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'Thank you.'

The
mirror showed a face that was considerably thinner than it had been a few weeks previously. There were hollows in the cheeks, shadows under the eyes.

'I look exhausted.' Lisa spoke out loud, addressing her reflection in her bathroom mirror. 'I am exhausted.'

Looking at herself critically, she saw a face which was abnormally pale after weeks of winter. Also, there was no denying that she had matured, that a certain plump, dewy youthfulness had gone, perhaps for ever. Lisa peered closer into her own eyes. She was not sorry that she had changed. After all, a woman in her mid-twenties should be grown up. It was time to stop mulling over pointless regrets about the past. There was nothing like a baby to force you to put your own ego on hold, to take a leap towards maturity.

"Morning, Lisa, I thought I heard you moving about.'

'Oh, hullo, Mum,' Lisa said, turning to look at her mother who had come to stand in the open door of her bathroom, wearing an old dressing-gown that had seen better days. 'I hope we didn't wake you. The baby's asleep again. I was up at six. . .she slept a little later this morning.'

'Good. You certainly need your sleep.' Mrs Stanton, like her daughter, had thick auburn hair, hers interspersed with grey, tied behind her head with a piece of ribbon.

Impulsively, Lisa moved forward and gave her mother a quick, appreciative hug. 'You shouldn't have got up,' she admonished. 'My appointment isn't until ten. I can manage until then.'

'I know.' Her mother smiled. 'I was awake, anyway.'

'I hope Dad didn't wake up?'

'No. You know, Lisa, I can't help thinking that maybe you shouldn't return to work tomorrow. Maybe you should have another month off.'

'You and Dad have done enough for me,' Lisa said decisively, moving towards the kitchen of her small flat that formed part of her parents' old, rambling house which had been her home since early childhood. 'And now that my maternity pay has just about run out I don't want you to be supporting me financially as well.'

'You're our daughter,' her mother said simply. 'What we have is yours. I wouldn't want it any other way.'

'I know. I appreciate that. It's just that I don't want to impose on you. And I've got some financial catching up to do. Tea, Mum? Or coffee?'

'Coffee will be fine.'

'If you start doing too much for me I shall have to keep that connecting door closed,' Lisa said lightly, teasingly, referring to the door between her own self-contained flat and the rest of the house.

'What time are you seeing that nice Dr Blair?' Mrs Stanton asked as she got two mugs out of a cupboard.

'After the hairdresser, to have my unruly locks chopped off, I'm going to come back here, feed Emma and then go to the hospital to see him at three o'clock,' Lisa said, feeling a quick pang of anticipation at the prospect of seeing Marcus Blair again. They had not met since the birth of the baby, although she had spoken to him on the telephone.. .twice.

'I still can't get over how wonderful he was to you,' her mother said. 'Such a charming, yet forthright sort of man. Aren't you glad you'll be working with him?'

'Yes, I think I am,' Lisa said thoughtfully as she spooned ground coffee into an automatic coffee-maker. 'I'm also wondering whether I'll feel any sort of embarrassment. I was
in extremis
when he saw me. Worse... he might feel embarrassed,' Lisa confessed, thinking of Marcus Blair hovering behind the inadequate curtains in the emergency department cubicle while she'd had a urinary catheter inserted and her blood-stained clothing removed.

'I shouldn't think so,' her mother said. 'He seemed to me to be a Very sophisticated sort of man. It's all in a day's work for him, anyway, isn't it?'

'Mmm...maybe,' Lisa said thoughtfully. 'Maybe not. Anyway, I'll sure be glad when this interview's over. I'm not quite sure why he wants to see me, anyway. The head nurse said he asked especially to see me before I started work. I mean. . .it's not usual. Nurses are hired—and interviewed—by nurses, not by doctors.'

'Maybe he's doing it just so that you
won't
feel any embarrassment when you first come face to face with each other in a work setting. That's my guess, Lisa. Don't worry about it. You've definitely got the job in the emergency department, haven't you?'

'Yes. Sadie Drummond—that's the head nurse—told me she'd be very pleased to have me work four days a week, five hours each day, from early morning,' Lisa said, pouring them both coffee.

'There you are, then,' her mother said decisively. 'I just hope it won't be too much for you, that's all.'

So—privately—did Lisa. Basically, she had never been so exhausted in her life. 'I'll be OK,' she assured her mother. 'If it proves to be too much I'll just take on less, that's all.'

Mrs Stanton stood up, holding her mug of coffee. 'I'll come to babysit at about nine-thirty,' she said.

'That's great,' Lisa said, standing up and kissing her mother on the cheek—appreciating her mother's sensitivity to her need for privacy and independence ever since she had moved back to her old flat here in her parents' home after the awful break-up with Richard...

When her mother had gone Lisa took her mug of coffee upstairs into the small second bedroom to check once again on her daughter. The truth is, she acknowledged as she bent over the cot that held her sleeping daughter, I don't really want to leave her.

Emma lay on her side with her eyes closed, wrapped in a quilt. Her long, dark eyelashes fanned down onto her soft, full cheeks. A shock of dark auburn hair fringed her forehead. When she awoke she would smile—that slow, gummy, delighted smile that she had just started to give in the past week when she focused on her mother—her large blue eyes shining. There was something very, very positive about a baby.

'I never knew,' Lisa whispered,, 'that it was possible to love someone so much.' It was different from the love for a man. When would it register with her daughter, she wondered sadly, that she had no father? How many years would it take? And would it matter as much as she thought it might?

It was good to be back in the flat, her old home. It wasn't tainted with memories of Richard. How desperately she had wanted to come back here after the debacle of the last time she had set eyes on Richard—the night she had become pregnant with Emma Rate. She sipped the hot coffee, remembering against her will...

The apartment, in the smart new apartment block, that she'd shared with Richard had been in an awful mess that night when a key had turned in the lock just as she'd been packing the last of her books into small, manageable cardboard cartons.

She'd been in a mess too, wearing a robe over her underwear. Richard had essentially already moved out at
that point, the break-up complete. Already he had told her that there was another woman, that he'd wanted 'out' of the relationship.. .as he had so unromantically put it. Not that there was anything she had
done,
he had said—or anything she had not done, come to that.

She had been kneeling on the floor, her hands full of books, when he had walked into the living room.

'Hi,' he said nonchalantly. 'How goes it?' He spoke as though they hadn't had the acrimonious break-up, as though she hadn't been almost paralytic with shock and was only now accepting the reality that he no longer wanted to live with her.

'Oh.. .just about finished,' she said, finding her voice. 'I.. .1 was just wondering what to do with the few things you left behind. Is that why you're here?'

When he stood looking at her—sizing her up, so to speak—maybe she should have guessed what was to come. But she didn't guess.

Richard looked very attractive—tall, heavily masculine, casually dressed in blue jeans and check shirt under a lightweight jacket, which he shrugged out of quickly.

'Yeah, just came to pick it up, actually,' he said, still seeming quite at ease while she had struggled to display some semblance of calm. 'I believe I left a suitcase here as well.'

'Yes, you did. Several,' Lisa said.

'I've missed you,' he said unexpectedly.

'I can't believe that,' she said, hoping he couldn't see how much of an effort the words cost her. You couldn't switch love on and off at will, even when you knew for sure that someone was no good for you.

The bedroom was in a shambles where she had piled what remained of his stuff in one corner, together with his bags. Going ahead of him into that room, where the bed had been dismantled and the mattress pushed to one side against a wall, Lisa indicated with a sweep of her arm his pile of belongings.

'That's all your stuff,' she said.

'It's true,' he persisted, taking her by the arms and looking into her eyes in the way that she had in the past found irresistible, 'that I've missed you. You can't sleep with someone for a whole year and not miss them.'

'Can't you, Richard? Is that all it's meant to you?' Her voice trembled, tinged with bitterness. The last thing she wanted to be was bitter, a destructive emotion she had so often seen in others.

'I can't pretend that I didn't want to get my hands on you the moment I saw you,' he said. 'That wasn't all of it.' He pulled her against him as he spoke.

'If you expect me to be magnanimous, you're mistaken,' she had said as calmly as she could. 'I can't pretend that I don't care.'

'You think it's easy for me?' he said roughly.

'You're the one who's going,' Lisa said tartly. She pulled away from him, feeling the old familiar weakening of her will when he was close to her. One day... perhaps. . .she would get over him.

Together they packed up his clothes, the few medical books and personal effects that he had left behind when he had taken the bulk of his things days before. Lisa folded his shirts and sweaters with exaggerated care, not wanting him to see any display of anger on her part. Perhaps she also wanted to delay the inevitable parting, after which she expected not to see him again. Inside, she had been weeping.

They were both kneeling beside the mattress when the packing was completed. She looked up to see him staring at her bare thigh where the robe had gaped open.

'Can't we be friends, Lisa?' he said. 'Who knows... maybe one day we could get together again?'

At that moment she so wanted the possibility to be there that a wild hope made her heart rate accelerate, even though the sober voice of reason whispered to her that they had never really been friends. At least, he had never had her best interests at heart—had simply taken all that she had to give, had finally made her feel that it was not enough and had made her feel inadequate.

He kissed her, with all the passion of their first liaison, taking her by surprise. At first she resisted, then found her loneliness giving way to his compelling charm.

'Don't shut me out.' He breathed the words into her ear, even though he had been the one to walk out.

In seconds he had pulled her down onto the mattress and had moved his weight td pin her down. Winded, she lay there, unable to summon up the necessary energy to move. The warmth of his body renewed the crazy hope in her.

'It's not you, Lisa,' he said thickly, his mouth brushing hers, 'it's me. I can't seem to stay with a woman for longer than about a year. I guess I don't want to be tied down... not yet. The other won't last, either. At least I'm not going to live with her.'

Before she could think of a suitable retort, her painful thoughts in chaos, he was kissing her hungrily—not like a man who had dismissed her from his life so summarily three weeks before. She struggled at first.

'No... I don't think this is a good idea,' she protested weakly, while her body betrayed her.

'Lisa... Lisa, I still want you,' he murmured. 'Maybe there's a future for us.'

'How can you want me?' she managed to gasp out, feeling herself weakening in the face of his undoubted physical attraction which she had never been able to resist. He knew just how to handle her, knew her responses intimately.

'I just do. I'm a bastard, I know it,' he said. Then they rolled together to the centre of the bed. Helplessly she found herself responding to him, telling herself as she did so that it was wrong for her. For a few moments only she knew that she would regret this. Then the physical reality of him dominated her mind, her emotions, as he made love to her quickly and furiously. It was like it always had been with them.

To his credit, afterwards he did not leave her immediately. He made coffee for them both, stayed long enough to tidy the apartment with her and bring it to some semblance of order. It was long enough for her hope not to die completely.

Before he left he didn't ask her whether she was still taking the Pill. She had been taking it, yet in her emotional state she might have forgotten a day or two... She didn't think so.

Six weeks later she knew for sure
that she was pregnant. By that time she also knew that he was not coming back. She found out quickly that there was nothing like a pregnancy to make stark reality assert itself.

At a quarter to three that afternoon Lisa was at University Hospital. It was not the first time she had been there since the baby was born—she had been there for postnatal check-ups and to have an interview with the head nurse of the emergency department, Sadie Drummond, before she had definitely got her job there.

She was going to miss the operating room, she acknowledged as she walked briskly along a familiar corridor leading from a main entrance, but there was no way she could work part time there.

The knowledge that she was to meet Dr Marcus Blair again in a few minutes made her unusually flustered, even though she knew that she looked attractive, smart and businesslike in her dark suit and silk scarf, topped by a gabardine trench coat against the early spring chill. Her hair, cut short, formed a shining cap of dark auburn.

The emergency department did not appear to be humming with activity when she got there. As she passed the main waiting room she could see that there were only two people in it. Then suddenly there he was, Marcus Blair, at the other end of the corridor, walking towards her as she made her way to where she knew the office of the head of department to be. In her imagination she had seen herself knocking at his door, waiting for a quiet command to enter and had mentally rehearsed what she would say and do once in there. She would be all composed and serene, not concentrating on the unusual relationship they had shared three months before.