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incoherent sentences which, too, she could still remember with painful clarity, just as she could remember her own responses.
    'What sort of a man am I?' His head, with dark, unkempt hair that looked as if it hadn't been brushed in days, was buried in his hands. 'I should have done everything differently. I love my daughter, but should I have let my wife sacrifice her own life so that Gabrielle could be born?'
    'Malcolm, you didn't have a choice,' Lucy answered urgently, racked by the inadequacy of her own power to help him. She ached to touch him. Just a squeeze of his hand or a press of his shoulder, but even that was out of the question. Especially now. Oh, Lord, especially now! 'Bronwyn would never have consented—'
    'I could have argued harder! Did I love her enough, I wonder? Perhaps I didn't. I can't have, if—'
    'Malcolm—'
    'Don't! Don't take any notice.' His burning storm-grey eyes swept upwards to fix on her, then closed as he covered them once more with his hands. 'It's not your problem. It's not your fault. None of this is your problem. You know that, don't you?' There was a white-hot urgency to the question.
    'I—'
    'I'm planning to leave Canberra as soon as I can,' he went on, not waiting for her answer, thank goodness.
    'There's a job in Brisbane. Lucy, Gabrielle doesn't need a trained nurse any more, and after—'
    'I can't stay. I know that,' she agreed quickly, before he could finish. 'My God! The last thing I want is for you to think I was expecting to stay!'
    'I've already arranged my resignation from the hospital,' he told her. 'I'll care for Gabrielle myself until we're settled in Brisbane. Please, leave as soon as you want to.'
    And as it was quite unbearable to stay, she packed her things and said goodbye to Gabrielle and Malcolm that same day...only to realise then, finally, as she travelled the long hours to her parents' farm, that the reason she ached so badly for Malcolm, with all that had happened, wasn't simply out of sympathy for what he'd been through.
    It was because she loved him.
    In hindsight, it wasn't very fair to Brett, a young motor mechanic from Brewarra, the modest-sized town nearest her parents' farm. She went out with him on the rebound, only it felt far more desperate and confusing and necessary at the time than that shallow phrase could express. She wasn't using him. But their relationship could never have worked in the long term, and she could hardly blame him for wanting no part of Charlotte's future.
    So there it was. The most painful, turbulent period of her life—and, no doubt, of Malcolm Lambert's as well—and by returning to Canberra she'd walked right back into her memories of it, like walking into a brick wall in the dark, because she hadn't even considered that he'd have had any reason to come back here himself.
    'And our daughters are best friends,' she whispered aloud at ten o'clock as she climbed, wrung out, into her solitary bed. 'Just how impossible is this going to be?'

CHAPTER TWO
    'I know I'm not the man you want to hear from at four o'clock on a Sunday afternoon,' said Matt Grady at the other end of the phone.
    'It's not a social call, then?' Malcolm answered. He had known Matt for years, and the two of them now held equivalent positions, Matt at a regional hospital in a nearby country town and Malcolm at Canberra's largest hospital.
    'I don't make social calls,' Matt replied. 'My wife makes those! No, but don't get too alarmed. I'm puttingyou on the alert just in case. We've got a report from the State Emergency Service of a big bushfire around Tumut, with probable casualties coining in. One volunteer firefighter is already on his way to us with facial burns and smoke inhalation. The fire's still out of control, with no change forecast until tomorrow, so the S.E.S. says we can expect some drama for at least the next forty-eight hours.'
    'You'll be the first port of call for casualties, presumably?' Malcolm guessed. 'Since you're closer to the