Free Brought Together by Baby by MARGARET MCDONAGH Page A

responded, finishing his sandwich with renewed appetite.
    The knowledge that he’d been upset at the thought of her with another man had brought a warm glow and a tingle of excitement as she’d dared to hope he might like her as much as she liked him.
    ‘George lost her dad shortly before my mum died. Since then she’s rented out rooms in her house,’ Holly had explained. ‘Kelly—as in Kelly Young from A&E—lives there, too.’
    ‘Is that something you thought of doing in your own home?’
    Gus’s question had hit a raw nerve, and she’d looked away lest he read the emotions in her eyes. She’d shaken her head, declining to explain why his suggestion wouldn’t have worked for her as it had so successfully for George. Doing so would have meant telling him about Julia, and that had been a road she hadn’t wanted to travel.
    ‘How about you, Gus?’ she’d asked, moving the conversation away from herself. She’d more or less fallen in lovewith Gus from day one and wanted to find out all about him. ‘What’s your family like?’
    ‘I don’t know…I’ve never had one.’
    Her bottle of juice had remained suspended in mid-air, part-way to her mouth, untasted and forgotten. She’d turned to face Gus, shocked not only by his words but by the bleak emptiness in his voice. Unable to stop herself, she’d reached out her free hand to take one of his, their fingers naturally entwining.
    ‘How do you mean?’ The question whispered from her, and she felt a mix of trepidation and suspense as she waited for him to answer, fearful for several long, tense moments that he’d shut himself away and not confide in her. ‘Gus…?’
    A jagged breath shuddered from him and he sat forward, his gaze averted, his fingers clinging to hers as if to a lifeline. Her drink set aside, Holly held on tight with both hands, willing him to talk, but increasingly fearful of what he might say.
    ‘I was abandoned outside a hospital in Glasgow one frosty March morning,’ he began, and Holly barely contained her gasp of shock. ‘A nurse found me and rushed me inside. I was only a few hours old. They treated me for near hypothermia, and it was touch and go for a while whether I’d develop pneumonia or some other breathing problem. I didn’t. An appeal went out for my mother to come forward—there were concerns for her own health, physical and mental—but she never did. And a police enquiry proved fruitless.’
    A shiver ran through her at the cold, emotionless tone of his voice. ‘Wh-What happened to you?’ she managed, stunned by the image of Gus as a baby, abandoned in the cold.
    ‘The nurse who found me named me Angus, but I’ve no idea where Buchanan came from.’ He paused, glancing briefly in her direction, and Holly squeezed his hand supportively.‘When I was well enough to leave hospital I was placed in foster care,’ he continued, fledgling emotion beginning to challenge the dispassionate nature of his account. ‘It became one foster home after another for the first few years until I was finally placed in a children’s home, age six, labelled difficult and unable to settle.’
    ‘How could any child settle in circumstances like that?’ Holly exclaimed, incapable of containing her reaction, furious and hurting for the little boy who had been passed from pillar to post for so many years. Of course he hadn’t been able to put down roots. He must have felt unloved and frightened, and horribly let down by a system designed to help which, in his case, had failed abysmally.
    ‘I don’t know. I certainly didn’t. Not that the home was any better,’ he admitted, and she could feel the shudder that ran through him as he faced his memories. ‘I hated it there.’
    Holly struggled to keep her tears for him at bay. ‘How long were you there?’
    ‘Until I was sixteen.’
    ‘All that time?’ she responded, unable to keep a horrified gasp in check. ‘What about adoption? Why didn’t they help find you a loving