How many patients made him feel like Pippa did?

Maybe it was the voice, he thought harshly. Upper-crust English. Maybe that was his Achilles’ heel.

Only it wasn’t the voice.

He lay back on his pillows, allowing himself a moment’s indulgence, letting himself remember the feel of the woman in the fluffy pink bathrobe.

A woman who smiled at Amy, who coached her, who cared. A woman who pushed herself past exhaustion because a sixteen-year-old kid needed her. Her skill had stunned him-she had been totally on Amy’s side; she was a midwife any woman would love to have at a birth.

But he also saw her as… a drowning bride at the end of a rope over a dark ocean.

The vision wouldn’t go away.

Phillippa Penelope Fotheringham.

Pippa.

Phillippa, he corrected himself harshly. English. Probably wealthy.

She was a nurse. Why would he think she was wealthy?

There was something about her… some intangible thing… the Roger story?

What did it have to do with him? Forget it, he told himself. Forget her. He did not need complications in his life. He already had a big one. Lucy

He glanced out the window. The sun was finally rising, its soft tangerine rays glimmering on the water.

Out at sea he’d have a chance to think. Or not to think.

Surf. And more surf. And medicine.

What was life other than those two things?

On Tuesday evening Riley went to see Amy. She was out on the hospital balcony, cuddling her baby and looking longingly at the sunset over the distant hills.

‘Hi,’ Riley said from the door, and she beamed a welcome.

‘This is lovely,’ she said. ‘You’re my second visitor tonight.’

‘Second?’

‘Pippa came back to see me, too. Look.’ She held up a stuffed rabbit, small and floppy, with a lopsided grin that made Riley smile.