Emily Forbes - Falling For The Single Dad - A Single Dad Romance

‘Summer hasn’t been collected,’ the woman on the end of the phone told him. ‘She has been sent to after-school care and I need to notify you. I need to make sure she is picked up by six o’clock.’

‘I’ve been in surgery all day, I’m still in surgery and I won’t be finished by then.’ Damien was aware that all the theatre staff could hear his conversation quite clearly but it was too late for secrets now. Abi was busy bandaging their patient’s eyes but he could sense by her posture that she was listening just as intently as all the others, but he couldn’t worry about them. Summer was his priority, now and always. ‘Have you contacted her mother? She was supposed to collect her.’

‘Of course, but she is in New York.’

‘What? She’s where?’ God, that woman was unbelievable. What the hell was she doing in New York?

‘She told me she contacted you.’

‘What? No, she hasn’t,’ he said, but he knew what she would have done. She would have left a message on his cellphone. No matter how many times he told her he didn’t check his cell if he was in Theatre, she never listened. Brooke always danced to her own tune; other people’s lives were of no consequence to her, she didn’t make allowances or exceptions for any of them, not even her own daughter. Once again, Damien would have to pick up the pieces left by Brooke’s selfishness. ‘Can you give me five minutes?’ he asked the woman on the phone. ‘I’ll make some arrangements and call you back.’

He nodded to the scrub nurse to hang up the phone and let out another expletive.

‘What’s going on?’ the theatre nurse asked.

‘Summer hasn’t been collected from school,’ he replied. He had another couple of hours left in Theatre and just five minutes to work out a solution. He wouldn’t be finished before six so he wouldn’t be finished in time to collect Summer.

His eyes roamed the room as he tried to figure out what to do. Abi taped the last bandage in place and looked up just as his gaze settled on her. She might just be the answer to his problem.

‘Abi, do you think you could do me a favour?’ he asked.

Damien looked worried, stressed, and Abi thought it was probably best that he didn’t operate while in this state. ‘Sure,’ she replied without hesitation, expecting he was going to ask her to start his final surgery, but his question when he asked it was completely unexpected.

‘Would you collect Summer for me?’

‘What?’ Was he crazy? Surely he was kidding. ‘I’ve never met your daughter,’ she retorted, but even in her flustered state she realised there was something he hadn’t considered. ‘I doubt the school would send her home with a complete stranger. Why don’t you go and I’ll start the last case?’

‘The last case is a breast lift.’

Abi knew that, she was supposed to assist for that surgery too.

‘How many of those have you done?’ he asked, and judging by his tone she knew he already knew the answer.

Exactly none. She stared at Damien and her silence was all the answer he needed.

‘That’s what I thought. I need to finish off here. Would you please collect her?’

‘Why doesn’t Summer’s mother pick her up?’

‘That’s a good question,’ he replied with a sigh. ‘She was supposed to but apparently she is on her way to New York.’

Apparently? ‘New York? Didn’t you know?’ Had it just slipped his mind that his wife was away and he was supposed to be picking up his daughter? Was it something he forgot on a regular basis and now he was trying to make it her problem?

Abi didn’t think so. It didn’t seem to fit with his character and he seemed to be genuinely upset and to be struggling for solutions. She believed this had come out of the blue for him too.

Damien shook his head. ‘Brooke told the school that she told me I would have to make arrangements but I haven’t heard from her. This is the third time she has done this.’

‘What did you do the other times?’ she asked, as the anaesthetist began to reverse the anaesthetic.

‘Once I collected her and another time she went home with a friend. But school finished forty-five minutes ago so those mothers would have left, and I don’t have any of their numbers. Please, Abi, I wouldn’t ask you if I had any other options. My daughter is five years old. You remember being five, don’t you? I don’t want her to feel abandoned.’

That word cut Abi to the core. Abandoned was the one word to use if he wanted her sympathy and cooperation. But he couldn’t have known that. That would be impossible. It had just been a comment. But of course she remembered being five.

She also remembered having no one to pick her up. Day after day she would get herself home from school. On a good day it had been because her mother had been working, but on a bad day her mother would be passed out on the sofa, hungover or drunk.

Abi had had no one to rely on when she’d been five or seven or nine. She’d had no one until she’d joined the army at seventeen and had gone to medical school. She’d had no one really until she’d met Mark and even then she’d still ended up alone. There had never been anyone she could rely on. She knew exactly what Damien was talking about.

She started to cave in. ‘I’d do it but I really don’t think the school would let me.’

Damien had an answer for that. ‘I’ll ring them and I’ll get Freya to email your staff ID photo to the office. You’ll just have to show some ID when you get there. Please? I don’t know what else to do. The school is ten minutes from home. If you could just pick her up and I’ll collect her from your place as soon as I’m done here.’

He knew she lived in his neighbourhood, which would put her home close to the school. His plan made sense but Abi didn’t know if she could do it, although it was hard to refuse when he was looking so distressed and imploring her with his dark, dark eyes. If she acquiesced she knew it would be stressful. Could she handle it?

But she remembered what it felt like to be five years old and know that no one was coming for you, knowing that you were on your own. She’d hated that feeling and she knew she couldn’t put someone else in that position.

She sighed and said, ‘Let me make a call.’ She threw her gloves and mask into the bin as Damien signed the surgical notes. She was careful not to agree to his crazy plan just yet. She still didn’t know if she was capable of agreeing to his suggestion. She needed a second opinion. She needed to run it past her psychologist but that wasn’t a conversation she was prepared to have in public. She pushed open the door into the scrub room and went to fetch her cellphone.

She dialled the emergency number, the one Caroline had promised to always answer. Abi wasn’t sure what Caroline termed an emergency exactly but, for her, going unprepared into a new environment that was not only large but filled with people and knowing she would have to introduce herself to strangers without time for any research or reconnaissance definitely fell into the emergency assistance category. Abi had no idea how she was going to manage this and she needed Caroline to give her some contingencies to help her cope.

Caroline answered on the third ring and Abi explained the situation.

‘I assume,’ Caroline said, after listening to Abi’s predicament, ‘that you would actually like to do this favour for your boss?’

Would she? Part of her worried that if she agreed she would be setting a precedent and part of her also worried that she was letting him take advantage of her. But she could also remember what it was like to be left to find her own way home because her mother was incapable, again. Back then nobody had noticed if you weren’t collected from school, lots of kids made their own way home, but not many primary school children had that freedom now. They were bundled off to after-school care before anything untoward could happen to them. Abi remembered all too well that feeling of abandonment and if she could help by collecting Summer she would. It didn’t matter that Summer didn’t know her; she imagined just knowing her dad had sent someone would be better than being forgotten. Abi wasn’t doing this for Damien.