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daughter’s breathing regulate. Then it was safe to let the tears creep out. They streamed, unchecked, down her face accompanied by the silent sobs she’d become so adept at.
    Minutes passed and Lea’s whole body hurt from keeping the pain inside. She sucked in deep, shuddering breaths then tiptoed out of Molly’s room and headed for her mobile. She punched in Reilly’s mobile-phone number and pecked out a concise text-message with badly shaking fingers.
    Just three words: I’ll do it.

Chapter Four
    T HE conception of their second child was a far cry from their first. Even Reilly appreciated the irony.
    Three weeks of blood tests, injections, headaches and hormones, until Lea’s body artificially ripened to bursting point, followed by scans every three days until her eggs were perfect for harvesting. Then the city specialist who had been flown in accessed Reilly’s tiny, frozen sample and injected the healthiest thaw survivor directly into one of Lea’s eggs.
    Shame had been a near-permanent resident in Reilly’s throat, knowing there’d been barely any sperm left, the rest biologically massacred by his over-zealous immune system.
    Now, Lea stared rigidly at the beige ceiling and did her best to ignore him and the six people in the room all fussing around the business end of her body where her legs were braced in stirrups and her hospital gown was tented over her bent knees. As if she needed the privacy from herself.
    Reilly’s gut tightened and his temperature raised. He hadn’t realised how humiliating this would be for her when he’d insisted on being present for the implantation. Or that every muscle in her body would tremble uncontrollably. Empathy washed through him.
    They’d tried to convince him it was nothing they hadn’t all seen before, but the excited buzz and the number of personnel present seemed to indicate an ICSI implantation was something several of them had very definitely not seen before in theirremote hospital posting. He could see the bright lights, the graceless position, the room full of strangers, were all starting to get to her. Even with sedation slowly kicking in.
    His lips tightened. Could they make this any more uncomfortable for her?
    Molly might not have been conceived in love, but at least it had been natural, the joining of two people who had connected for a preciously short time. In a bed. With sweat. This man-made artifice was so foreign.
    But entirely appropriate under the circumstances.
    Lea sighed, just when he might have himself. He glanced back at her eyes and saw they were getting more glazed as the sedation continued to take effect.
    ‘Lift your hips slightly, Lea? Good girl, thank you,’ the specialist requested from down near her feet. She flinched at something being done down there. Three pairs of eyes glanced up at her over blue hospital-masks, then at the clock on the wall. Was she taking too long to relax?
    ‘Why are all the blue people talking so loudly?’
    At least he thought that was what she said. Her speech reminded him of the lost tourist they had found out on the far corners of Minamurra one time, half-frozen after a night in dry, sub-zero Kimberley temperatures.
    Lea started to fight the sedation and he took her hands to stop her waving them about. She forced her head towards him, as though he were a life buoy in a tossing sea, and stared at him with vulnerable, anxious eyes. A pang bit deep in his chest. ‘You’re okay, Lea.’
    ‘Reilly?’ Her frown doubled even as her hand-hold grew tighter.
    He turned to the nearest doctor. ‘Should she be in this much distress?’
    The doctor rested his hand on her calf kindly. ‘She’s not really responding to the sedation as we would have hoped.’
    Lea Curran doing something completely contrary to the norm? No surprises there.
    ‘We’ve ceased the feed now. It’ll ease off shortly.’ Thedoctor’s attention went back under the sheet as yet another man in blue bustled in the door and dived under the