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Tom nodded and skipped away happily. No one would have ever guessed that a minute ago he’d looked on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
‘I’m sorry,’ Callum apologised to Hailey. ‘He’s very attached to it.’
Hailey rubbed absently at the spot just below her shoulder where the imprint of the torch was still making itself felt. ‘Like a security blanket?’ she murmured.
Callum nodded. He looked up, seeing the curious looks over Tom’s attachment to something as non-cuddly as a torch. He glanced over at his son again to check that he was too absorbed in the show to be listening.
‘Tom was diagnosed with ALL two years ago. He had a lot of complications and spent quite a bit of time in hospital. At night, on the ward, it was dark and he’d wake up really frightened. One of the nurses suggested I buy him a torch, give him back some control. I’m afraid they still can’t be parted.’
Hailey felt as if the walls were closing in. Acute lymphocytic leukaemia? She heard the gasps and the sympathetic murmurs from her sisters but was too frozen to respond. Tom was sick?
‘Is his treatment complete?’ Rilla asked.
‘Six months now,’ Callum confirmed. He didn’t say what the three nurses would have already known. Tom needed five years in remission to be given the all-clear. He could relapse at any moment.
Hailey stared at him unblinkingly. Tom was sick? It felt like déjà vu. She remembered Eric. How his meningitis had developed out of the blue and he’d been dead within two days. How the love she’d once felt for Paul, Eric’s father, had been mangled by the vortex of grief, guilt and blame.
Hailey vaguely heard Callum mentioning his wife’s battle with cancer but was still too stunned over the information on Tom to really compute this latest tidbit. Callum had certainly been through a harrowing six years. If it had been anything like this last year for her, she was amazed he was still standing.
Oh, dear God. She was doing it again. Becoming attracted to a man with a sick child. A sick, motherless child. Becoming? Who was she kidding? There was no becoming about it. She was. She’d arrived. She was attracted to him. But this was worse than with Paul. Much worse. She’d known Callum for a week and she could barely think about anything else.
For heaven’s sake, he’d sat beside her all evening and she couldn’t recall a thing anyone had said. This was no friendship evolving into something else, no slow burn, as it had been with Paul. This was a raging bush fire set to explode out of control. Last time had crushed her and already she knew this wasn’t in the same league. She couldn’t survive another doomed attraction.
‘Isn’t that right, Hailey?’
‘Wh-what?’ Hailey spun around, Beth’s voice intruding into her seething thoughts.
‘I was saying how you saw Remi Duconte speak in London about the advances in leukaemia treatments.’
‘Er…yes.’ Hailey nodded, trying to think of a single thing the world’s foremost expert in childhood cancer had had to say.
Callum glanced at Hailey. She seemed nervous suddenly. Out of it. Her replies were automatic, like those of a robot. Had the news of Tom’s illness thrown her that badly?
‘He’s in Brisbane soon, isn’t he? Dad’s chairing his lecture,’ Beth added, oblivious to the conflict raging inside her younger sister.
‘Tomorrow night.’ Hailey nodded absently.
‘I assume you’re going?’ Beth asked Callum.
Callum shook his head. ‘I’m registered to attend but Tom’s grandparents, who normally look after him, have tickets to Les Misérables tomorrow night. I’ll catch him next time.’
‘Oh, but you simply must go!’ Beth urged. ‘Aside from your work, you have such a personal stake in it.’
‘Yes. I will be disappointed to miss out. He rarely lectures these days. But as I haven’t been in Brisbane very long I don’t have alternative child-care arrangements yet. I’m afraid the timing’s all wrong.’
‘Nonsense,’ Beth dismissed. ‘You know us, don’t you?’
Callum laughed. ‘Oh, no, really, it’s OK. I couldn’t impose.’
‘Hailey can do it,’ Rilla piped up, ignoring Hailey’s knitted brows. ‘She’s just down the hall. She won’t mind. She loves kids. Don’t you, Hails?’
Callum looked at Hailey. He didn’t profess to be an expert on women’s moods—and he’d been married for five years—but Hailey looked as if she minded. A lot. She was frowning her disapproval at her sister.
Callum didn’t want to rock the family boat and certainly not with Hailey who he felt on rocky ground with anyway. ‘No. It’s fine, really.’
