Doctor And Son. Maggie Kingsley

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       CHAPTER ONE

      ANNIE was going to be late. Very late.

      ‘Take the lift to the fifth floor,’ the porter had said. ‘Turn right when you get out, then left, then right again, and Obs and Gynae is through the double doors at the end of the corridor.’

      It had sounded so easy—so simple—and it probably would have been if the Belfield Infirmary’s ancient elevator buttons had been working properly, and if what they’d proclaimed to be the fifth floor hadn’t, in fact, turned out to be the third.

      I am not going to cry, Annie told herself as she hurried down yet another of the Belfield’s rambling Victorian corridors in a desperate search for the stairs. Grown-up women of twenty-eight didn’t cry. Jamie hadn’t cried this morning when she’d left him at the day-care centre, and he was only four.

      ‘You will remember to come back for me, Mummy?’ was all he’d said, his blue eyes huge in his little face, his small nose reddened by the cold January wind. ‘You won’t forget?’

      And she’d been the one who’d got all choked up, and now she was on the verge of tears all over again because she was late. Late for the first job she’d had since Jamie was born, and if she messed it up she was never going to get another one.

      ‘It’s full time, you know, Dr Hart,’ the head of administration at the Belfield Infirmary had said, gazing at her uncertainly. ‘And your shifts won’t always be eight until four. There may be some night work, some afternoon shifts…Look, I guess what I’m trying to say is, you have a young child. Are you sure you’re up to it?’