Ava walked slowly back to the hospital room that they’d made her sleep in overnight under observation. The blank look in Zac’s eyes when he’d regarded her hung cold around her like a damp fog that was worse than any lingering effects from the accident. His memories of her were lost. What did you do when the love of your life forgot who you were?
It had to be transient. Temporary. Surely. He was awake and functioning, so that was the most important thing. That was what really mattered when it could have been so much worse. The dread she’d felt when she’d watched over him at Yulara chilled her skin again. Thank God he was awake.
But he didn’t remember her. Didn’t remember them.
Had it all been a glorious dream to be grabbed back like a child’s longed-for Christmas toy? That incredible instant connection to the man she’d given her heart to after only a few days. The love she’d never believed would find her after Jai’s betrayal.
They’d been pushed off a bank by a stupid campervan and now he didn’t know her. At all. Their last week together had evaporated from his heart like rain in the desert. Without a trace.
Her head pounded. What was she supposed to do? She could tell him the truth, say he’d proposed, force him to look at her and describe what they had. ‘Daunting’ didn’t begin to describe what that would be like. And what if he didn’t believe her? A proposal after a week, to a woman he didn’t recognise, in a place he was passing through? Ludicrous. If their positions were reversed she wouldn’t believe it.
Should she patiently wait here, hover around like a lost soul, until his mental recovery took pity on her? Pass time until he did remember? If he remembered. She didn’t even have an excuse to stay. She was on leave.
What if he never remembered her?
Stop it, she told herself. Bemoaning the fact won’t help you or Zac.
Ava blew out a long, pent-up, anguished sigh and let it go. She drew in a steadying breath and tried for the unshakably composed Ava. Okay. As soon as this bloody headache left her she’d make a plan. She had to. Because she was not losing the man she loved to a bloody white campervan.
Granny Mim and her mother were waiting when she returned. They took one look at her face and closed in for a group hug.
After several seconds of intense hugging, Stella was the first to step back. ‘Well? How is your friend?’
Ava hadn’t had the chance to say more than that Zac had flown down to see Uluru for the weekend. Her mother knew Ava had only known him for a week, so it wasn’t strange he’d be labelled ‘friend’. But it hurt. She couldn’t explain now, and Stella wouldn’t want to believe her, either. She’d always had a thing that city people were different, which was a double standard considering she’d married one who’d been the love of her life. Ava settled for ‘He’ll recover.’
Her mother examined her face with some scepticism. ‘Good. Does he remember you?’
And there was the hell of it. ‘No.’ She looked for reassurance. ‘Most people get their memory back, don’t they, Mum?’ She needed to refresh her understanding of amnesia prognosis. There wasn’t a lot of call for amnesia knowledge in obstetrics.
Stella nodded decisively. ‘Yes.’ Good old Mum. ‘Often a mirror incident or aural trigger can help. Is he having flashbacks?’
Ava thought back to their awkward conversation. ‘I don’t know. I told him we worked together, but that’s gone too. Dr Fithers said he’s lost a chunk of time since March, which would be just before he came here.’
There was a gasp from Mim, and Ava realised she must have given some indication of her hopes because Mim looked horrified at this stumbling block. Incurably romantic Mim.
‘He doesn’t think he’s still married?’ Mim asked.
‘I didn’t ask him.’ Ava lifted her hand to her forehead, which had begun to ache with renewed enthusiasm.
‘Mother.’ Stella’s voice commanded Mim’s attention. ‘Ava needs pain relief and rest.’ Then she turned to Ava. ‘We’ll go now and come back later and pick you up after lunch, not before. I’ll tell them at the desk. I’m not sure you want to drive yourself to Setabilly on Tuesday, either.’
Ava would drive herself, but there was no use asking her mother not to talk to the nurses. She already had them terrified. And her head did hurt. If she was honest with herself, it was nice not to have to worry about anything when her mother had it all in hand. As long as Stella didn’t have Zac in hand. She couldn’t deal with that at the moment.
‘On one condition,’ Ava said quickly before they left the room.
Her mother stopped and turned back. ‘Condition?’
‘Promise you won’t go see Zac without me.’
Granny Mim and Stella exchanged glances. If she wasn’t mistaken, they both looked disappointed. That was a lucky escape.
‘As you wish.’ Stella gave a firm nod. ‘Now rest. They’ll be in soon with something for that headache.’
Ava took off the wrap she’d put on to visit Zac and laid it across the blanket, then raised the head of the bed with the remote control. She’d been spoiled with a single room, she thought as she climbed up onto the mattress. Thankfully. She couldn’t imagine dealing with this behind the curtain of a shared room within earshot of other patients. A staff bonus. She should be grateful, and she really was trying to be.
Her thoughts turned to Zac once again. She tried to imagine what he must be feeling to wake in a strange place and with a time gap of two weeks. Not knowing how he’d arrived or the people he worked with except a colleague from the past. She guessed she had some luck that it wasn’t common knowledge she’d been sleeping with Zac, now that he’d forgotten her. Something else to be grateful for. She closed her eyes.
After lunch, Ava woke with her headache dulled enough to allow her to make decisions. She would be proactive and fight. Fight for what Zac had believed in enough to fly to her to do. He’d believed so much that he’d proposed they spend their lives together. They needed to recapture the connection that had been so strong from the first moment they met.
Although she could smack Zac upside the head for holding onto telling her he loved her until Yulara, when he could have shared his feelings earlier. Right now, the brief episode of him skirting around asking her to marry him felt like something she’d dreamed up before all this horror started.
Ava slipped on her robe and padded up the hall to peer into his room. He was alone and awake, and sat in a chair, staring out the window. She took a deep breath and knocked. She watched the frown as he tried to place her, then recognition that she was someone he’d met once before. She could be grateful for that, at least. ‘Hello there, Zac.’
‘Ava.’ He even remembered her name. ‘Come in.’ He stood, his face inquiring more than welcoming, and she had to stamp down the feeling of hopelessness as he gestured to the other chair.
One day since the accident, she told herself. It has only been one day. Everything will be fine.
‘Thanks.’ She pulled the chair closer to his and sat. Glancing at her hands in her lap, she gathered her thoughts to convince this stranger he needed to spend time with her. ‘I’m going home this afternoon.’ She lifted her chin to hold his gaze. ‘I’ve come to ask you again to consider convalescing with us on Setabilly Station when you’re discharged.’
He studied her, as if trying to see through to her reasoning. He was an intelligent guy so he must be wondering. At least he didn’t say no straight off. ‘Setabilly Station?’
She answered the easy part first. ‘Down near Mount Conner, towards Uluru. A cattle station. We’re setting up a sideline as a farmstay, like an ecotourist retreat. It’s early days, but we’re geared for guests.’ She shook herself. ‘I just wondered if you’d like to try our hospitality while you’re still isolated by loss of memory. I understand you can’t go back to work for two weeks. And you shouldn’t fly either.’
The way he searched her face gave her a tingle of hope. Then his measured ‘Thank you’ dashed it. ‘I’ll probably just stay in the apartment George says I have at the hotel.’
Ava forced a laugh and pushed a little more. ‘Or you could come with me and be an ecotourist and at least I could keep my eye on you for a few days.’ There. She’d said the words.
He raised one dark brow. ‘To your family station? A stranger?’
Ava lifted her shoulders. To hell with it. ‘Not a complete stranger. We did have a six-day relationship that you don’t remember,’ she said quietly. ‘And my family know we’re friends, so they understand why I want you to come.’
She waited for him to dispute the information, but he didn’t. His eyes met hers and his brows went up. ‘A relationship? Did we? I wondered.’ Although she listened for it, she didn’t detect disbelief.
Still not sure what he was thinking, she said firmly, ‘Yes. We did. I haven’t forgotten.’
‘And I have.’ Their gazes met and held. Finally, after the slowest two seconds in the world, he said, ‘That would explain my somewhat out-of-character fascination with your womanly wiles.’ Then he gave her that beautiful smile she’d fallen in love with and she thought her heart would break.
Oh, Zac.
After a brief struggle with the lump in her throat, she whispered huskily, ‘Nice to know something still rings a bell.’ She gestured vaguely. ‘The thing is, I’ll worry about you if I leave you here. I was driving that damn car, and if you came as a guest I’d be able to check on you. At least till the ten-day mark.’
Still he watched her face intently. ‘Make sure I don’t have a secondary cerebral bleed or something?’
‘Something like that. Such disastrous complications are strictly forbidden.’ She gestured to the window this time. ‘We have cottages, pre-fab corrugated-iron mini homesteads that my grandmother designed. They’re air-conditioned, self-contained and have desert views. So it’s not like you’d be living in the main house.’ Though her mother or grandmother might still veto that. Old nurses didn’t trust in nature as much as midwives did, and she’d be overruled. In this particular case, her mother and grandmother were the only people in the world she’d allow to overrule her. But that was a worry for later.
He didn’t look convinced and she could feel him slipping away. Make it happen, she told herself, or lose him. ‘As the one responsible for your loss of memory, I would prefer you to spend the next week or so this way.’ Please, she silently added. ‘And I can’t hang around here because I help at muster this time of year. I’m not back in Alice for a month. But it’s up to you.’
‘It’s good of you to offer, but please don’t feel responsible as the driver.’ His face twisted a little as if he understood the price of that, and she thought of his past trauma. Yes, he definitely understood. He probably didn’t connect that she knew about his wife, either.
Had she put too much pressure on him? Was recuperating with a strange woman the last thing he wanted to do and he didn’t know how to say no? For a moment she cringed, feeling pushy and desperate. Then she pulled herself together. She was fighting for their love. For them. For a future Zac had seen as wonderful, if what he’d said in Yulara was true. This guy was a high-flying city emergency doctor. He knew how to say no if he wanted to. He had amnesia, not a personality transplant.
Tensely, she waited for his answer, watching him warily. Trying not to let him see how awkward this was for her.
‘I’ll think about it,’ he said.
She could almost read his thoughts. Could read them a little better than when she’d first met him, anyway. She’d bet he was thinking, What sort of relationship have we had? It can’t have become too much in a week, surely? She hoped she didn’t look like a woman who needed him to escape her life, or needed to grasp at men who didn’t remember her.
She added, ‘If you like, I could drop in here before I leave this afternoon and introduce you to my mother and grandmother. They can add their invitation to mine. They’ll be going back today ahead of me and you could see if you feel comfortable with them. I don’t want to pressure you.’
Yes, she did, but she’d try not to. Honestly. Now, however, it was time to go.
She stood. ‘I pick up my replacement car this afternoon and will be heading to the station tomorrow before lunch. We’ll talk again tomorrow but then I’ll be gone.’ She tried to look calm about his indecision, to look like the patient woman she was known as. Funny how she couldn’t find much calm resignation at this moment. Soon she’d be leaving for a month.
She hoped he’d make the right decision.