Page 94 of Where the Wattles Bloom

Although, to be fair, it was slightly banged out of shape right now.

Rolling on her side, she shoved her bent arm under her head, propping her cheek on it. ‘It wasn’t anything you did or didn’t do. It’s …’

She hesitated and Lachlan could tell she was grappling with how much to tell him. He rolled onto his side, mimicking her pose. ‘It’s?’

‘The medication.’

‘Medication?’ Clearly there was a much bigger story here.

‘I take medication. To manage anxiety.’

‘Okay.’

From what little Lachlan knew about the subject, a lot of people took anti-anxiety pills. Part of him wondered if there was a specific reason, but mostly he was wondering about the effects on the baby.

As if she could read his mind, she said, ‘It’s perfectly safe to take during pregnancy. There’s a lot of data on it and my psychologist concurs.’

‘Okay.’

Her assurances helped as his brain crowded with other questions. She’d spoken about her therapist before and he wondered how long Rowena had been seeing someone. Had she been dealing with anxiety all her life? Or had the accumulation of her many life challenges triggered it more recently?

‘Is the anxiety a chronic thing?’

She didn’t say anything for long moments. ‘It’s a … new thing.’

Lachlan could feel her hesitation hovering between them and he wished she felt able to be more open, but he didn’t want to push either.

‘Although,’ she added, ‘as I have come to understand through therapy, it’s a conglomeration of all that has come before.’

Encouraged by her sharing a little more, Lachlan dared another question. ‘Did something happen specifically? Did you have a panic attack or was it more subtle?’

She gave a dramatic groan then, pressing her face into her bicep. Following instincts he hoped were right, Lachlan said, ‘You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.’

Lachlan wanted to know. Because he wanted to know everything about this woman who had turned his world on its head. But more than that, he wanted her to want to tell him.

To confide in him.

Peeking out at him, she sighed. ‘It’s kind of an embarrassing story.’

Smiling, he murmured, ‘Try me.’

He saw the moment she made up her mind to go for it and hoped like hell that here, in the fogged-up cocoon of his dual cab, surrounded by the vastness of the outback, she felt comfortable enough to tell him everything.

‘It happened sort of slowly and then all at once. Quite spectacularly, actually.’

‘Okay.’ He nodded encouragingly and waited, not wanting to say anything that might spook her back into her shell.

‘It started at the beginning of the year. With a drug error. Actually, an almost drug error. I caught it before it was administered but it … shook me. I mean, in the NICU, two RNs have to check every drug, so it shouldn’t have happened.’

‘I can see how that could impact you.’

‘I went home that night shaking, thinking about all the what ifs. And it just kinda grew from there, triple-checking everything, a constant feeling of dread that I’d screwed something up. That I’d get to work one day to find that the baby I’d looked after on the previous shift had died after I’d left due to a medication error I’d made.’

A slight waver in her voice betrayed some of that angst and she shut her eyes for a moment. When she opened them again, she was looking right at him.

‘As someone who has struggled to have a baby I couldn’t even conceive how awful it would be to have the thing most precious in your life taken away because of an error made by a bedside nurse. The person every parent in the NICU trusts implicitly.’

Lachlan could only begin to imagine the cost of that kind of screw-up.