by Annie O'Neil
* * *
Brodie checked the boy’s pulse again, shaking his head when he felt nothing. “Can someone grab the pelican cases from my four-by-four?” he shouted, to no one in particular.
They appeared by his side moments later, along with a huge pile of dry towels, blankets and clothing. He could see feet jostling and hear the murmur of the crowd shifting and changing, but his focus remained steadfastly on his hands, clasped together, delivering the steady cadence of compressions required to bring Jack’s heart back to life.
“The air ambulance is going to be at least an hour. They’re just finishing another call. What do you need me to do?”
Kali dropped to her knees on the other side of Jack, the AED in her hands.
“He’s not responding. Severe hypothermia. Body temperature twelve degrees below normal.” He kept his voice low. The anxious keening of the boy’s mother still came in waves of sound above them.
“Twenty-five Celsius? You’ve got a thermometer that registers temperatures that low?”
Brodie nodded. “Have to up here. Unfortunately this sort of thing isn’t unusual.”
It was how his mother had died. He more than most knew the importance of warming this child in the safest way possible.
“We need to get some fluids inside him. I don’t want to use the defibrillator until we’re inside.”
“If the ambulance is going to be a while, should we get him to the clinic?”
“Yes, but he’s going to need constant CPR.” Brodie was panting. He’d already been administering CPR for over ten minutes, and the intensity of his focus was beginning to take a toll. “Can you help me intubate?”
“Absolutely—then let’s get him on the biggest backboard we have and I’ll ride it.”
“I’ve got a surfboard right here,” someone called.
“Great.” Brodie nodded. “Get the board.” His eyes flicked up to meet Kali’s. The steady green gaze assured him that they had this—as a team.
Swiftly, efficiently, they intubated Jack and then transferred him to the board. Kali straddled the small body and took over CPR while Jack compressed the airbag providing oxygen to the little boy’s lungs.
“Steady, lads,” Brodie cautioned as six men lifted the board on his count. “Precious cargo.”
His eyes were on Kali, whose expression was one of utter focus on the child. She was in a class of her own. He would count himself lucky to have had her in his life at all, let alone for the rest of his life. He made a silent promise to propose sooner than later.
“Fluids?” Kali threw him a questioning look.
“Nothing warm enough to put into a drip. Everything will have gone cold in the car.”
“Warmer than his body?”
He nodded. It was a good point. They’d have to warm him gradually. Anything else would be too much of a shock to the small body that had already been traumatized.
“All right, lads? Slide them in as steady as you can.”
* * *
The trip to the clinic passed in a blur of CPR, pulse checks, IV insertion, airway checks and temperature monitoring.
“It’s not looking good, is it?” Jack’s mother asked tearfully. She was leaning over the seat into the back of the car, where Kali was still carrying out CPR.
“I read about a case of a two-year-old...” Kali huffed between compressions. “Fell into an icy river—must’ve been in it for half an hour at least. They performed CPR for over an hour and a half. Between that, fluids and other warming methods they got him back.”
“But was he all right? You know...” Jack’s mother asked, not wanting to put words to everyone’s concern. Irreparable brain damage.
Kali nodded. She thought so, but wasn’t 100 percent. She wanted to offer hope, but knew there was a degree of caution required in all hypotheticals.
“We’re here,” Brodie said unnecessarily as the vehicle slowed to a careful halt.
He’d thrown the keys to one of the lads. CPR was tiring. If Kali needed to be relieved he wanted to be by her side to help.
“Kali, if you grab the IV bag I’ll take over.”
Again, the concentrated blur of saving someone’s life had shifted everything else out of his consciousness. If they could just get...
“We’ve got a pulse!” Kali finally said, a few minutes after having hooked Jack up to the monitoring system. “It’s weak, but we’ve got one.”
A collective sigh of relief released the taut tension in the exam room, where Jack’s family had anxiously been looking on.
“Will you be needing the ventilator?” Ailsa appeared in the doorway.
“Thanks, Ailsa. Yes. It’ll make it easier for the little guy to breathe, and maybe we can get some aerosol medication in him.”
Brodie curled his fingers into a loose fist and gave Jack a quick sternal rub. He felt a twitch of a response. Heard a cough, then a gag.
“Quick! Let’s get him in the recovery position.”
He and Kali quickly shifted Jack onto his side, a stream of seawater gushing out of the little boy’s mouth as they did so, and a wail of relief from his mother filled the room.
They’d done it. They’d brought him back to life.
Kali gave Brodie a happy nod, her lips shifting in and out of her mouth as she tried to keep the emotion at bay. He felt it, too. Deep in his heart. All he wanted to do was pull Kali into his arms, but they weren’t out of the woods yet.
“Right, guys. We’re still fighting the hypothermia. Anyone have word on that air ambulance?”
Kali gave him a soft smile as a new flurry of activity began to whirl around them. They would do this. Together.
* * *
“Look who’s on the front page!” Brodie flourished the Dunregan Chronicle in front of Kali.
She felt the blood drain from her face in an instant. She could hear Brodie happily chattering away, but his voice was only coming to her in the odd hit of vowels and consonants she couldn’t put together. She blinked hard, forcing herself to concentrate on what he was saying.
“Craig thinks it’s so good the nationals might pick it up. It’s already all over the internet—so some of the international papers might run it.”
Her breath came out in short, sharp huffs.
“What’s wrong?” Brodie sat down beside her, laying the paper down on the round table in front of her. “I think it’s an amazing shot. You should be proud.”
“I am—it’s not that—I just...”
She stared at the photograph in disbelief. A picture of the moment she and Dougal had hoisted the near-lifeless body of little Jack into the lifeboat was printed in full color—her face was utterly unmistakable. She was struck by the confidence, the passion she saw in herself. The complete antithesis of the fear she felt welling within her now.
“Hey, babe.” Brodie slid a hand across her back in a slow circular motion. “What’s wrong with being the heroine of Dunregan for a day? It’s well deserved.”
“Everything!” The word came out as a wail as years of fear came to the fore. Hot tears poured down her cheeks, and the back and forth no, no, no shaking of her head flicked them onto the paper, instantly blurring the ink.
“Kali, you’re scaring me. What’s going on?”
She turned to him, knowing that this might be one of the last moments when Brodie’s belief in her was absolute. The moment she’d been dreading had finally arrived. The moment when she had to explain to Brodie that the Kali he knew...was a fiction.
“Come here.”
He held open his arms but she couldn’t move. The weight in her heart was rendering her motionless except for her head, which persisted with its shaking. No, no, no.
“Right.” Brodie pushed back from the table and headed toward the kitchen counter. “I’m making
you a fresh cup of tea—and then, Kali O’Shea, you are going to tell me exactly what has got you so—”
“I’m not Kali O’Shea.”
The words were blurted out before she could stop them and they seemed to assault Brodie physically. His blue eyes clouded, steady blinks shuttering them from her view every few seconds, and his body became absolutely rooted to the spot.
“Who are you, then?”
Ice water ran through her veins. All she could hear in Brodie’s voice was the betrayal he had to be feeling. She pressed her fingers together to stop their shaking and forced herself to tell him the story.
“My birth name is Aisha Kalita.”
Brodie folded his arms across his chest, as if protecting himself from what she was about to say. She didn’t blame him. This was a blindsider. A trust breaker. So it was now or never if she was going to win his trust again.
“My father is originally from India. He is...very traditional...”
In a monotone, Kali heard herself telling Brodie about her naively happy childhood, the support her parents had given her in her quest to become a doctor.
“So what happened?”
“He arranged a marriage for me. My father.”
“What?” Brodie all but shouted the word.
The dogs came scrambling in from the lounge, where they had been lolling in the morning sun, big furry heads shifting from Brodie to Kali, waiting to see who needed them most.
Kali sat rigidly as Brodie digested the news, her hand distractedly giving each of the dog’s heads a rub.
“Sorry, Kali. Please. Go on.”
The clinical tone of his voice sent another chill of fear through her. She swallowed and forced herself to tell the story that had been told out loud only once, five years earlier at the Forced Marriage Protection Unit.
“My father had been planning it for months, but none of us knew about it. Not my mother or sister—”
“You have a sister?”
She shook her head yes, and continued. If she didn’t get it all out now...
“It was someone from my father’s hometown. A man highly esteemed for his business acumen—but not for his morals. My father organized for me to marry this man and secured a visa for him in England.”
She choked back a sob.
Brodie came toward her, stopping himself halfway, as if undecided about whether or not to comfort her. Her heart physically hurt. For him, for herself, for the lies she’d been forced to tell and for the life she’d thought she could have.
She put up a hand. “Please. Let me finish.”
He pulled out a chair on the opposite side of the table and nodded for her to continue. It was impossible to tell what was happening behind those pure blue eyes of his. She prayed to everything she could think of that he would be empathic. Compassionate. Forgiving.
“I was completely clueless. My father brought him over to dinner one day and then later made my sister and mother leave the room with him so that it was just the two of us. He wasted no time in telling me how the marriage would work. Who would be in charge. That I would have to shelve my medical degree and do something more...something that would give me more time to look after him. When I protested and said I would only go ahead with the marriage if I were able to complete my medical studies he—”
A ragged sob escaped her very core.
“He hit me. The rest of it happened horribly fast. My father was in the room in an instant, apologizing—can you believe it?—apologizing to this man for my behavior. When he left I begged my father to be released from the union. He said the only way I could escape the marriage—humiliating him as I had—was death.”
* * *
Brodie’s hand shot across the table. He needed to touch her. Comfort her. Aisha... Kali—whatever her name was—she was the same woman she’d been ten minutes ago. If there was any way he could have taken back his initial reaction he would have.
Kali slid her own hand across the table, then retracted it.
“What happened next?” Part of him didn’t want to know, but it was imperative he heard the full story.
“In the middle of the night my mother came to me with a small amount of money and an address for a distant relative in Ireland. She said I should seek her out if I absolutely must—but if it were possible to just go. Never speak of them or think of them again.”
In a rush she blurted out the rest. The tremors of fear juddering through her body as she’d stuffed a handful of clothes into a small backpack. The fearful silence in the house as they’d tiptoed to the back door, terrified of waking her father. The tears she’d been unable to shed as she’d hugged her sister and mother goodbye that one last time.
“And then I just began to run.”
Brodie itched to hold her. Ease away the pain. But she had to finish. He could see the determination in her eyes.
“I stayed at a cheap hostel the first night. And then—because I didn’t want anyone to know where I was, especially if my father was going to go on the hunt for me—I spent my days in London’s biggest hospitals. Just reminding myself why I had chosen to become a doctor. I spent my nights in the waiting room of an ER until a nurse finally figured out something was wrong and helped me contact the Forced Marriage Protection Unit. They helped me with a new identity. But with the invention of Kali O’Shea I had to let my mother and sister go.”
Brodie felt his throat go dry, his body physically aching for her. He’d left his family of his own accord. A selfish decision by a teenager blinded with grief and anger after a tragic accident. But Kali...? She’d been betrayed by her own father and forced to live apart from the people who could have comforted her most.
“And you’ve never been back?”
“Never.” Her eyes were wide with disbelief, though she was the one who’d lived with the pain, the reality of a life lived in fear. “I moved to Dublin so I could feel close to my mother’s relatives. It was a weak link—but it helped, believe it or not.”
“That’s why you picked the name O’Shea?”
“No.” Kali finally looked across at him, her beautiful green eyes shining with vitality. “It was the name of the nurse who helped me that night. Helped me to find the FMPU and make a fresh start. Become who I’d always thought I could be.”
She was so much braver than he had ever imagined. Stronger.
Brodie couldn’t restrain himself anymore. He was pulling her into his arms before he could stop himself, running his fingers through her hair, holding her tight to his chest so she could weep long pent-up tears of grief, fear and loss.
“My beautiful, brave Kali...Aisha,” he corrected, then laughed awkwardly. “What do you want me to call you?”
“Kali,” she answered without hesitation. “It’s the name I chose because I thought it would give me strength. And it has. And,” she added, looking at him as if she hardly believed he was still there, “I have become who I thought I could be. Thanks to you, to Ailsa—everyone here on Dunregan.”
“But mostly me, right?” he teased gently.
“Mostly you.” Her fingers pressed into his.
“You’ve never looked for them? Your family?” Brodie asked, leading her out to the sofa in the lounge, where they nestled into a big pile of humans, dogs and cushions.
“I was far too frightened the first couple of years. There were enough scary stories of retribution killings to keep me as far away from my father as I could. Though I worry about my mum and sister. Every day I worry that my father turned his anger on them.”
She shook her head, suddenly looking overwhelmed with exhaustion.
“Are you—are you okay with this? With me?”
“Are you kidding?” Brodie shook his head in disbelief. “Obviously it’s all a bit of a shock, but I love you, Kali. I don’t think having a different name c
hanges who you are and what you mean to me.”
Kali blinked, her teeth biting endearingly into her lower lip as she did so. “You love me?”
“Of course I do. What did you think? I go parading around Dunregan with every beautiful woman who shows up here?”
“I—uh—”
“Don’t answer that.” Brodie laughed, scooching along the sofa so he could hold her in his arms. “I love you, Kali O’Shea, and I will do everything in my power to ensure you’re never put in harm’s way. You have my word.”
He dropped a kiss onto the top of her head, enjoying the weight of her body as she slowly let herself relax into his embrace.
They were words he’d never said to a woman before.
I love you.
And they were words he meant from the bottom of his heart. The only thing left to do was rustle up the most romantic setting he could and propose.
* * *
“Kali?”
It was Brodie, gently knocking on the door to her office.
“You left your mobile in the staff room and it rang. I hope you don’t mind, but I answered it for you.”
“Who is it?”
A jag of fear ran through her. It had been twenty-four hours since the photo had gone public and she’d heard nothing so far.
“Is it a man or a woman?” she whispered, more to herself than Brodie. She would never forget the malice in her father’s voice. Not as long as she lived.
“A woman,” Brodie said with a smile, his blond hair shining in the late-morning sun coming through the back door. “I think you’ll want to take it. It’s a Mrs. Kalita.”
Tears leaped to her eyes as one set of fingers popped to her lips and the other to her chest, as if trying to hold her heart inside.
Her entire body shook with anticipation as she reached forward to accept the phone from Brodie. She had to hold it with both her hands as she took it from him, the tremor in her fingers was so strong.
Over five years. It had been over five painfully long years.
Brodie took a step back, dismay furrowing his brow. He mouthed a question. Want me to stay?
