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‘To study medicine,’ Flávia finished, more as if she was thinking out loud than actually talking to him.
‘What is it you want to know?’ he asked astutely.
‘I suppose—’ her answer was slow, thoughtful ‘—that a part of me wonders why you followed them into medicine. Given how they were.’
As though she knew him better than anyone else ever had.
‘Not just medicine. Surgery. They didn’t want doctors for kids... They insisted we both became surgeons.’
‘Insisted?’ He could actually hear the smile in her voice, could imagine it hovering on her lips, as if she didn’t fully believe him.
He didn’t blame her.
‘There was no option. They made it clear from as early an age as I can remember that they would never accept anything else from either of us but becoming surgeons.’
‘Oh.’
‘Actually, I didn’t want to,’ he shocked himself by saying. ‘I spent most of my childhood and teenage years dreaming of becoming an engineer.’
It was a confession he’d never told a living soul.
The moment seemed to hang between them.
‘It should surprise me more,’ she murmured after a while. ‘You’re such a skilled, driven, compassionate surgeon, it’s no wonder you were sought out to run clinical trials. But the truth is that it doesn’t surprise me that much at all.’
‘I don’t know if that’s a compliment.’
‘It is,’ she laughed softly. ‘So you and your sister are...were...both surgeons.’
‘I am. Well, you know that, of course. But although Helen studied medicine at uni, it was partway through her third year th
at she fell pregnant with Brady.’
‘I can’t imagine that went down well, from everything you’ve said.’
‘It didn’t,’ he acknowledged. ‘They didn’t shout, or yell—that wasn’t their style. But they told her that she was too young, that a baby would ruin her career at this stage and that the logical solution was to terminate.’
He could remember it now. The cool, firm statement made as they’d all sat around the table in a restaurant for a typically uptight family meal. There had been no scene in any real sense of the word.
‘What happened?’ Flávia asked tentatively, drawing him back to the present.
‘Helen wiped her mouth with her napkin, set it to one side and quietly told them that she would be keeping her baby. Then she got up and discreetly walked out of the restaurant.’
Not that her parents had ever made any attempt to stop her.
‘And that was it?’
‘That was it. They went back to their lives, I went back to uni and Helen did her own thing. We didn’t see her again for about six years. So, you see, I wasn’t much of a brother to her at all.’
‘What about the father? If you don’t mind me asking.’
And the fact was that he didn’t. He had no idea why he was still talking—maybe it was the intimacy the rainforest created—but it was somehow cathartic.
‘Helen never told us who he was. The first and only time I met Brady he was five, and I did ask her about the father. But she simply said that she’d told him she was pregnant and given him the choice of how involved he wanted to be. Apparently, she’d never heard from him again, but her son was her world.’
‘I can tell that. She was a good mum.’
‘She was,’ Jake agreed. ‘I’ve no idea how, given the example we had set for us. I just know that whatever she had, I don’t have it in me. But I’m trying, thanks to you, and I should be grateful for that much.’
