CHAPTER ONE

      ‘WHERE’S the airport?’ Shouting her question over noise from the plane’s engine, Abby was slightly taken back by the pilot’s reaction when he started to chuckle. It hadn’t been her intention to crack a joke!

      ‘Show me a flat piece of land and I’ll land this little lady!’ Turning, Bruce grinned widely, showing rather too many gaps in his smile, and Abby forced a rather brittle one back, wishing he would turn his attention to the windscreen or whatever it was called on a plane and get on with flying the thing.

      Her apparent aloofness for once had nothing to do with Abby’s rather formal nature, for now it was borne of pure fear! The tiny plane that had met her on the tarmac of Adelaide airport seemed woefully inadequate for this long journey, and as they zipped through the late afternoon sky, as Abby struggled to concentrate on the mountain of paperwork in front of her, for the first time in ages there were only two questions buzzing through Abby’s overactive mind. How the hell did this thing stay in the sky? And, perhaps more pointedly, how would anyone ever find them if it didn’t?

      ‘There’s a flight strip near the clinic, we should be there in another fifteen minutes or so, give or take a few.’

      ‘Thanks.’

      Bruce’s time frame was hardly rigid but, as Abby was fast learning, she might just as well have tossed her watch into the quarantine buckets when she’d left Sydney. The same laid-back nature had been present in the ground staff who had greeted her when she’d landed tense and rushed at Adelaide, sure she was late for her connection. And when she’d finally located Bruce, standing by his plane, sipping on a cup of tea, he had assured Abby she had ‘no worries’. Bruce, it would seem, would have been happy to wait all day for her if he had had to.

      What have I taken on?

      A third question was making itself heard as Abby gave up on the paperwork she was attempting to read and leant back in her seat, gazing at the red landscape beneath her. Mile upon endless mile stared back at her, like the coloured sands in the bottle in her small city kitchen back home. The rings of time indelibly etched on the landscape gaped beneath her, leaving Abby feeling as insignificant and as meaningless as the speck in the sky she surely was.

      Mind you, it wasn’t as if she’d had a choice but to take it on, Abby mused. Reece Davies, Director of Emergency, long-time colleague and supposed friend, had made his feelings on the subject pretty clear.

      ‘There was nothing you could have done, Abby.’

      How many times had he told her that? How many times had he pulled her into his office when Abby had ordered a multitude of tests on a patient for the most simple of complaints?

      ‘Try telling that to the rest of the staff.’

      ‘There’s no need to tell them,’ Reece had insisted. ‘No one in this department thinks what happened that night was your fault.’

      If only she could believe him, if only she could believe that the silence that descended every time Abby approached a clique of nurses had more to do with her seniority and less to do with David’s death.

      David.

      A vague attempt at a smile inched across her lips as she tried to imagine David’s take on all this. What David would say if he could see his Abby, the eternal city girl, on her way to three months in the middle of nowhere. But the start of a smile vanished as, once again, cruel realisation