From Fling to Forever

Panicking at the thought of seeing an Asian child with an adoptive parent.

Unable to entertain even the thought of a relationship with a man.

Pretending she was calm and in control when she was a basket case.

Her life had become a series of shambolic episodes. Too many drinks at the bar. Getting picked up by strange men, determined to see it through then backing out. Always backing out, like the worst kind of tease, because no matter how desperate she was to feel something, the guilt was always stronger. Coping, but only just, with endlessly sad thoughts during the day and debilitating dreams at night.

She knew that something in her was lost—but she just didn’t know how to find it. She hid it from the people she cared about because she knew her grief would devastate them. She hid it from her colleagues because they didn’t need the extra burden.

And she was just … stuck. Stuck on past heartbreaks. And it was starting to show.

No wonder Aaron James abhorred the idea of a ‘relationship’ with her.

Ella rubbed tiredly at her forehead. She closed her eyes, longing for sleep, but knowing the nightmares would come tonight.

Dr Seng slapped his hand on the desk and Aaron’s wandering mind snapped back to him. ‘So—we’ve talked about malaria. Now, a few facts about the hospital.’

Kiri had been whisked off to do some painting—one of his favourite pastimes—on arrival at the Children’s Community Friendship Hospital, so Aaron could concentrate on this first meeting.

But he wasn’t finding it easy.

He had a feeling … A picture of Ella here. Was this where she was working? He wasn’t sure, but he kept expecting her to sashay past.

Dr Seng handed over an array of brochures. ‘Pre-Pol Pot, there were more than five hundred doctors practising in Cambodia,’ Dr Seng said. ‘By the time the Khmer Rouge fled Cambodia in 1979 there were less than fifty. Can you imagine what it must have been like? Rebuilding an entire healthcare system from the ground up, with almost no money, no skills? Because that’s what happened in Cambodia.’

Aaron knew the history—he’d made it his business to know, because of Kiri. But he could never come to terms with the brutal stupidity of the Khmer Rouge. ‘No, I can’t imagine it,’ he said simply. ‘And I’d say this hospital is something of a miracle.’

‘Yes. We were started by philanthropists and we’re kept going by donations—which is why we are so happy to be associated with your documentary: we need all the publicity we can get, to keep attracting money. It costs us less than twenty-five dollars to treat a child. Only fifty dollars to operate. Unheard of in your world. But, of course, we have so many to help.’

‘But your patients pay nothing, right?’

‘Correct. Our patients are from impoverished communities and are treated free, although they contribute if they can.’

‘And your staff …?’

‘In the early days the hospital relied on staff from overseas, but today we are almost exclusively Khmer. And we’re a teaching hospital—we train healthcare workers from all over the country. That’s a huge success story.’

‘So you don’t have any overseas staff here at the moment?’

‘Actually, we do. Not paid staff—volunteers.’

‘Doctors?’

‘We have a group of doctors from Singapore coming in a few months’ time to perform heart surgeries. And at the moment we have three nurses, all from America, helping out.’

‘I was wondering if …’ Aaron cleared his throat. ‘If perhaps Ella Reynolds was working here?’

Dr Seng looked at him in surprise. ‘Ella? Why, yes!’

Ahhhhh. Fate. It had a lot to answer for.

‘I—I’m a friend. Of the family,’ Aaron explained.

‘Then I’m sorry to say you probably won’t see her. She’s not well. She won’t be in for the whole week.’

Aaron knew he should be feeling relieved. He could have a nice easy week of filming, with no cutting comments, no tattoo come-ons, no amused eyebrow-raising.

But … what did ‘not well’ mean? Head cold? Sprained toe? Cancer? Liver failure? Amputation? ‘Not well?’

‘Dengue fever—we’re in the middle of an outbreak, I’m afraid. Maybe a subject for your next documentary, given it’s endemic in at least a hundred countries and infects up to a hundred million people a year.’

Alarm bells. ‘But it doesn’t kill you, right?’

‘It certainly can,’ the doctor said, too easily, clearly not understanding Aaron’s need for reassurance.

Aaron swallowed. ‘But … Ella …’

‘Ella? No, no, no. She isn’t going to die. The faster you’re diagnosed and treated the better, and she diagnosed herself very quickly. It’s more dangerous for children, which Ella is not. And much more dangerous if you’ve had it before, which Ella has not.’

Better. But not quite good enough. ‘So is she in hospital?’

‘Not necessary at this stage. There’s no cure; you just have to nurse the symptoms—take painkillers, keep up the fluids, watch for signs of internal bleeding, which would mean it was dengue haemorrhagic fever—very serious! But Ella knows what she’s doing, and she has a friend staying close by, one of the nurses. And I’ll be monitoring her as well. A shame it hit her on her birthday.’

‘Birthday?’

‘Two days ago. Do you want me to get a message to her?’

‘No, that’s fine,’ Aaron said hurriedly. ‘Maybe I’ll see her before I head home to Sydney.’

‘Then let’s collect Kiri and I’ll have you both taken on a tour of our facilities.’

It quickly became clear that it was Kiri, not Aaron, who was the celebrity in the hospital. He seemed to fascinate people with his Cambodian Australian-ness, and he was equally fascinated in return. He got the hang of the satu—the graceful greeting where you placed your palms together and bowed your head—and looked utterly natural doing it. It soothed Aaron’s conscience, which had been uneasy about bringing him.

They were taken to observe the frenetic outpatient department, which Aaron was stunned to learn saw more than five hundred patients a day in a kind of triage arrangement.

The low acuity unit, where he saw his first malaria patients, a sardine can’s worth of dengue sufferers, and children with assorted other conditions, including TB, pneumonia, malnutrition, HIV/AIDS and meningitis.

The emergency room, where premature babies and critically ill children were treated for sepsis, severe asthma, and on and on and on.

Then the air-conditioned intensive care unit, which offered mechanical ventilation, blood gas analysis and inotropes—not that Aaron had a clue what that meant. It looked like the Starship Enterprise in contrast to the mats laid out for the overflow of dengue sufferers in the fan-cooled hospital corridors.

The tour wrapped up with a walk through the basic but well-used teaching rooms, some of which had been turned into makeshift wards to cope with the dengue rush.

And then, to Aaron’s intense annoyance, his focus snapped straight back to Ella.

Tina and Brand would expect him to check on her, right?

And, okay, he wanted to make sure for himself that she was going to recover as quickly and easily as Dr Seng seemed to think.

One visit to ease his conscience, and he would put Ella Reynolds into his mental lockbox of almost-mistakes and double-padlock the thing.

And so, forty minutes after leaving the hospital, with Kiri safely in Jenny’s care at the hotel, he found himself outside Ella’s guesthouse, coercing her room number from one of the other boarders, and treading up the stairs.

CHAPTER FOUR

AARON FELT SUDDENLY guilty as he knocked. Ella would have to drag herself out of bed to open the door.

Well, why not add another layer of guilt to go with his jumble of feelings about that night at the bar?

The boorish way he’d behaved—when he was never boorish.

The way he’d assumed her headache was the result of booze, when she’d actually been coming down with dengue fever.

The door opened abruptly. A pretty brunette, wearing a nurse’s uniform, stood there.

‘Sorry, I thought this was Ella Reynolds’s room,’ Aaron said.

‘It is.’ She gave him the appreciative look he was used to receiving from women—women who weren’t Ella Reynolds, anyway. ‘She’s in bed. Ill.’

‘Yes, I know. I’m Aaron James. A … a friend. Of the family.’

‘I’m Helen. I’m in the room next door, so I’m keeping an eye on her.’

‘Nice to meet you.’

She gave him a curious look and he smiled at her, hoping he looked harmless.

‘Hang on, and I’ll check if she’s up to a visit,’ Helen said.

The door closed in his face, and he was left wondering whether it would open again.

What on earth was he doing here?

Within a minute Helen was back. ‘She’s just giving herself a tourniquet test, but come in. I’m heading to the hospital, so she’s all yours.’

It was gloomy in the room. And quiet—which was why he could hear his heart racing, even though his heart had no business racing.

His eyes went first to the bed—small, with a mosquito net hanging from a hook in the ceiling, which had been shoved aside. Ella was very focused, staring at her arm, ignoring him. So Aaron looked around the room. Bedside table with a lamp, a framed photo. White walls. Small wardrobe. Suitcase against a wall. A door that he guessed opened to a bathroom, probably the size of a shoebox.

He heard a sound at the bed. Like a magnet, it drew him.

She was taking a blood-pressure cuff off her arm.

‘I heard you were ill,’ he said, as he reached the bedside. ‘I’m sorry. That you’re sick, I mean.’

‘I’m not too happy about it myself.’ She sounded both grim and amused, and Aaron had to admire the way she achieved that.

‘Who told you I was sick?’ she asked.

‘The hospital. I’m filming there for the next week.’

She looked appalled at that news. ‘Just one week, right?’

‘Looks like it.’

She nodded. He imagined she was calculating the odds of having to see him at work. Flattering—not.

He cleared his throat. ‘So what’s a tourniquet test?’

‘You use the blood-pressure machine—’

‘Sphygmomanometer.’

‘Well, aren’t you clever, Dr Triage! Yes. Take your BP, keep the cuff blown up to halfway between the diastolic and systolic—the minimum and maximum pressure—wait a few minutes and check for petechiae—blood points in the skin.’

‘And do you have them? Um … it? Petechiae?’

‘Not enough. Less than ten per square inch.’

‘Is that … is that bad?’

‘It’s good, actually.’

‘Why?’

Audible sigh. ‘It means I have classic dengue—not haemorrhagic. As good as it gets when every bone and joint in your body is aching and your head feels like it might explode through your eyeballs.’

‘Is that how it feels?’

‘Yes.’

Silence.

Aaron racked his brain. ‘I thought you might want me to get a message to Tina.’

Her lips tightened. Which he took as a no.

‘That would be no,’ she confirmed.

A sheet covered the lower half of her body. She was wearing a red T-shirt. Her hair was piled on top of her head, held in place by a rubber band. Her face was flushed, a light sheen of sweat covering it. And despite the distinct lack of glamour, despite the tightened lips and warning eyes, she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen.

‘Shouldn’t you keep the net closed?’ he asked, standing rigid beside the bed. Yep—just the sort of thing a man asked a nurse who specialised in tropical illnesses.

‘Happy to, if you want to talk to me through it. Or you can swat the mosquitoes before they get to me.’

‘Okay—I’ll swat.’

She regarded him suspiciously. ‘Why are you really here? To warn me I’ll be seeing you at the hospital?’

‘No, because it looks like you won’t be. I just wanted to make sure you were all right. See if you needed anything.’

‘Well, I’m all right, and I don’t need anything. So thank you for coming but …’ Her strength seemed to desert her then and she rolled flat onto her back in the bed, staring at the ceiling, saying nothing.

‘I heard it was your birthday. That night.’

An eye roll, but otherwise no answer.

He came a half-step closer. ‘If I’d known …’

Aaron mentally winced as she rolled her eyes again.

‘What would you have done?’ she asked. ‘Baked me a cake?’

‘Point taken.’

Trawling for a new topic of conversation, he picked up the photo from her bedside table. ‘Funny—you and Tina sound nothing alike, and you look nothing alike.’

Silence, and then, grudgingly, ‘I take after my father’s side of the family. Tina’s a genetic throwback.’ She smiled suddenly, and Aaron felt his breath jam in his throat. She really was gorgeous when she smiled like that, with her eyes as well as her mouth—even if it was aimed into space and not at him.

He gestured to the photo. ‘I wouldn’t have picked you for a Disneyland kind of girl.’

‘Who doesn’t like Disneyland? As long as you remember it’s not real, it’s a blast.’

Aaron looked at her, disturbed by the harshness in her voice. Did she have to practise that cynicism or did it come naturally?

Ella raised herself on her elbow again. ‘Look, forget Disneyland, and my birthday. I do need something from you. Only one thing.’ She fixed him with a gimlet eye. ‘Silence. You can’t talk about that night, or about me being sick. Don’t tell Tina. Don’t tell Brand. My life here has nothing to do with them. In fact, don’t talk to anyone about me.’

‘Someone should know you’ve got dengue fever.’

‘You know. That will have to do. But don’t worry, it won’t affect you unless I don’t make it. And my advice then would be to head for the hills and forget you were ever in Cambodia, because my mother will probably kill you.’ That glorious smile again—and, again, not directed at him, just at the thought. ‘She never did like a bearer of bad tidings—quite medieval.’

‘All the more reason to tell them now.’

Back to the eye roll. ‘Except she’s not really going to kill you and I’m not going to drop dead. Look …’ Ella seemed to be finding the right words. ‘They’ll worry, and I don’t want them worrying about something that can’t be changed.’

‘You shouldn’t be on your own when you’re ill.’

‘I’m not. I’m surrounded by experts. I feel like I’m in an episode of your TV show, there are so many medical personnel traipsing in and out of this room.’

Aaron looked down at her.

‘Don’t look at me like that,’ Ella said.

‘Like what?’ Aaron asked. But he was wincing internally because he kind of knew how he must be looking at her. And it was really inappropriate, given her state of health.

With an effort, she pushed herself back into a sitting position. ‘Let me make this easy for you, Aaron. I am not, ever, going to have sex with you.’

Yep, she’d pegged the look all right.

‘You have a child,’ she continued. ‘And a wife, ex-wife, whatever. And it’s very clear that your … encumbrances … are important to you. And that’s the way it should be. I understand it. I respect it. I even admire it. So let’s just leave it. I was interested for one night, and now I’m not. You were interested, but not enough. Moment officially over. You can take a nice clear conscience home to Sydney, along with the film.’

‘Ella—’

‘I don’t want to hear any more. And I really, truly, do not want to see you again. I don’t want—Look, I don’t want to get mixed up with a friend of my sister’s. Especially a man with a kid.’

Okay, sentiments Aaron agreed with wholeheartedly. So he should just leave it at that. Run—don’t walk—to the nearest exit. Good riddance. So he was kind of surprised to find his mouth opening and ‘What’s Kiri got to do with it?’ coming out of it.

‘It’s just a … a thing with children. I get attached to them, and it can be painful when the inevitable goodbyes come around—there, something about me you didn’t need to know.’

‘But you’re working at a children’s hospital.’

‘That’s my business. But the bottom line is—I don’t want to see Kiri. Ergo, I don’t want to see you.’ She stopped and her breath hitched painfully. ‘Now, please …’ Her voice had risen in tone and volume and she stopped. As he watched, she seemed to gather her emotions together. ‘Please go,’ she continued quietly. ‘I’m sick and I’m tired and I—Just please go. All right?’

‘All right. Message received loud and clear. Sex officially off the agenda. And have a nice life.’

‘Thank you,’ she said, and tugged the mosquito net closed.

Aaron left the room, closed the door and stood there.

Duty discharged. He was free to go. Happy to go.

But there was some weird dynamic at work, because he couldn’t seem to make his feet move. His overgrown sense of responsibility, he told himself.

He’d taken two steps when he heard the sob. Just one, as though it had been cut off. He could picture her holding her hands against her mouth to stop herself from making any tell-tale sound. He hovered, waiting.

But there was only silence.

Aaron waited another long moment.

There was something about her. Something that made him wonder if she was really as prickly as she seemed …

He shook his head. No, he wasn’t going to wonder about Ella Reynolds. He’d done the decent thing and checked on her.

He was not interested in her further than that. Not. Interested.

He forced himself to walk away.

Ella had only been away from the hospital for eight lousy days.

How did one mortal male cause such a disturbance in so short a time? she wondered as she batted away what felt like the millionth question about Aaron James. The doctors and nurses, male and female, Khmer and the small sprinkling of Westerners, were uniformly goggle-eyed over him.

Knock yourselves out, would have been Ella’s attitude; except that while she’d been laid low by the dengue, Aaron had let it slip to Helen—and therefore everyone!—that he was a close friend of Ella’s film director brother-in-law. Which part of ‘Don’t talk to anyone about me’ didn’t he understand?

As a result, the whole, intrigued hospital expected her to be breathless with anticipation to learn what Aaron said, what Aaron did, where Aaron went. They expected Ella to marvel at the way he dropped in, no airs or graces, to talk to the staff; how he spoke to patients and their families with real interest and compassion, even when the cameras weren’t rolling; the way he was always laughing at himself for getting ahead of his long-suffering translator.

He’d taken someone’s temperature. Whoop-de-doo!

And had volunteered as a guinea pig when they’d been demonstrating the use of the rapid diagnostic test for malaria—yeah, so one tiny pinprick on his finger made him a hero?

And had cooked alongside a Cambodian father in the specially built facility attached to the hospital. Yee-ha!

And, and, and, and—give her a break.

All Ella wanted to do was work, without hearing his name. They’d had their moment, and it had passed. Thankfully he’d got the message and left her in peace once she’d laid out the situation. She allowed herself a quick stretch before moving onto the next child—a two-year-old darling named Maly. Heart rate. Respiration rate. Blood pressure. Urine output. Adjust the drip.

The small hospital was crowded now that the dengue fever outbreak was peaking. They were admitting twenty additional children a day, and she was run off her still-wobbly legs. In the midst of everything she should have been too busy to sense she was being watched … and yet she knew.

She turned. And saw him. Aaron’s son, Kiri, beside him.

Wasn’t the hospital filming supposed to be over? Why was he here?

‘Ella,’ Aaron said. No surprise. Just acknowledgement.

She ignored the slight flush she could feel creeping up from her throat. With a swallowed sigh she fixed on a smile and walked over to him. She would be cool. Professional. Civilised. She held out her hand. ‘Hello, Aaron.’

He took it, but released it quickly.

‘And sua s’day, Kiri,’ she said, crouching in front of him. ‘Do you know what that means?’

Kiri shook his head. Blinked.

‘It means hello in Khmer. Do you remember me?’

Kiri nodded. ‘Sua s’day, Ella. Can I go and see her?’ he asked, looking over, wide-eyed, at the little girl Ella had been with.

‘Yes, you can. But she’s not feeling very well. Do you think you can be careful and quiet?’

Kiri nodded solemnly and Ella gave him a confirming nod before standing again. She watched him walk over to Maly’s bed before turning to reassure Aaron. ‘She’s not contagious. It’s dengue fever and there’s never been a case of person-to-person transmission.’

‘Dr Seng said it deserved its own documentary. The symptoms can be like malaria, right? But it’s a virus, not a parasite, and the mosquitoes aren’t the same.’

Ella nodded. ‘The dengue mosquito—’ She broke off. ‘You’re really interested?’

‘Why wouldn’t I be?’

‘I just …’ She shrugged. ‘Nothing. People can get bored with the medical lingo.’

‘I won’t be bored. So—the mosquitoes?’

‘They’re called Aedes aegypti, and they bite during the day. Malaria mosquitoes—Anopheles, but I’m sure you know that—get you at night, and I’m sure you know that too. It kind of sucks that the people here don’t get a break! Anyway, Aedes aegypti like urban areas, and they breed in stagnant water—vases, old tyres, buckets, that kind of thing. If a mosquito bites someone with dengue, the virus will replicate inside it, and then the mosquito can transmit the virus to other people when it bites them.’ Her gaze sharpened. ‘You’re taking precautions for Kiri, aren’t you?’

‘Oh, yes. It’s been beaten it into me. Long sleeves, long pants. Insect repellent with DEET. And so on and so forth.’

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