She stared at him for a long, long minute. And then she lifted the cup from her nephew’s hands and set it on the desk.
‘Cady, look. There’s blocks in the corner,’ she told him, motioning to where Nate kept a basket of toys to amuse small children. ‘Can you build me a house?’
Cady considered and then nodded, with all the gravity of a carpenter agreeing to sign a contract for house construction.
‘Sure.’ He knelt on the floor and started to build. One block after another. The sight was somehow comforting compared to the unbelievable conversation that was taking place over the desk.
But then the doctor in him focused. The child seemed to be building more by feel than sight. He was lifting the coloured blocks and feeling their edges, fitting them together with a satisfactory click.
Was he blind? Maybe he normally wore glasses…
It wasn’t his business. Cady wasn’t his patient. Somehow this crazy conversation had to resume.
‘Right,’ Nate said. He took a deep breath and braced. ‘Tell me.’
‘My sister was… I think you could almost call her manic.’
‘Now, that’s what I don’t understand.’ Nate thought back to the last time he’d seen Fiona. Manic? For some reason the description suddenly seemed apt. He hadn’t known why then. He didn’t know why now.
‘In what sense was she manic?’
‘I told you she had diabetes.’
He thought that through and couldn’t make sense of it. ‘Diabetes is not usually a life sentence and it has nothing to do with a person’s mental state.’
‘It does if you’re as perfect as Fiona.’ Gemma shrugged. ‘You need to understand. Fiona…well, she was two years younger than me and from the time she was born she was perfect. My mother certainly thought so. My mother was a beauty queen in her own right. My father left us before I can remember, and all my mother’s pent-up ambitions centred on Fiona. Perfect Fiona.’ She took a deep breath, fighting back bitterness that had been instilled in her almost since birth.
‘Anyway, Fiona was as beautiful as even my mother could want. Even as a baby she was gorgeous and she turned from winning baby pageants to winning beauty contests almost without a break. And she was clever-brilliant really. She passed her exams with ease, she moved from one eligible man to another-whatever she wanted Fiona got. She was indulged to the point of stupidity by our mother, and when Mum died Fiona’s boyfriends took right over.’
He saw. Or maybe he saw. ‘And then?’
‘And then she was diagnosed with type-one diabetes.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Neither do I really. I only know that Fiona had just started medical school, she was flying high and suddenly she was faced with four insulin injections a day, constant monitoring and dietary restrictions.’
‘I do know what diabetes is,’ he told her. ‘Type one… It’s a damnable pest but if it’s well controlled it’s hardly life-threatening.’
‘Hers wasn’t well controlled. Not because it wasn’t possible to control it but because she wouldn’t. She hated it. She refused to monitor herself. She gave herself the same amount of insulin every day regardless of what her blood sugars were and sometimes she didn’t even do that. She refused to accept the dietary modifications. You need to understand. For once it was an area where she wasn’t perfect and she couldn’t bear it.’
He thought about that. He had diabetics in his practice who refused to take care of themselves and the results could be catastrophic. But…
‘She was a doctor. She knew. With medical training she’d know what the risks were.’
‘I think,’ Gemma told him, slowly as if the words were being dragged out of her, ‘I think my sister was a little bit crazy. She’d been indulged all her life. She was the golden girl and everyone treated her as if she was perfect. The thought of injections, the thought of not being able to eat everything she wanted and the thought of her body being less than perfect… Well, as I said, I think she was a little bit mad. It was as if she saw diabetes as a bar to her perfection and if she ignored it, it’d go away. Only as a doctor you’d know that that’s a disaster.’
He was horrified. Why hadn’t he guessed any of this? He’d never even known she’d been diabetic. And not to control it… ‘That’s practically suicide.’
‘Yes.’ She gave a grim little nod. ‘It is-and by the time she’d finished medical school the effects were starting to show. Then our mother died. Mum and Fiona had fought about Fiona’s diabetic management. Fiona had rebelled but Mum’s death just seemed to make things worse. Things weren’t going right in Fiona’s world and she reacted with anger. Her specialist told her that if she couldn’t keep her diabetes under control then at least she shouldn’t get pregnant. She must have been pregnant within minutes of him saying that. With Cady.’ She shrugged and her eyes seemed to shadow with remembered pain. ‘And her decision to have Cady tore our lives apart.’
Our lives? There was a desperate bleakness in her words and she looked as though she was staring back into a chasm that she couldn’t quite escape.
‘And?’ Nate prodded, and Gemma seemed to shake herself back to reality. To the harshness of now. Her voice became brisk and carefully businesslike.
‘And she darn near died having him. When she didn’t it was as if she was mad at the world. As if she’d been cheated. She was furious that she didn’t die and from then on she was on a downhill spiral of neglect.’
By now Nate was thoroughly confused. He shook his head, trying to reconcile what he was hearing with the vibrant, lovely doctor who’d swept into his life twelve months ago. ‘She seemed fine. I didn’t get any of this when she was here.’
‘No.’ She met his look, her eyes steady and challenging. ‘I guess you only saw what most men saw-the gorgeous Fiona. Fiona the irresistible. But there was another Fiona-the Fiona who walked a fine line between sanity and madness. She had Cady and she walked away from him. She knew…she knew that I’d take care of him. How could I not? But I kept working. After what she’d done to me… I barely managed it but there were glimmers of my former life left.’
He still didn’t follow. ‘That sounds as if she was angry with you.’
‘Of course she was.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘She was supposed to be the perfect one,’ Gemma said wearily. ‘And she was. My mother loved her to distraction and I was sidelined. But she was jealous even of that. She was jealous of me from the moment she was born-as if I could ever compete with her. It was crazy, but like a cuckoo in another bird’s nest she’d push aside any sibling that competed for her attention. And when our mother got sick she leaned on me. That drove Fiona crazy-that Gemma, the plain one, should now have what she wanted. Health. And our mother’s dependence. So she fixed me right up. She saddled me with a baby and then…and then when I managed to cope and still have a life-of sorts-she gave me another. And she died doing it.’
Dear heaven…
Nate sat back in his chair. He let what she’d said drift slowly though his mind, trying to assimilate it. He raised his hand and ran his fingers through his thatch of burnt-red curls, fighting for some sanity. Fighting for some reason.
‘I don’t know what to say,’ he said at last. ‘I can’t think.’
‘There’s not much to think about.’
‘Well, that’s a crazy statement,’ he snapped, shock giving way to anger. ‘Not much to think about! When you come in here and present me with the fact that I’m a father…’
‘If you slept with Fiona you must have known fatherhood was a possibility.’
‘Of course I didn’t.’
‘You’re a doctor,’ she snapped back, as angry as he was. ‘You know very well that no contraceptive is perfect. Unless it’s abstinence. And you and Fiona didn’t practise abstinence.’
‘No, but-’
‘But nothing. She’s your baby.’ She rose again and proffered her bundle. ‘Are you going to take her-or are you intending to arrange an adoption? Fiona had this baby to punish me for not being ill. I’ve thought it through. It worked with Cady. I’ve taken him in and I’ve cared for him and I love him to bits. But with Mia…every time I look at her I get angry. That’s no way to rear a child, Dr Ethan. She deserves better than that. So…you’re her daddy. Will you take her-or will you find someone else who’ll love her?’