From Fling to Forever

‘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 (#u8dd48bc3-2426-5668-92e2-8417d33f14b1)

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?’