She’d simply died.

He’d had patients who’d done this-just died. The operation had been a success, yet the assault on their bodies had been too great, their hearts had simply stopped.

Mostly it happened in the aged, where maybe there’d been a question of whether the operation should have been done at all, only how could you convince a patient that you couldn’t remove cancer because there was a risk of heart failure? Maybe you tried, but the patient could elect to have the operation anyway.

He hated cases like those. He hated this.

He knelt and saw, closer now and more dreadfully, the full extent of scar tissue. He thought about what this little animal must have gone through in the past six months and he knew that yesterday’s decision to operate must have been a hard one for Tori to make.

Where was she?

He glanced around, out through the window, and then he saw her. She was out at the edge of the clearing, and he knew what she was doing.

Hadn’t she cried enough?

She didn’t get attached to her patients. She couldn’t. Getting attached was the way of madness.

She was crying so hard she could barely see the ground she was trying to dig.

This was the first of the animals she’d tried to bury. Up until now there’d been volunteers taking away bodies of the animals she’d failed.

This was the end. Her last failure. If she’d known it would turn out like this she’d have euthanised her six months ago.

She’d had to make a decision. She’d got it wrong, and there were no volunteers left to bury her.

So much loss. So much appalling waste. Dad, Micki, one tiny baby with no life at all…

One little koala who somehow represented them all.

‘I can’t do this any more,’ she whispered and hit the ground with the spade. The spade shuddered back. Was she hitting tree roots?

She swore and hit the ground again. Three spade lengths away, Rusty flinched, as if the little dog felt every shudder.