out, please? Until my friend has finished having her tests, she won’t know when she’ll be released.’
‘I wouldn’t wait till then before you make contact,’ she advised softly, as the printer started chattering, beckoning Callie to the far end of the reception desk to give them some semblance of privacy for their conversation. ‘There’s an excellent YMCA but they’re always so heavily over-subscribed and only take people in on a night-by-night basis, so there’s no continuity. There’s only one official residential centre in town, and that takes the girls up to six weeks after the birth, so they rarely have any beds free.’ She paused a moment in thought then wrote something on the paper. ‘This one I’m adding at the bottom of the list is still trying to start up at the moment—they’re struggling financially, so they won’t have the same number of carers. It’s a private one, not officially on the hospital list yet. A friend told me it’s being set up by a woman whose teenage daughter ran away from home when she discovered she was pregnant, and then died.’
Callie thanked her for the information and set off for the phone. She could only imagine the feelings of guilt that were driving the poor woman to set up some sort of refuge, but directing Steph to somewhere that could fold before the end of her pregnancy might not be the best course.
Fifteen minutes later she had to admit that she was out of options and started to dial the number written on the bottom of the list in the receptionist’s neat script. The sight of the woman’s surname startled her for a moment and brought back one of her worst memories from the time she had been doing her rotation in Obs and Gyn.
‘Yeah?’ said a bored voice when the phone was answered, the sound barely audible over the racket going on in the background.
‘Is that The Place to Go?’ Callie asked, wondering if she’d misdialled.
‘Yeah,’ said the same bored voice.
‘Is Mrs Keeley there?’
‘Who? Oh, you mean Marian. Nah. She had to take Jess to ’ ospital. ’Er waters broke,’ she offered, with the first glimpse of real emotion in her voice.
‘Which hospital did they go to?’ Callie asked over a superstitious shiver when she heard the woman’s first name. What were the chances that there were two people called Marian Keeley who had each lost a pregnant teenage daughter? What were the chances that she would be the one who had provided the spark that had made Callie decide between specialising in Obs and Gyn and A and E?
‘She’s taken ’er to City. It’s where we all go when it’s time,’ said the laconic voice on the other end of the line. ‘Can I take a message? I dunno when she’ll be back, mind. Babies can take hours to be born sometimes. And it can hurt a lot, too,’ she added with an audible edge of fear to her voice.
‘That’s why they give you gas and air to breathe,’ Callie said matter-of-factly. ‘To take the pain away.’
‘You’ve got kids?’ she interrupted, almost eagerly.
‘No, but I’m a—’
‘Well, what would you know about it, then?’ the girl snapped, and Callie was left with the dial tone burring in her ear.
‘That went well,’ she muttered wryly as she replaced the receiver and made her way back towards the curtained cubicles.
‘Come with me, Callie,’ Steph said as soon as she caught sight of her. ‘They’re taking me up to the place where they do scans.’
Callie hadn’t done anything about finding herself accommodation for the night yet, but she couldn’t bring herself to rebuff the youngster, not when she was the closest thing she had to a friend.
She let Steph’s nervous chatter wash over her as she rationalised that she could always book into a hotel for one night, even if it meant she had to start looking for a job sooner rather than later. Also, if they were going up to the antenatal department for the ultrasound, it might be close enough to the labour ward for her to see if she could make contact with Marian Keeley.
‘Callie! Look!’ Steph exclaimed a little while later as she saw the indistinct image appear on the screen. All her fear and disappointment seemed to have been banished by that one shadowy impression with its tiny heart beating so valiantly. ‘It’s the baby! My baby!’ she whispered, with a mixture of fear and awe as the being growing inside her became real for the first time. ‘Look! It’s moving!’
It felt as if a giant vice was being tightened inexorably around Callie’s heart. She could remember all too clearly her own terrified joy when she’d seen her baby’s heart beating, and for the first time had allowed herself to hope that she and Con would finally have their miracle.
‘Would you like a picture to keep?’ the technician asked.
The intense look of longing that swept across the youngster’ s face was a far cry from the resigned defensiveness she’d worn as a shield when Callie had first met her. Her ‘Yes! Please,’ was every bit as fervent as Callie’s had been, and she had no doubt that it would be evidence of a precious memory, as her own early scans had been.
Then, she’d been amazed how different it had been to look at the scan of her own child rather than that of a patient. With professional distance between them, she’d been able to look at the images analytically; when it had been her own baby, she’d demanded, ‘Is the baby all right?’ every bit as anxiously as any other expectant mother.
‘Everything looks fine so far,’ the voice interrupted her thoughts. ‘No sign that your accident did any damage to the baby or to the placenta.’
‘So that means I can go?’ Steph said, although Callie thought she could detect a little less eagerness in the words than before. Perhaps the young girl was actually feeling the reassurance of having so much professional help around her.
‘Not until the morning,’ the midwife who had been assigned to Steph said firmly. ‘Although it was brief, you did suffer some loss of consciousness, so we’d like to keep you under observation for a while just as a precaution. In your case, that’s more important because of the baby. Anyway,’ she added cheerfully, ‘it will give you a chance to look us over and get to know us before you come in for the real thing.’
It was another half an hour before Steph was settled in the small four-room ward with two heavily pregnant companions, and Callie was glad to see that both of them were so eager for the novelty of a new person to talk to that they weren’t about to let her young friend’s defensive prickles put them off.
Callie had almost forgotten about contacting Marian Keeley until she was leaving the antenatal side of the department. She’d turned into the reception area and couldn’t help glancing through the safety glass panel in the doors that divided the mothers with babies from those without.
Right at the other end of the corridor she caught sight of a bustle as several people in theatre scrubs were rushing towards the door with the sign for the delivery room hanging above it.
‘Jess’s baby?’ she murmured aloud, and wondered if there was any way she could find out without asking the staff to break patient confidentiality. If the baby had already arrived, she might have missed her chance to meet the woman she hoped would have a suitable place for Steph. If Jess was still in labour, she might still be able to speak to her.
‘Can I help you?’ said the young midwife, who emerged from the room just the other side of the doors and pushed one of them open to speak to her. ‘It’s husbands only at the moment. General visiting hours don’t start until seven, after the evening meal is over.’
‘It was one of your visitors I was hoping to catch,’ Callie said with a smile. ‘I’m looking for Marian Keeley. She came in with Jess…’
‘Ah, you’re one of Marian’s new volunteers, are you?’ she said with a sudden welcoming smile. ‘Come in and have a cup of coffee while you’re waiting for her. She shouldn’t be long now. Jess is already pushing and…’
At the far end of the corridor there was the sound of a faint wail and her smile grew even wider.
‘Oh, I do love that sound!’ she exclaimed as she beckoned Callie into the room behind her. ‘I’ve delivered dozens already, but it still gives me a thrill. I’m Jenny, by the way. How do you take your coffee? Milk and sugar? I’ll make one for Marian as soon as she’s settled Jess onto the ward.’
‘I’m Callie,’ she offered distractedly, her innate honesty urging her to confess that she wasn’t one of Marian’s volunteers, but what could she say? That she’d never met the woman? That might not be true if she was the same Marian Keeley she’d met nearly two years ago. ‘Milk with just the tiniest bit of sugar would be perfect,’ she said in the end, deciding that explanations could wait until she came face to face with the refuge’s owner.
‘Surely you’re not watching your weight. You certainly don’t need to,’ chatted the young woman as she spooned instant coffee into two mugs and waited for the kettle to boil.
‘Trying to cut down on my coffee intake by making it less palatable,’ Callie admitted wryly. ‘At one time I was drinking it black and nearly thick enough to stand a spoon up.’ It had been one way of getting through the brutal regime that doctors put themselves through to qualify and she’d virtually become addicted to the stuff. Then she’d heard that it could be a factor for couples experiencing difficulty in conceiving and was definitely frowned on for pregnant mums and had completely cut it out of her diet.
Even though it had been nearly five months since she’d lost her precious baby she hadn’t returned to her former coffee intake, feeling as if it would be some sort of admission that she’d given up all hopes of motherhood.
‘How do you stand on the subject of biscuits—chocolate biscuits, to be precise?’ Jenny asked as she held up a rather posh tin. ‘A gift from some very happy parents.’
‘Biscuits are definitely one of the major food groups and chocolate is essential for the existence of civilisation,’ Callie declared solemnly, then grinned as she beckoned the tin closer.
‘Is this a private party or is there room for one more?’ said a voice at the door. ‘I’m gasping for a cup of tea.’
‘Marian!’ Jenny said as she leapt to her feet, but Callie hadn’t needed the unintentional introduction. The woman in the doorway was someone she’d never forgotten even though she no longer resembled the grief-ridden fury she’d last encountered.
She saw the moment that the bereaved woman recognised her and braced herself for another tirade.
‘Dr Lowell!’ she gasped and stared at her open-mouthed for several startled seconds before hurrying into the room. To Callie’s utter amazement the woman bent to throw her arms around her for a fervent hug. ‘Oh, Dr Lowell, I’m so glad to see you. I tried to contact you at the hospital but they said you weren’t on Maternity any more and I’ve felt so guilty…so guilty for what I said to you that day…And it wasn’t your fault…I knew it wasn’t your fault…That you’d done your best to save Lisa…That it was my fault if it was anyone’s that she’d gone off like that, and—’
‘Hey, Marian, slow down,’ said Jenny, clearly stunned by the woman’s unexpected reaction to her visitor. ‘What’s going on here? Callie said she was one of your volunteers.’
‘Actually, I didn’t…’ Callie began, unhappy with the implication that she’d lied, even though she knew she hadn’t corrected the midwife’s mistaken assumption. Marian’s voice overrode hers easily.
‘I should be so lucky!’ she exclaimed with a dramatic roll of her eyes as she slumped into the nearest chair, clearly well at home in the room. ‘Jenny, I don’t know whether she’s said anything, but this is the doctor I was telling you about a little while ago. She was there when my Lisa died. She and her husband were the ones who saved my granddaughter’s life.’

CHAPTER THREE
‘I’M SORRY, sir, but there’s nothing I can do,’ said the policeman in a world-weary tone totally at odds with his youthful appearance. ‘From what you’ve told me, your wife left home of her own accord and—’
‘But you don’t understand,’ Con interrupted, on the verge of screaming with frustration at yet another example of bureaucratic stonewalling. ‘She suffered a traumatic loss not many weeks ago. Our baby was stillborn. This is totally uncharacteristic for her. She would never walk out on our marriage or her job like this. Never.’
‘I’m sorry, sir, but…’
The polite half-smile was so infuriating, making him feel as if the man was patronising him for being concerned. ‘Don’t you care that something dreadful may have happened to her? That she might even try to commit suicide or—?’
‘That would be more in your line, Doctor,’ he interrupted flatly. ‘Depression isn’t a legal matter so much as a medical one. Legally, if your wife decides to walk away, there’s absolutely nothing we can do about it other than to list her as a missing person after forty-eight hours.’
Con stabbed his fingers through his hair, tempted to pull it out in handfuls. He knew how fragile Callie was at the moment. He’d been devastated when they’d been told their precious baby’s heart wasn’t beating any more; he could only imagine how much worse it must have felt to her, knowing that the child she’d sheltered inside her own body had died before it could be born.
He’d been tiptoeing around on eggshells while he’d waited for her to sort things out in her head…waited for her to be ready to come and talk to him about her feelings the way she always had…at least, the way she always had until now.
Being patient had been a struggle for him. It was an intrinsic part of his character that he’d always gone after what he wanted…the way he had when he’d met Callie for the first time. He’d known the moment he’d seen her that he was attracted to her and within minutes of speaking to her had started a determined campaign to persuade her that they were perfect for each other.
And they had been, in spite of everything that life had thrown at them…at least, that was what he’d believed.
Never in his wildest dreams would he have imagined that she would just walk away from him…from their marriage.
‘Sir?’ prompted the duty constable in a slightly more conciliatory tone. ‘Sometimes people feel they just have to go away when they need some time to themselves…time to think. Often they’ll get in contact with another member of the family or a friend. It might be worthwhile making a list of your wife’s family and close friends and giving them all a call.’
Callie would hate that, Con thought as he trudged wearily out of the police station. She was an intensely private person and if she found out that he’d been telling all and sundry that she’d…what? Blown a fuse? Gone crazy? Well, she really would go crazy then.
As for that note she’d left him…Why on earth would he want to divorce the only woman he’d ever loved? The whole idea was completely…crazy.
There was only one person that he could go to and that was Martin Nimmo. Not only had he known the man since they’d been at school together, but his old friend had gone into law and had handled any legal matters that he and Callie had needed from time to time. He had absolutely no intention of following her instructions, but if Callie’s depression had her confused enough to think of such a thing, then at some stage she would be getting in contact with Martin.
‘Hi, Martin, it’s Callie,’ she said, her heart a lead weight in her chest as she contemplated the irrevocable step she was taking. Would Con have already been in contact with his old friend to set things in motion?
‘Hey, beautiful!’ he exclaimed. ‘I haven’t heard from the two of you in ages. I hope you’re ringing to invite me for another of your delicious home-cooked meals.’
‘N-not exactly,’ she stammered, surprised just how hard one simple phone call could be. ‘I—I wondered if Con has been in contact with you yet?’
‘No…As I said, I haven’t heard from either of you in…’ He stopped suddenly. ‘Callie? What’s the matter? You sound strange. Has something happened? Is Con all right? Are you?’
‘W-we’re all right…sort of,’ she said with a hitch in her voice as tears threatened. Martin was one of the few people who knew just how long the two of them had been trying to start their family. ‘I—I mean, we haven’t had any accidents or anything. It’s just…Con’ll be contacting you soon to do whatever you need to do to sort out about the divorce.’
‘Divorce?’ he echoed in disbelief, then burst out laughing. ‘Oh, very funny, Callie. You had me going there for a minute. If there’s any couple not likely to divorce it’s you and Con. So, why did you ring? Is it that invitation for a poor bachelor otherwise condemned to a diet of junk food?’
‘Martin, I’m not joking,’ Callie said as the tears started slipping down her cheeks. ‘I’ve moved out of the house…moved away completely so I won’t be an embarrassment to him when he—’
‘Callie, what the hell’s going on?’ he interrupted sharply, no laughter in his voice now. ‘You’re crazy about the guy and he loves you, too. What—?’
‘Not any m-more,’ she hiccuped, fighting the gathering flood of tears. ‘I just wanted to let you know that I’ll be in touch again as soon as I’m settled somewhere, so you’ll know where to send the papers.’
‘Damn the papers!’ he snapped, clearly rattled. ‘Callie, talk to me. Tell me what’s been going on. Something must have been, to get the two of you in such a state. And it must all be a monumental misunderstanding because there’s no way—’
‘I’m sorry, Martin, but I—I just can’t…can’t talk about it,’ she interrupted, hating to be rude to someone who had been a good friend to both of them, but this was so much harder than she’d thought it would be. ‘Speak to Con. He’ll tell you all about it.’
This had definitely not been one of her better ideas, she realised as she tried to mop up her tears without letting Martin know she was crying or attracting too much attention from the people around her.
She’d been waiting for Marian to say her farewells to Jess and the new baby before she drove Callie to see her new venture, and she’d decided to make use of the time by contacting Martin. She obviously should have waited until she was somewhere more private than a telephone kiosk that was little more than a clear plastic bubble.
‘I—I’ll call you in a little while,’ she promised before she fumbled the receiver into its cradle and sobbed.
A persistent tapping beside her head had her hastily smearing the tears away with both hands before she turned to face the elderly gentleman standing nearby.
‘Are you all right, missy?’ he asked in concerned tones. ‘Is there anything I can do?’
‘There’s nothing anyone can do,’ she said bleakly before she could put a curb on her tongue. ‘I’m sorry. That was rude,’ she apologised swiftly when he blinked at the rebuff. ‘I’m all right, really. I just…had some bad news and…’
‘Take yourself home and make yourself a cup of tea,’ he advised kindly, giving her arm a pat with a gnarled, blue-veined hand. ‘I find that even if it doesn’t make the problem go away, it sometimes makes it easier to cope with.’

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