Carol Marinelli - Sydney Harbour Hospital - Ava's Re-Awakening

‘You’ve lost weight,’ she said, because he had. He was a big man, and had never been that overweight, but he’d lost a lot and now stood broad, lean and toned.

‘A bit.’ He shrugged.

‘How was your flight?’ How stilted and formal she sounded when really she wanted to run to him, to rest her head on his chest, to welcome him home, to say how much she had missed him, except she greeted him like a colleague and clearly it was noticed, because he didn’t even answer the question, just shot her a slightly incredulous look that that was all she had to say after his three months away.

‘I’ll see you tonight,’ James said instead, and then as he turned to go, he stopped. ‘Ava, we need to talk.’

He’d been saying that for months—no, years—as more and more she’d shut him out, only this time it was a different conversation to be had. ‘I know we do.’

‘I’ll speak to you tonight.’ He didn’t come over and kiss her, he just turned and walked away and headed out to work, to involve himself in his patients. Only it wasn’t his familiar scent that lingered. Instead she smelt cologne. Ava wished she had patients scheduled this morning, that she could think about someone else’s problems instead of her own.

Instead, she was giving a lecture.

She had her little case packed, filled with aids that would make the student nurses laugh at first, but she would push through it, hoping to get her message across, hoping that one day in the future her words would be recalled and a sensitive, informed word might be had by one of them to a patient, that there was help available.

Except she felt a fraud as she stood there, this cheerful, laughing, sexual dysfunction specialist married to the gorgeous James.

She couldn’t remember the last time that they had slept together and wasn’t stupid enough to think in the three months he’d been away, in the years they’d been away from each other physically, that James wouldn’t have seen someone else.

Someone he liked enough to lose weight for, to tone up for, to buy new clothes for and splash on cologne for—it wasn’t the James she knew. She knew that she’d lost him long ago.

Lost them.

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