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He froze. The trolley end wasn't empty now. There was a woman in a ragged grey coat there, leaning over one of the trolleys, pressing something black into the face of someone in a neat-fitting, pale blue uniform. He heard a voice, thready rather than musical as it usually was, but he still recognised it as Lucy's.

He couldn't hear what she was saying, but he could tell even from this distance that she was scared. The equipment that surrounded her seemed to gleam with menace suddenly, and that little black thing—great goodness, could it be a gun?

He took about five seconds more to assess the situation. Was he really seeing all this? Hell,
yes...

Silently, he moved closer, prepared to duck into his office if it looked like the woman might see him. Somehow he sensed that the more dangerous trigger wasn't the one on the gun but the one in the woman's own psyche. If she felt threatened and that sent her over the edge...

He began to sweat and to calculate at the same time.

The one positive factor in this situation was that she had her back to him at the moment, because she'd circled around the head end of the trolley to position herself better so that she could look into Lucy's face.

All I need to do is get the gun away, he began to think feverishly. If I can do that before she sees me coming, then I can yell blue murder and I'll have help in keeping her subdued. But I've got to get the gun away
first...
If Lucy sees me coming...she might see me because she's in a better position to see than Grey Coat is... she might be able to distract her and mask any sounds I make.

He had to will his body not to shake as he moved along the corridor, had to remind himself of the old saying about more haste and less speed, but he made steady progress. It felt as if this was taking for ever, but when he caught sight of the wall clock a little further along, he realised that his sense of time passing was out of kilter. It was only a minute...less...since he'd first seen that shocking sight of Lucy and the woman and the gun.

Hardly daring to breathe, he continued his painfully controlled creep closer, and could hear the woman muttering. No, singing. In French. She had the sort of lusty voice that would have done justice to bawdy songs in an old vaudeville show. It was surprisingly tuneful and her French accent was, to his ears, flawless. Lucy must have thought so, too.

'Where did you learn to speak French, Comtesse Alphonsine?'

'Mais, je suis francaise, ma chere!'
She delivered an impeccably correct series of French oaths.

'What was the name of the song you were singing just now?'

'
Ca ira
.' They used to sing it in the Revolution. This is my revolution, you see.'

'Yes, I see. So you're singing a revolutionary song? I like the tune.'

Had she seen him? Malcolm wondered. She was doing all the right things. Distracting Grey Coat, engaging her, not threatening her, getting her to talk about something positive and safe. He was very close to both of them now, belatedly thinking back to Heather and Brian and Anna and the others.

How close were they to being finished with those patients? If they came out of those cubicles at the wrong moment and made a noise, and Grey Coat turned... Should he have taken the time to involve them? Should he have called hospital security, or the police, or something? Too late now.

And which was the greater risk in the two choices he had next? Lunge now, when he wasn't quite close enough and Grey Coat might have time to pull the trigger? Or wait another critical few seconds until he was closer and risk having her hear him? She was reciting poetry now, still in that flawless, resonant and beautiful French.

Not yet. Not yet. Not yet.

Each step was a silent, rhythmic protest against action. He could hardly believe it when his right hand closed over the gun at last, while at the same time he wrenched the woman's other arm back and up behind her.

She stiffened and screamed, struggled for a moment, then seemed to give up and began sobbing in his arms.

'Brian!' he yelled, turning his head away from the woman's stale, smoky smell. 'I need you here,
now!'

'Oh, Malcolm, Malcolm...'

On the trolley, Lucy began to shudder convulsively, and if he hadn't been holding a hysterical, mentally ill woman with infected wounds and a grey, gangrenous leg and a gun that was very definitely real, he'd have bent over and pulled her up into his arms and kissed her warm, living flesh a hundred times. The thought of the danger she'd been in was now making every hair on his head prickle as his scalp tightened to the point of pain.

This is why I couldn't ask Heather Woodley out, he suddenly realised. Because if I'm going to ask anyone out, if I'm going to summon up that courage, put my toe in the water of that particular very frightening pool, then it's going to be Lucy.

It was a realisation that had his stomach churning and his heart singing at the same time, and he felt so tangled up inside with fear and hope and pleasure and doubt that he couldn't even look at her.

Everything happened very quickly after that. Jeff Curtis took over the care of the grey-coated woman and managed to get her subdued and onto a trolley. An ambulance siren sounded in the background before Malcolm had said a word to Lucy in response to her feverish use of his name. Brian was crouching beside her, asking if she was OK, and another emergency patient was being brought in, a pale, sweaty man in his fifties in the severe pain of a major heart attack. Malcolm gave him the appropriate drugs and set him up on a heart monitor, his brain still whirling. He heard another ambulance siren approaching from the street outside.

A few minutes later, the grey-coated woman with the gangrenous leg was taken away to be prepped for surgery after orthopaedic surgeon Michael Farrell had confirmed that amputation of the left leg below the knee was the only life-saving option. The patient had given a hazy and grudging consent, although she still insisted that her name was Alphonsine.

Brian took Lucy into one of the cubicles and gave her a glass of brandy and a cup of sweetened tea, then ordered Lisa to sit with her. Kerry was back now, and took over Lucy's tasks. She'd been buttonholed by someone from Administration in the cafeteria. Something to do with a report she'd submitted last week, she said. The remaining staff had returned from lunch as well. Brian went off to deal with the latest emergency admission.

In the space of ten minutes, they'd gone from being abnormally quiet to having a major backlog, but it couldn't be helped. As soon as he'd satisfied himself that the cardiac patient was adequately stabilised, Malcolm said to Heather, 'Can you keep an eye on him, and find out when we can get him up to the ward?'

'They may not have a bed,' she offered.

He knew that, of course. The whole hospital was frequently short on beds at the moment, and would continue to be until a planned extension was completed. There was the issue of budget cuts as well. The fact hardly needed to be mentioned every time. You simply had to negotiate, argue, compromise...and meanwhile make the patients as comfortable as possible.

He almost snapped at Heather, then reminded himself that she must be as tense as he was. Wendy had called the police, and the gun was still sitting on the equipment trolley where Malcolm had very carefully placed it. No one wanted to touch it. Kerry had wheeled the trolley into Malcolm's office and shut the door.

This wasn't a big American city. This was safe, tame Canberra. Half the staff in the department had never seen a gun before, let alone in the hospital. Malcolm himself had only encountered one once, still clutched, no longer loaded, in the hand of the patient who'd accidentally shot himself in the foot while rabbit-hunting. A totally different situation, in other words.

'Lucy!'

At last, after what seemed like hours but wasn't anything like that long, he was able to see her. He instinctively closed the cubicle door behind him to shut out the craziness of the department. Everyone was jittery, and everyone was trying to hide it from the non-urgent patients still waiting their turn to be seen.

Those who hadn't been present during the drama had to be told the story, in quick private murmurs. Heather's voice sounded high and strident, until the door clicked shut and muffled the sound.

'How are you?' he said to Lucy. Hell, he sounded completely useless!

'I'm fine.'

'No, you're not.'

'I'm
alive,
Malcolm. I'm not hurt,' she replied shakily. 'That's all that matters. I just kept thinking that if I died today, how badly would it damage Charlotte? I was so scared, so scared! And now this brandy's going to my head because I haven't had lunch, and I just keep thinking that
I'm alive!
Has she gone to surgery?'

'The woman? Alphonsine?'

'La Comtesse Alphonsine de Crespigny. It can't be her real name, surely, but her French was certainly perfect.'

'Yes, I heard the poetry. She's on her way to surgery, and they're going to remove the lower leg. The other leg will need some treatment, too, and James Nairn from the psychiatric unit will be involved as soon as she's out of Recovery, to try and stabilise her mental condition. It may be schizophrenia, or a form of very severe manic depression. She's clearly a well-educated woman. If her illness can be controlled by medication, then the leg problem may be a blessing in disguise.'

'You mean she might have a normal life she can go back to?'

'It's possible.' He nodded. 'Meanwhile, the police are going to try and track down her next of kin, and they'll need you to decide if you'll press charges.'

Lucy buried her face in her hands. 'That's the last thing I want to do!'

'Don't make a decision now.'

'I
am
making a decision! I won't press charges. She's mentally ill. There'd be no point. And it would mean Charlotte would have to know, and my parents; wouldn't it?'

'I expect so.'

'They don't need that.'

'But what do you need, Lucy?'

'Something to eat, and to get back to work...'

'Post-traumatic stress counselling is practically compulsory. I expect they'll want us both to have some sessions.'

'That, then,' she agreed, as if it didn't matter one way or the other. 'And then time... We were talking about this last week...time to gradually put it behind me.'

'Don't bottle it up.'

'I'm not planning to.' She smiled. 'I'm planning to vent it in a very long walk on the beach this weekend after Charlotte has gone to bed.'

'You're going down to see your parents?'

'Yes, I've been planning it for weeks, and now I can't wait!'

She was thinking of it already—the glorious stretches of open, uncrowded beaches, the rolling blue-green waves. The option, if she needed it—and she suspected she would—to run and shout and scream, with the sound safely masked by the waves. She was still thinking about it, pinning herself to it, actually, when Malcolm spoke again, and his words dragged her back from her visions of the ocean and took her by surprise.

'I'm really glad for your sake that you're going down to your parents',' he said slowly, 'but I have to admit to some selfish disappointment as well. I was going to ask if you were free to go out on Saturday evening.'

'Go out? With you?' she said stupidly.
No, with Leonardo di Caprio,
she mocked herself inwardly.

Malcolm was kinder. 'Yes, with me.' His tone was patient. 'But if it's a horrible idea...'

'Of course it isn't,' she said quickly, with automatic politeness. After all, Malcolm Lambert had just saved her life.

'No!' he exclaimed almost angrily. 'Look at me, Lucy!'

She raised her eyes to meet his watchful gaze. 'Yes?'

'I'm not just saying that,' he said urgently. 'You know what happened between us before, and why it was so impossible and wrong. Six years have gone by. I've come to terms with what we did. I've laid my guilt to rest. That didn't happen overnight, and it wasn't easy.'

'Oh, Malcolm, I'm sure it wasn't!'

'But I've done it. And now, seeing you again...I'd like to spend an evening together and talk a bit There's no one left in my day-to-day life any more from that time. For you, though, I realise that it might be totally different. So I'll say it again. If it's a horrible idea, then you must say so, and we'll never speak about it again. Or if you simply need some time to think...'

'Perhaps I do,' she acknowledged.

The small room was thick with their awareness of each other. That male body, sitting just feet away. She'd held that body against her. She'd squeezed him, cradled him, kissed him, eased him inside her. If they went out together, would it happen again? Did he want it to?

She
didn't want it. The idea almost frightened her. Another desperate joining, with no context of love and commitment surrounding it? No! Even thinking about it felt dangerous.

And yet that wasn't the only way in which she'd known him. They'd been...not friends, exactly. More like allies, or partners. Partners in their service to Bronwyn, and partners in the desperate tenderness they'd felt for motherless baby Gabrielle...tiny Gabrielle, who was now Ellie, Charlotte's friend.

Lucy understood, for the first time, that he was the only such partner she'd ever had in her life, and that there had been a wonderful balance and equality between them, innocent, until that final night, of anything dishonest or sinful.

And she understood something else. That she still loved him. Loved the father of her precious only child in a way she'd doubted she'd ever be able to love a man again.

Yes, she loved Charlotte's father as much as she had six years ago, when she'd spared him from even knowing about the devastating fact of Charlotte's conception. In that way, she was still protecting him, deliberately letting him believe that it was her short-lived relationship with Brett back home in Brewarra which had produced her child.