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Chapter 2.

Los Angeles, California

Jack always liked her in green, Kate thought as she smoothed the silk blouse that she'd put on in place of her comfortable sweats down over her hips. Today was one of the biggest days of her life and yet instead of being excited, all she wanted to do was to crawl back into bed and watch daytime soaps with the curtains drawn until her mind was blissfully numb, but there was somewhere else that she needed to be.

"Are you going out?" Claire's voice asked, breaking into her thoughts.

She turned away from the mirror to see her standing in the open door to her room. "I have an appointment with my new OB," she reminded her. She hadn't expected her to remember when she was still trying to adjust to being back in the real world, but Claire looked chastened.

"That's today? Hold on, let me get Aaron ready and we'll go with you."

"It's okay," she assured her before she raced off to wake him from his nap. She was actually looking forward to getting away from them for a while. As much as she loved having them there with her, she was beginning to feel unwelcome in her own home; Claire looked so wounded whenever her son asked Kate to cut off his crusts or tuck him into bed instead of her that she was trying everything in her power to discourage it, which left her with little to do herself. She was already dreading the day when Claire packed their bags and took him to live with her mother in Australia and she was left to roam her empty house alone. If everything went to plan, she would have the baby, of course, but that was still more than eight months away. A lot could happen in that time. "Margo's meeting me at the hospital."

She could see that Claire was surprised. "Jack's mum?" Though they'd never met, for obvious reasons, she recognised the name.

"Yeah. When I told her I was going she asked if she could come along." Even when she and Jack were engaged, she'd never imagined that they would be close, but the more time Kate spent with her, the more she realised that Margo understood better than anyone what she was going through because she'd lost Jack too. But while she was still young enough that she might meet someone else and fall in love again one day when the pain wasn't so fresh, Margo would never have another son.

"I think it's sweet that she wants to be involved," Claire announced, trying to sound upbeat, though Kate knew she was disappointed at not being invited along. She didn't like being left alone, probably because it reminded her too much of the island.

Under any other circumstances it would be, but this was about more than just wanting to be a good grandparent. "This baby is all she has left," Kate said softly. That was why she needed it almost as much as Kate herself did.

Claire seemed to sense that they weren't just talking about Margo. "Are you okay?" she asked.

She wasn't, but she couldn't afford to fall apart now. Today was going to be difficult enough. "I should go," she told her, striding purposefully into the hall. "I don't wanna be late."

"Now the main aim of today's appointment is to put together a complete medical history," the doctor explained once they were seated across from her at her desk. She consulted the list in front of her. "Have you ever been pregnant before, Kate? That includes any pregnancies that ended in miscarriage or abortion."

"No," Kate assured her. She'd had scares like a lot of women, but last week was the first time she'd ever been confronted with the sight of a positive pregnancy test. It made her hate him just a little bit. How could he do this to her and then leave her alone to deal with the fallout? Did it even occur to him that it wasn't just the island that needed him?

"That makes things easy." She watched the doctor make a note of this. "Have you or anyone else in your family ever suffered from any serious physical or mental illness?"

"My mother has cancer," she agreed; as an afterthought she added, "My father was an alcoholic," just in case it was relevant.

"Okay, what about Dad?"

Kate's heart constricted painfully as she saw him turn to her with a grin in her mind's eye. He would have gotten a kick out of being called that. She wished he could have been there to hear it. "He had appendicitis, a couple of years ago," she managed to answer. "That's the only time I've ever seen him sick." Both she and Aaron had had the flu twice while he was living with them, but it never seemed to affect him. He was the healthiest person she knew, which was why his death had come as such a surprise. She'd always pictured him outliving them all, even her.

"Anything else?"

"My husband – his father – died of a heart attack," Margo supplied and Kate flashed her a grateful smile. She was so distracted that she hadn't even thought to mention it.

The doctor wrote this down on her clipboard. "And finally, have you or the baby's father ever smoked or used drugs?"

She hadn't, except for the occasional stolen cigarette with Tom back in high school, but Jack... "Does that include opiates?"

"That includes any prescription medications you or your partner are taking," the doctor agreed.

She closed her eyes, forcing herself to remember the name on the bottle she'd found in their bathroom right before she kicked him out. He was clean by the time she got pregnant; she'd never imagined that his addictions might one day hurt their unborn child as well. "Oxycodene," she told her, staring straight ahead when she opened them again, afraid of the disappointment in Margo's face if she didn't already know. "He was taking Oxycodene. I'm not sure how long for."

"The other thing I need to do today is confirm and date the pregnancy," the doctor told them once she'd finished with the exam. She dragged her stool over to Kate's side. "So if you would just lie back…" She trailed off when she finished adjusting the equipment and saw that Kate hadn't moved. "Is something wrong?"

It was all becoming too real. "I just didn't realise you were gonna do an ultrasound today," she replied with a weak smile. She wasn't supposed to do this without him. He was supposed to be here. What if there was something wrong? Or worse, what if the tests had been faulty and she wasn't really pregnant at all?

A positive's a positive, she reminded herself. He was the one who'd told her that.

"Do you want to call your fiancé?" the doctor asked, misunderstanding the cause of her hesitation. "Maybe he can still make it."

It was as if he'd gotten caught up in surgery and lost track of the time. Her voice stuck in her throat as she allowed herself to consider that fact that he really wasn't coming; that for all Claire and Margo's good intentions, she was alone in this. It was all she could do to hold herself together. She shook her head.

"My son passed away a few weeks ago," Margo explained.

Right away, the doctor realised her mistake. "I'm very sorry for your loss," she said. She turned to Kate. "Would you like a minute?"

Kate sucked in a deep breath, counting to five in her head just like he'd taught her before she trusted herself to answer without bursting into tears. "I just wanna get this over with," she told her, settling on her back so that the doctor could prep her.

"Well then let's take a look, shall we?" She moved the transducer around until a dark oval appeared. "There's the gestational sac." She pointed to a tiny grey shape against one side. "There it is. There's your little one, right there. And there," she announced, circling something at the centre with her finger, "is the heart."

It didn't look anything like a baby, but if she squinted hard enough, Kate could just make out the faint flicker of the minute organ expanding and contracting. "I don't hear anything," she told her, fighting to suppress her panic. "Shouldn't we be able to hear it?"

"You have to remember that it's still very early," the doctor reminded her with a kind smile. "Depending on the baby's position, we might not pick up a distinct heartbeat for another three to six weeks."

"But it's okay?" she insisted. As small and insignificant as it seemed now, it was the only part of the man she loved that hadn't been taken from her. She didn't know what she would do if she lost it too. "I really need for it to be okay."

"It's fine, Kate," the doctor assured her, and when she turned to beam at Margo, she smiled back at her tearfully. "Better than fine. It's perfect."

Tunisia

Home could be anywhere, so rather than have to face the outside world before he was ready, he decided to stay on at the hospital. In exchange for helping out by changing bedpans and redressing wounds and doing whatever else he could to make himself useful, they let him use one of the cots and on nights when he wasn't working the late shift, Amir – the only English-speaking doctor there – would take him into the village to eat dinner with his family.

At the end of his first week there, a boy was brought in with massive head trauma after a jeep accident that took the life of his father.

He was washing the floors at the time, but he stopped when the boy started seizing. "He could have a subdural hematoma," he announced; as soon as he said it he knew that he was right. It was like a sixth sense, only he had no idea where he'd gotten it. He set his mop back in the bucket and moved over to where they were struggling to hold him down.

"We need to relieve some of the pressure. Do you have a drill?" He repeated the word, miming drilling into his palm until finally getting it, one of the nurses scurried off, returning a moment later with a handheld power drill. "Perfect."

He searched the room until he found Amir. "Tell them to sterilise the bit," he said, rolling up his sleeves. "And make sure they give him enough anaesthetic to knock him out for a few hours. We don't want him waking up in the middle of the procedure."

Amir repeated his instructions in Arabic and while they were organising all of this, he washed his hands and snapped a pair of latex gloves on over the top.

He expected to feel nervous, but as he drilled into the boy's skull, below the bruise, a strange calm came over him as though this was what he was born to do. He'd done this before. He was sure of it. Once he was confident that the hole was big enough, he used forceps to stretch the skin around the opening and inserted a drainage tube to draw the rest of the blood away from his brain.

"Is he going to make it?" Amir asked, joining him at the sink afterwards as he was cleaning up.

All in all it had gone pretty well. "Barring any complications, I don't see why not," he told him, wiping off the drill bit. It was hard to believe that he'd just used it to save a child's life.

Amir was silent for a moment. "So you are a doctor too?" he said finally.

Ever since the surgery, he'd been asking himself the same question. How else would he have known what to do?

If they were right, then he was one stop closer to figuring out who he was. "Yeah," he agreed with a grin. "I guess I am."