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How was it that he’d come to relish those moments more than anything else? Because those were the times when she struck him as being the most herself.
‘We’re not far out now.’ She peered around the back of the vehicle and out at the landscape, which was, to be fair, rather boringly flat.
As everywhere was in these parts.
‘About an hour by my calculations.’ He checked his watch.
Again she poked her head out the back and peered around.
‘I’d say a little longer. There’s something of a deceptive dip in the terrain around here. Takes you by surprise if you’re not careful.’
Yes, he knew all about things around these parts taking him by surprise. He was staring right at one of them. Two, if he counted the precious being currently nestled in his arms, so tiny that it was almost fragile.
Almost.
He’d been around them long enough to hear that cry and know that these babies were a lot more robust than they seemed.
‘Are you really hating this?’ she asked suddenly, taking a break for a moment from checking her patient.
‘Hating what? Doing a recce in the middle of our training ground that I was going to be doing anyway?’
‘You know what I mean.’ She dropped her voice until, even in the back of a four-tonner, it felt almost...intimate. ‘Being in the back of this lorry, holding a baby.’
He pondered her question for a moment, almost tempted to lie, before wondering why he needed to.
‘Let’s just say that I’m disliking it a lot less than I thought I would,’ he answered honestly, and then, as if to prove the point, he found himself peering down at the baby to check he was all right, before snuggling him tighter.
As if he was somehow protecting this tiny, fragile bundle from the potential of becoming an orphan in the next few hours.
‘Quite a compliment,’ she told him, and he couldn’t tell if she was serious or not.
‘Maybe our patient here will call her baby Hayden.’
For a moment she looked bleak, and he didn’t need to be a doctor to know that the chances of the mother surviving were low as it was, and getting lower with every moment. Not that his drivers could go any faster with the sick patient on board.
Then Bridget gathered herself together and made herself answer. And he liked it that she kept her voice upbeat and her words positive, even though they were both fairly sure that the mother was too far out of it to hear. And that, even if she could, she wouldn’t be able to understand.
‘Maybe.’ She forced a smile.
And she didn’t contradict him.
For a long, long while they continued in silence.
* * *
‘You’ll like Rejupe,’ she told him at last. ‘My team acclimatised here for a couple of days before we headed out to Jukrem. Unlike back there, where we have hole-in-the-ground latrines, the guys here all have individual bathrooms, plus they live in purpose-built accommodation blocks. It isn’t five-star but it’s plush compared to where we are.’
Not that she would be anywhere but Jukrem.
‘Quite a luxury.’ He matched her grin with one of his own and something delicious shivered through her. She tried to ignore it. ‘So, what’s the plan when we arrive?’
Bridget shrugged her shoulder but kept her voice deliberately even.
‘Hopefully we’ll get to the camp in good time, the surgeon comes out to assess, and they take her straight into surgery.’
‘And then for us?’
She knew he didn’t mean anything by the word us, but it rippled through her all the same. As if there was a possibility of that word meaning something more.
