The Children's Doctor and the Single Mum

In the herb section, she saw a familiar figure—Laird Burchell, the last man on earth she would have expected or wanted to see here, with the possible exception of her ex-husband—and unfortunately he saw her before she could veer in the direction of the summer annuals and get out of his way.

He was wearing jeans, a blue polo shirt, a pair of scuffed work boots and a broad-brimmed Akubra hat, which made him look like a farmer. There was an air of relaxed satisfaction hovering around him that she hadn’t seen on him in the NICU.

Some doctors played with their investments during their time off.

Dr Burchell apparently preferred to play at being a man of the land.

He came up to her with arrow-like directness while she stood there with garden-centre potting mix leaking out of the holes in the bottom of the lemon thyme punnet, dirtying her hands. In the background Ben knocked over a standard rose bush, and Tammy hoped she’d get a chance to set it upright again before either the garden centre staff or Laird Burchell realised that Ben was hers.

‘Convenient, seeing you here,’ he said.

‘Oh, is it?’ She smiled.

‘I owe you a coffee.’ He’d completely skipped hello.

She understood at once. ‘You mean something did show up on Cameron Thornton’s ultrasound?’

‘I sent him down late last night, but you’d gone by the time he came back. There was a marked dilatation in the left kidney, suggesting a significant ureteral obstruction. He’s on antibiotics, and we’ll do a pyeloplasty on Monday. Mrs Thornton is not even trying to resist telling me that she told me so.’

‘Well, we did take a while to trust her intuition. She’s allowed to be smug.’

‘But I’m hoping you’ll resist telling me that you told me so, if I make good on the coffee deal.’ He gestured behind him to the garden-centre building, where there was a pretty café section overlooking the greenery.

He meant coffee right now, Tammy realised.

Well, you could get it here in paper cups, to go.

‘No paper cups, right?’ he said, as if reading her thoughts and challenging them. She remembered her joking insistence that it had to be good coffee, in a china cup.

‘That is, if you want to,’ he added, just as a man who could conceivably have been her husband picked up a punnet of parsley and one of basil and moved in Tammy’s direction.

‘Would you rather get it over with?’ she teased, letting Dr Burchell think what he liked about her relationship to the herb hunter—who wasn’t her type at all.

She would have a latte, she decided, and she could sip it on one of the garden benches out the front, while the kids ate their ice creams. She’d tell Dr Burchell he didn’t need to stay and keep her company. He could buy his pair of matching maidenhair ferns, or whatever, and go home to put them on his glassed-in townhouse balcony.

Meanwhile, Lachlan was trying to help Ben to set the rosebush straight. There was only a little bit of spilled soil on the ground, thank goodness. But the thorny branches of the fallen rose caught in the next rosebush as Lachlan pushed it too hard, and three of the bushes fell in a heap. They’d outgrown their pots and were top-heavy. ‘Sorry, Mummy,’ he mouthed, wincing.