Melting The Trauma Doc's Heart

Perhaps it was just an illusion. He was rattled, that’s what it was. He hadn’t expected her to turn up and now he was responsible for an imminent encounter that was quite likely to be awkward, if not potentially damaging to everybody involved, including himself. Sure enough, Don rounded on Isaac the moment his office door was closed behind the trio.

‘You told her, didn’t you? After I specifically asked you to keep the information to yourself?’

‘Ah…’ Technically, Zac had made the call before Don had requested confidentiality but he’d known that he shouldn’t be doing it. ‘Sorry, Don… I thought it was the right thing to do. That your daughter should know that…’

‘That your dying wish was to see me again?’ Olivia was shaking her head. ‘But that’s not actually true, is it?’

Don’s eyebrows rose and then lowered even more as he scowled at Isaac. ‘You said that?’

‘I don’t remember saying exactly that,’ Zac admitted. ‘I was a bit riled up on your behalf, though. After seeing all those letters that Olivia had refused to read.’

‘I didn’t refuse to read them.’ Olivia was sounding pretty riled up herself now. ‘I never received them. I’m not sure I even believe they exist.’

Zac couldn’t help glancing up at the shelf where that filing box was sitting. When he looked down again, he found both Olivia and Don glaring at him and the similarity in their gazes almost made him smile. Clearly father and daughter still had things in common.

‘They don’t exist any more,’ Don muttered. ‘I put them through the shredder. But even if they were still in that box, they’re just ancient history. Totally irrelevant.’

If he hadn’t still been watching Olivia so closely, Zac might have missed the way she swallowed hard just then. Those letters had been important to her, hadn’t they? Maybe she was telling the truth and she hadn’t known they existed and maybe she’d wanted to see them. There was something about the way she was taking a breath that made him think she was struggling with this. That, despite her very put-together and poised outward appearance, she was actually feeling quite vulnerable. The shrug of her shoulders was definitely defensive.

‘I really don’t care,’ she said. ‘But I do believe that seeing me before you died wasn’t something on any list of priorities you might have. After all, you’ve had more than twenty-five years to do something about that. The real reason I came was to tell you it’s not fair…’

Yes…there was a tiny wobble in her voice that made Zac wish he’d never made that call. What right had he had to interfere in someone else’s life and upset them? And Don was looking alarmingly pale, as if he could collapse at any moment. If he did, it would be entirely Zac’s fault. Olivia Donaldson was looking a bit pale herself. Old wounds were being opened here. Deep wounds.

‘It’s not fair to let people think it was me who rejected you,’ Olivia continued. ‘When it was totally the other way round. What kind of father just walks out of his kid’s life and never looks back?’

He was looking back yesterday, Zac wanted to say. He was looking back and crying… But he kept his mouth shut and said nothing. Because he’d said too much already.

‘The lousy kind,’ Don said. ‘And I don’t blame you for hating me. I just don’t understand why you’ve bothered coming all this way to find me.’

‘Because someone suggested that I might regret not taking the last chance I’ll ever have to see you.’ Olivia’s chin rose. ‘And I decided I wanted to tell you face to face what I thought of you. It’s not much, actually. Not as a father. Or as a husband, for that matter. Mum told me how little support she got from you with her career choices. I’m not sure I think much of you as a doctor, either, when you’re not even getting proper medical treatment. What kind of example is that to your patients? How can anyone trust you to do what’s best for them if you won’t even do it for yourself?’

Zac sucked in a breath. Wow… He might have wanted to say something similar to Don himself, but he’d never have delivered it with that much…passion. There were deep feelings there that were showing themselves in anger but he could feel something very different beneath what was showing. He could almost see a small girl who was bewildered and hurt because her father had abandoned her.

What on earth had made Don do something so appalling? There was a part of him who wanted to step in and simply give Olivia a hug. But he could imagine how unwelcome that would be. He shouldn’t even be in this room. This was none of his business.

Don must have been reading his mind.

‘This is none of your business,’ he growled. Except that he was talking to Olivia, not Zac. ‘I didn’t ask you to come here. You shouldn’t have come. You don’t belong here, any more than your mother did. Why don’t you just get out while the going’s good?’

Oh, no… Zac found he was holding his breath. Could things get any worse?

Apparently, they could.

‘Oh, don’t worry.’ Olivia was already turning on her heel. ‘That’s precisely what I’m going to do.’

Zac had to steel himself to meet Don’s gaze as the door slammed behind his daughter. He knew he was going to be facing a man who had every right to be very angry with him.

Except he didn’t look angry. He looked…as sad as anyone Zac had ever seen.

‘You can go, too,’ he said quietly. ‘Just leave me alone, okay?’

Her hands were shaking so much that it took two attempts to get the rental car started. And then Olivia found that her vision was blurred by tears so she had to pull over, not far from where she’d stopped not so long ago, near the fire station. She swiped at her face and hauled in one deep breath after another as she tried to calm down. Why on earth was she so upset? Had she expected anything else from the man who’d walked out of her life when she was far too young to understand what might have driven him to do that? Had she had some deeply hidden hope that she might discover that her father did still love her, like that stranger had suggested in his phone message?

Of course he didn’t. He hadn’t expressed any desire to even see her before he died. That was simply a flight of fancy by someone who’d had no business interfering. Stirring up things that would have best been left alone. And, yes, it hurt but it was a pain Olivia had had plenty of practice dealing with. She’d had it nailed by the time she was in her early teens so nothing had really changed. She’d made a mistake by coming here, that was all, and the best that she could do now to repair the damage was to get away from this place as quickly as possible and try to just forget about it. At least she’d left the township behind now. There was farmland on either side of the road and she was heading towards the narrow, winding road that led through the gorge.

Not that it was going to be easy to push those stupidly intense minutes out of her head, she realised a few minutes later. It wasn’t just that horrible conversation with her father, because she was already pushing that into the part of her brain where everything else to do with Donald Donaldson had been buried. No… There was another man whose image it might be even harder to erase. The troublemaker. Some kind of irresponsible bad boy who’d fallen into a forgotten corner of her life and had decided to wreak havoc.

It was quite possible she was going to be thinking about Isaac Cameron for a rather long time. Wondering why she’d never felt anything quite like that kind of tingle deep in her belly before and whether she would ever feel it again. That pull of sheer…desire that even thinking about the man could generate.

Good grief… Olivia shook her head. It wasn’t just an electrical jolt she could feel in her body, she could hear a loud humming in her ears that was getting rapidly louder. So loud, she found herself looking up. And then she was stamping on the brake pedal and bringing her car to a complete halt as a single-engine light plane came from nowhere, only a short distance ahead of her, crossing the road barely above the level of her car’s roof. Its engine was roaring as it gained some height and then it coughed and spluttered and the plane dipped again. What was the pilot trying to do—make an emergency landing in a farmer’s field? If so, it needed to get a lot higher than it was, to clear the dense macrocarpa pine trees in the windbreak and how was it going to do that if its engine was dying?

Olivia watched in horror as the plane’s wheels dragged through a treetop and then its wings tipped one way and then the other as it got rapidly closer to the ground, sheep scattering to get away from the overhead intrusion. It bounced as a wheel touched the ground but then the small aircraft rolled, nosedived and finally came to a shockingly abrupt halt upside down. Olivia sat there, frozen, for a moment and then jumped out of her car, her phone in her hand. She punched in the three-digit code for the emergency services.

‘Where is your emergency?’

‘I’m on State Highway One. About ten minutes out of Cutler’s Creek, heading towards Dunedin.’

‘What’s happened?’

‘It’s a plane. It’s crashed into a paddock. Small plane, a Cessna, maybe.’

‘Do you have any idea of how many people are involved?’

‘No… I couldn’t see inside when it went over me.’

‘What can you see now?’

‘Um…’ There was a puff of smoke coming from where the plane had crashed but Olivia was too far away to see whether there was any movement inside or around the plane. ‘I can’t see anything.’ She needed to get closer but there was a barbed-wire fence and a ditch she would need to cross.

‘Stay on the line,’ she was told. ‘Help’s on its way.’

Olivia was looking up and down the road. How long was it going to take for that help to arrive? Surely someone would come past and be able to assist her with a first response? From the direction she’d come from, she could hear the faint wail of a civil defence siren. Were the local volunteer fire brigade and ambulance officers being summoned to the station?

Even if they were, it was going to take them at least several minutes to get here. Possibly crucial minutes if there were lives that were hanging in the balance. Someone with an arterial bleed, perhaps. Or now trapped upside down in a position that was occluding their airway. Olivia was a doctor—she couldn’t stand here and do nothing, even though the prospect of being first on this scene was actually rather terrifying. She’d worked in emergency departments with all the equipment and staff available to back up or take over an attempt to save a life but here…here she was entirely on her own and in a huge space with those towering mountains in the background that were still making her feel insignificant and she had nothing and nobody to help and…

It was possibly the first time in her life that Olivia Donaldson had to rely entirely on herself and her own judgement and to act so fast it had to be based on instinct as well as any skills she had learned over the years. Those skills didn’t include getting over a fence with barbed wire on the top but Olivia pulled apart two strands lower down on the fence, put her head through and then one leg and somehow the rest of her body followed easily enough, although she could feel the side seam of her narrow skirt catch and rip a little. She set off across the uneven grassed land at a run and all she was thinking about as she got closer to the plane was how she was going to try and get the doors open and how badly hurt the occupants might be and how on earth she was going to get them out and look after them with nothing more than her bare hands.

Slowing down as she got close to the plane wasn’t just to catch her breath. Long ago, at medical school, Olivia had attended an interesting workshop that paramedics had given about being first on the scene at any emergency. Snippets were drifting back into her head and she knew that the first thing she had to do was to assess the scene for any dangers to herself and any other rescuers that would be arriving. Things like broken glass or leaking fuel that could present a fire hazard or power lines that were down. A glance back towards the road confirmed that nearby power lines seemed to still be intact.

It also showed Olivia that a vehicle with a flashing light on its roof had come through the gate of this huge paddock further down the road. It wasn’t a fire truck or an ambulance. It looked like an SUV and the light was one of those magnetic temporary ones. Someone was driving rapidly towards her. It should have been far too far away to recognise the driver but Olivia had no doubt at all about who it was.

Isaac Cameron.

It didn’t matter that it was the person who had just stirred up a part of her past that should have been left well alone. She had never been so pleased at the prospect of seeing anyone in her whole life.

She wasn’t facing this alone, after all.

CHAPTER THREE

ISAAC CAMERON HAD never expected to see this woman again.

She wouldn’t have been his first choice to work with in an emergency situation, either, but—fair play—when he’d arrived, he’d seen how hard she’d been running across this paddock with the obvious intention of helping whoever was in this plane. As he pulled his vehicle to a halt and leapt out to get his medical pack from the back, part of his brain registered that she must have ripped that tight skirt of her power suit getting past the barbed wire on the fence and she probably wouldn’t appreciate the fact that her careful hairstyle was coming a little unravelled and that she was now well splattered with animal manure but, in this moment, her appearance was totally irrelevant to either of them.

‘Did you see it come down?’ Zac dropped his pack near a wingtip and bent to get beneath the diagonal strut that connected the wing to the fuselage of the small aircraft.

‘Yes. It went right in front of my car.’

‘So it was trying to land?’ Zac could see the slumped figure of a man in the cockpit.

‘I think so. It sounded like there was something wrong with the engine. The wheels got caught in the trees. It flipped over right at the last second and there was a bang when it stopped so suddenly.’

Zac wasn’t surprised. The propeller had dug itself deep into the soil. The Plexiglas of the windshield was broken, too, and there were splatters of blood on it. He leaned to look in further.

‘I can’t see any passengers. I think it’s just the pilot.’ He rapped on the side window. ‘Hello…can you hear me? I’m a doctor. We’re here to help you.’

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