McKenzie smiled and took her mother’s hand, and they headed for the door behind which lay a whole new life. Peyton knocked lightly and entered at Valentino’s command, finding him at his desk, a pile of charts to one side but only one in front of him – McKenzie’s, she presumed.
‘Peyton,’ he said as he stood, sending her a smile so full of calm confidence her nerves settled if only temporarily.
She returned his smile before he transferred his attention to McKenzie. ‘Hello, there,’ he said, grinning as he signed. ‘Are you ready?’ When she nodded, he ushered her closer. ‘Come in.’
But Peyton held fast to her daughter’s hand. ‘You don’t have to do this. Ellen will be in soon. You have surgery.’
She didn’t know why she was so resistant to Valentino switching on the implant. A few weeks ago she wouldn’t have cared less had it been a trained monkey. But this man, this sexy Italian model-dating surgeon, was different. There was more than a professional connection between them, no matter how they tried to avoid it.
There was intimacy. And Peyton knew from bitter experience that intimacy left you vulnerable. Something she swore she’d never be again when it came to men.
She doubted it would have mattered had she not slept with him. But she had. And while he was obviously a pro at separating himself from that, standing before him now, she doubted she could entirely. So much of her life these past few months was already tangled up in him.
He shrugged. ‘I had a cancellation.’
Peyton frowned as she searched her memory for this week’s theatre cases. ‘Who?’
‘Peyton.’ His voice was thick with reproach.
‘I know. It’s just…’ It wouldn’t have made sense to anyone else that she was stalling after all this anticipation, but it madesense to her. ‘That’s why we have two audiologists so the surgeon is free to, you know, dothe surgery.’
‘And miss the pay-off? That moment when my patient hears something for the first time is the best part of my job. It’s what makes it all worthwhile. You’re not going to take that from me, are you?’
Peyton was humbled by his response and felt petty for equivocating. But she wondered just how many of Harry’s patients he’d taken such a personal interest in.
And therein lay the problem.
Still, after everything he’d done for her, could she really deny him the rewards?
McKenzie, spying the low kiddy table strewn with puzzles, tugged on Peyton’s hand and dragged her into the office and that was that. She let an eager McKenzie go and shut the door to give them all some privacy.
‘Why don’t you sit down with McKenzie while I get set up?’
Peyton nodded and walked on wobbly legs to the table, sitting on the child-size chair beside her daughter.
‘Has she had any repetition of those earlier dizzy episodes?’ Valentino asked as he tapped away at his computer.
‘No.’ The first few days post-op Peyton had noticed McKenzie would stagger a little on standing. She hadn’t been concerned, knowing it was directly attributable to the disruption of the inner ear, and they’d settled quickly.
Valentino pressed one last key on the laptop and glanced at Peyton. ‘Okay. Ready. Let me check how the wound’s doing first.’
He got up from his desk and took the seat on the other side of McKenzie. He tapped her hand and when she turned to him, he signed and said, ‘Can I have a look at your ear, please?’
McKenzie nodded her agreement and cocked her head to allow him access. He lifted the angelic curls that covered her right ear out of the way to expose the small shaved area wherehe’d operated. Two weeks ago there’d been some slight swelling over the bony area behind her ear but now it looked normal. ‘It’s healed beautifully,’ he murmured, letting her hair flop back over the site.
‘Okay, then,’ he said to Peyton, but signed for McKenzie’s benefit. ‘Let’s fit the external component.’
Peyton nodded, apprehension swirling in her gut. ‘Dr Valentino is going to fit your new hearing aid,’ Peyton signed.
Not that it was the type of hearing aid that McKenzie was used to but having worn them most of her life it was the simplest way to explain it to a three-year-old.
McKenzie kept playing as Valentino fiddled with the external component, fixing it directly over the area where he’d implanted the internal part. It was a small circular unit that consisted of a microphone, a speech processor and a transmitter. It linked magnetically to the internal mechanism, which consisted of a receiver and a stimulator.
He then retrieved his laptop from his desk and set it up at a smaller desk directly behind where McKenzie was sitting. Tension built in the muscles of Peyton’s abdomen as he methodically fiddled, plugging the external component into the laptop via a long cord.
‘Okay, you know the drill now,’ Valentino said. ‘I’m going to run the neural response telemetry first. It should take about ten minutes. She won’t be able to hear this.’
Peyton nodded. She knew that Valentino would pick a few of the electrodes now implanted into McKenzie’s cochlear to stimulate via the computer. He would get a reading back which told him that the auditory nerves had responded. Unlike hearing aids that magnified sound, the cochlear implant directly stimulated the auditory nerves inside the inner ear.
