A Forever Family For The Army Doc

‘Even when he was young he had a passion for them. Pop made him a little model one that had some string around the rotor stem and you wound it up then pulled and the helicopter took off. But most of the time he just ran around with it in the air, making helicopter noises, diving, and rising, and chasing the rest of us.’

They’d reached the track and set out in a slow jog.

‘You were a happy family, then?’ he asked, turning to look at her as he asked the question, his eyes studying her face.

Looking for a lie?

‘Very,’ she said firmly. ‘Oh, we had our fights like any family and there were always kids who found it hard to fit in.’

She faltered, paused, looked out to sea before adding, ‘Some of them had been so traumatised, so badly abused, they hated being happy, I guess.’

Mac nodded. You couldn’t get through training as a doctor without seeing the horrific things people could do to one another—could do to children. At least, that was what he’d thought until he’d gone to war.

‘Hallie and Pop must be remarkable people,’ he said, forcing his mind back to the present as they resumed their jog, speeding up slightly.

‘They are,’ Izzy agreed, and the simple confirmation, the love in her voice, told him far more than the words.

They jogged in silence, and he breathed in the sea air and marvelled at the might of the waves crashing against the cliffs, the beauty in the scraggly, wind-twisted trees along the path, the little cove...their porpoise cove?

‘The helicopter bothered you last night?’

He’d been so lost in his contemplation of the scene—concentrating on the details of the beauty around him to avoid his reactions to the woman beside him—that the question startled him.

He didn’t have to answer it, he decided, but within a minute realised his companion—colleague, as he should be thinking of her—wasn’t so easily silenced.

‘Just the sound of it coming in made you go pale, yet you agreed to accompany the patient to the city.’

She was stating a fact, not asking a question, so now he didn’t have to...

Except...

Except he wanted to!

For some reason, in this beautiful place, with this woman he barely knew by his side, he did want to talk about it.

‘It wasn’t fear so much as memory,’ he said, stopping to look out to sea while he found the words.

Not the words for the unimaginable horror—no words could cover that—but enough words to explain, to her and to himself.