Midwife in a Million by Fiona McArthur

until I come back?’
    She was so young and he was sure that leaving was the right thing. ‘It’s because I love you I have to leave.’ Kate Onslow had been the one person he could dream with and that dream included both of them.
    Then she lifted her face and kissed him, and her sweetness and ardour and the thought of the months away from her helped drag him down under the tree and when she kissed him with a desperation he hadn’t been prepared for things had got a little out of control. Actually, a lot out of control. ‘Take me with you,’ she said again.
     
    In retrospect, he should have.
    ‘I remember everything,’ he said.
    Kate lifted her head. Her beautiful eyes, filled with the darkest shadows from the past, stared into his. ‘All right, Rory. Maybe it is time. But you asked for it.’
    She stared at him for a long moment and then she said it, so quietly he almost didn’t hear her, ‘Seven months later I lost our baby.’
    Rory blinked. ‘What baby?’
    She chewed her lip. ‘Ours!’ She glanced at him briefly to see if he understood and then away. ‘Yours and mine. The one we made after our last night.’
    He stared at her, unable to take it in. He’d taken precautions, or thought he had, but it had been his first time too.
    ‘The son I didn’t tell anyone about, just like Lucy, until it was too late and I was too sick.’
    Rory felt the shock hit him like a hammer in the gut. Kate had had a baby? First he was cold, then hot and then he stopped thinking about himself and the fruitless dreams that it would be too painful to think of right now, and thought of Kate.
    His Kate had been pregnant at sixteen and he’d left her to face it on her own. With Lyle Onslow. Cold sweat beaded as he thought of how her father would have treated her. ‘You should have told me.’
    Her voice was flat. ‘Father flew me out to Perth toa private convalescent hospital. I didn’t know anyone and our baby was born by Caesarean section. Alone.’
    The bastard. He dreaded the next question.
    ‘The baby?’
    She sighed. ‘As I said before, I was very sick for a week and when I woke up it was too late. My baby was gone.’ She turned stricken eyes to him. ‘If I’d told my father earlier, maybe things would have been different but I was too much of a coward. My baby might have lived.’
    Kate was the young girl she’d talked about. Not an unconnected case at all, but herself. Poor young, defenceless Kate and he hadn’t been there. He tried to imagine the scenario. ‘Who told you he’d died?’
    ‘Some nurse. I’ll never forget when that awful woman came in. She said it was just as well as I was so young. Earlier there’d been another, younger and kinder midwife, who’d said I could hold him but she didn’t come back.’ Her voice dropped even lower. ‘She said she’d take a photo, a lock of hair and a handprint, but I think they stopped her.’
    She drew a breath and went on more strongly, ‘The awful one said he’d died from complications of prematurity and the separated placenta. I never even saw him.’
    She looked at Rory with pure agony in her eyes. A devastation she’d carried bottled up for ten years. Rory wanted to kill someone for doing this to his Kate.
    ‘I never saw who our baby looked like. What colour his hair was. The shape of his ears or hands—nothing.’ She gazed into the fire. ‘I think I could have borne it better if I’d said goodbye.’
    Rory struggled with the monsterlike actions of a man who should have looked after her. ‘Your father had no right to leave you to face that alone.’
    She shrugged and rolled her shoulders to loosen the tension in her neck. ‘For a long time I pleaded for information on what had happened. He kept saying, “Nothing happened. Forget it. There never was a baby.’” She shook her head at the concept.
    ‘By the time I’d left boarding school I was strong enough to stand up to him and I demanded the address of the funeral home. I even hoped