‘I hear Conrad came to see you. He texted me when I was on the job, just called him back quickly. Isaac is coming down for a visit. Have to communicate, unfortunately.’
He knew that feeling well. ‘Conrad told you he talked to me?’ He hoped Beau’s letter would circulate before the team got wind of what he’d been involved in; he wanted his son to have a chance to apologise first if he could.
‘Not the details. You know what he’s like; he likes to be the one that knows something when nobody else does. Everything okay?’
‘Yeah, everything is fine.’
She went off to the locker room and he came face to face with Kate next as he walked along the corridor. He could see the job had been a tough one just as Vik had said.
‘Nothing we could do,’ she told him as she put the drugs away in their rightful place.
Brad was similarly out of sorts as Hudson went into the hangar and Nadia was the last to step out of the rear of the helicopter.
‘Was it horrific?’ he asked her as she came up to him.
But she didn’t say a thing.
She looked at him, her whole face took on a different expression and she burst into tears.
16
Nadia felt Hudson’s arm around her, felt her legs move as she put one foot in front of the other. They came through the internal door from the hangar, bypassed the office, and went through to reception and the privacy of her own office space.
‘Wait here, I’ll get you a strong cup of coffee,’ she heard him say.
And then the door clicked shut.
She closed her eyes. She’d been there plenty of times as a nurse – felt her own hands on a chest performing compressions knowing it was a desperate and final attempt. She’d seen patients die in front of her, heard that there was nothing else that could be done, been the one to declare the fact.
Hudson was soon back with a hot coffee for her. Despite the pleasant temperature of a warm June day, she felt the need to get some more heat by holding her hands around the mug, even though she knew her shivering wasn’t from the cold but from the shock.
‘Do you want to talk about what happened out there?’ he asked after a while.
She looked up at him. ‘It was horrible.’
‘I know the patient didn’t make it.’
‘It was worse than that…’ Hudson was a good listener. He needed to be in his job. He was a friend too but right now, she needed to think of him in a professional capacity; it was the only way she’d be able to tell him everything. ‘When the call came in, I thought the victim was my sister. I thought it was Monica.’
Hudson pulled the chair on the other side of the desk around so that he was sitting next to her. ‘That’s why you went out on the job.’
‘When I saw the woman on the ground, her hair, it was the same colour as mine, the same as our mother’s was. I thought…’
‘But it wasn’t.’
She shook her head. She’d seen the patient lying on the ground, she’d known the team had done everything they could. And for a split second, before she saw the woman’s face, she’d really thought it might be Monica.
‘I feel terrible, Hudson.’
‘It must have been an enormous shock.’
‘No, it’s not that. It’s because… it’s because all I felt when I saw that poor woman properly was relief.’
‘That’s only natural when you thought it might be your sister.’
‘It makes me a monster.’ She gasped. ‘I haven’t even told Archie.’ She fumbled on her desk for her phone. ‘He was here when I went out with the crew and I said I’d let him know. I didn’t even think. He’ll be going out of his mind…’
She had the phone clutched against her chest. She couldn’t make a move to do what she needed to.
