Nate was still in his dinner suit. He looked handsome-absurdly handsome-but Gemma didn’t notice. She didn’t see Nate the man. She saw Nate the doctor, and the doctor was what she needed most at this moment. A doctor with skills. Please…

‘Tell me what happened.’ Nate’s voice was curt and decisive, cutting through her fear. Or trying to. She might be a doctor herself but this was her beloved Cady and her medical judgement couldn’t surface through her terror.

Somehow she forced herself to be calm. To give Nate the facts.

‘We stopped a few miles down the road. I wanted to get a little distance between us…between the baby and us…before we ate. And Cady was really, really quiet but I thought, well, it was his little sister we’d just left. And we’d grown so fond… Regardless of what I told you…’

She was almost incoherent, Nate thought. She was hugging the little boy to her as she spoke and their faces were a matching chalky white. Jane had pressed Gemma into a chair and was taking Cady’s blood pressure. She’d called Nate as soon as she’d seen Cady. The dance hall was only a few hundred yards from the hospital so he’d arrived there in minutes.

Nate listened to the fear in Gemma’s voice. He stooped before them, lifting the boy’s wrist and feeling his racing pulse. His breathing was deep and gasping-as if it hurt.

‘OK, Cady, we’ll have you feeling better in no time,’ he told the little boy, sensing the rigid fear in the child’s body. Obviously there were things happening that Cady didn’t understand.

Neither did Gemma. ‘OK, Gemma, just take it slowly,’ he told her. ‘Calm down.’ His voice insisted she do just that. ‘Tell me what happened next.’

She hiccuped on a sob. ‘He said he couldn’t see. He said everything was fuzzy. And then…he was violently ill and now he’s limp…’