‘Of course.’ And it was no surprise that Officer Tucker and probably the rest of the force assumed she was seeing Conrad on a regular basis. She wondered whether he’d told anyone about the divorce at all.
Before their shift came to an end, the crew got one more job ten minutes away but they returned in good spirits after a positive outcome for their young patient. Bess and Noah completed the patient report forms and updated the database. Maya had her own paperwork to do as she was responsible for keeping the technical log up to date with maintenance requests – none today – details of each flight and fuel calculations.
After shift, Maya went to get her things from her locker. She’d expected Noah to have left as she’d been waylaid chatting with Vik, the other pilot, as she handed over. But he was still in the locker room, as though this might be the best place for peace and quiet, even though it rarely was with the comings and goings of the team, the shrill alerts of the multiple phones when a job came in at the airbase.
She undid her locker and retrieved her bag. She couldn’t wait to get home and take a shower. Hilda was cleaner than she was right now.
Noah opened his own locker now he was no longer alone and got his things out before closing the steel door once again.
Maya couldn’t leave it. ‘Noah, I know I don’t know you all that well but if you need to talk…’
He turned to face her, his expression one she couldn’t read.
‘I mean it. We’re working together every shift and if there’s something bothering you, it might help to get it out in the open.’ She sensed he wasn’t one to usually do that. ‘It might not, but the offer is there…’ Maybe it was best if he didn’t let her in, if they didn’t get too close given she was starting to feel more than friendship towards him. She’d known it all the more the day Conrad had watched them outside the pharmacy. If it was totally platonic on her part, she would’ve dismissed Conrad’s comments and not thought about it since. But the fact was, she’d thought about Noah a lot more than she should have.
His voice stopped her as she turned to leave. ‘I can’t stand it, you know.’
She turned back. ‘Can’t stand what?’
‘Not knowing who made that prank call.’ He slumped down on the bench near the row of lockers. ‘It’s eating me up.’
She went over and sat down next to him, detecting a faint smell of the aftershave he usually brought with him at the start of shift. She was pretty sure any scent from her shampoo or shower gel hand long gone by now and it made her want to hold her arms down in case she smelt bad.
‘It’s horrible, it makes us all angry,’ she said. ‘But we can’t control the stupidity of some people. It’ll drive us insane if we try.’
He leaned forwards, forearms resting along his thighs. ‘Eva isn’t actually my daughter.’
‘I know, she’s your niece.’
He looked sideways at her briefly, eyes watery, forearms still laid against his thighs, palms pressed together. ‘Did Bess tell you anything else?’
‘She didn’t.’
He took a deep breath. ‘I have Eva because my sister Cassie died.’ He leaned back, shook his head as though he couldn’t really believe it.
‘I’m so sorry, Noah.’ Her heart sank in sympathy at what this man had been through. She couldn’t imagine his pain – if she were to lose Julie, it would crush her. ‘When did it happen?’
He looked at her briefly but then up at the strip light on the ceiling. ‘Five months ago.’
‘Noah, that’s barely any time at all.’
‘Some days, I wake up from a dream that she’s coming over to see Eva. Then I remember…’ His voice caught. ‘Cassie was a great mum. Eva was her whole world.’
‘May I ask what happened?’
He explained the weekend away, the horse falling, Cassie’s catastrophic injuries.
‘I’m not sure how you move on from that.’ She wanted to reach out and hug him, try to make him feel at least a little bit better if only for a moment. ‘She must’ve loved you to want Eva to grow up with you.’
‘We got on well as far as siblings go. But when I agreed to her wishes, I never thought…’
‘Nobody ever does.’
‘When my sister had the accident that day, emergency services were called but it was hard to get to the location by road ambulance and it took forever. An air ambulance would’ve been her best chance, but the air ambulance had already been dispatched on another call and by the time it was re-routed, it was too late.’
‘Oh, Noah…’
‘That’s not the worst of it.’ And now, piecing it together, she knew what was coming even before he said, ‘The call the crew were on when Cassie was lying there with life-threatening injuries was a prank call. Made by some rich kid for his kicks, an entitled teenager who thought the world revolved around him and stuff the consequences. He was sorry, of course he was, but that wasn’t going to bring Cassie back. Nothing was.’
