Free A Secret Shared... by Marion Lennox Page B

He’d done exactly what he was told. He’d submitted to everything with stoic indifference. His world had been shattered and he’d been totally, absolutely joyless.
    Now, as the world seemed to hold its breath, something changed. The little boy’s shoulders, for months slumped and defeated, seemed to square.
    He looked out at the dolphins and as if on cue they both reared, skating backwards.
Come on
, their body language said.
What are you waiting for?
    And then they dived, so deep they disappeared, and that message was obvious, too. Time to start the game now.
    And while Jack watched in awe, and Kate said nothing at all, Harry strode purposefully out into the waves, grabbed the ball and tossed it high out over the sea to the waiting dolphins.
    There was nothing for Jack and Kate to do but stand and watch. The dolphins did the rest.
    This must be a game they played over and over with withdrawn children, Jack thought. Harry was putty in their...flippers?
    Harry threw the ball and they tossed it back to him, but as they did they gradually returned the ball a little further out. The waves were tiny and non-threatening. Harry found himself chest deep in the water before he knew it, but he was focussed only on the ball.
    The next time he threw it, the dolphins flipped it back, but this time they flipped it over his head. He turned to grab it but before he could, a silver streak flew through the shallows, reached the ball before he did and flipped it back to where it had been landing before.
    Harry lunged for it but the second dolphin reached it first, tossing it high again.
    ‘It’s mine,’ Harry yelled, and grabbed for it, got it and tossed it out again. ‘I got it, I got it,’ he yelled, and he turned to Jack and Kate, his face alive with excitement. ‘They tried to take it away from me but I got it.’
    ‘Watch out, they’re coming back,’ Kate said, chuckling. ‘They’re champions at playing keepings off.’
    The ball came back again and Harry pounced.
    He was twisting on his injured leg, Jack realised. It had been badly broken. It still hurt to weight-bear so he usually tried not to use it. But Jack hadn’t needed the physio’s explanation to know where the problem lay—they all knew it. The only way Harry could get back the use of his leg was to use it.
    He was using it now. It must be hurting, at least a little, but he was too entranced to notice.
    ‘I can’t believe this,’ he murmured to Kate, while Harry was ball-chasing, out of earshot.
    ‘It’s our specialty,’ she said, flashing him a look that was almost smug. ‘None of your hospital physiotherapists have this—the means to make kids forget every single thing that’s wrong with them. It’s why this place is magic.’
    ‘I don’t believe in magic.’ But maybe he did, he thought as he watched Harry pounce again. He thought of Susie, withdrawing into herself, desperately unhappy but still aching to play with the dolphins. He thought of Toby, his last days made happy. And he watched Harry.
    It seemed like a miracle. Maybe he was even prepared to give magic a shot if it’d get Harry well again.
    He was feeling disoriented, watching his nephew throw the ball, standing beside this woman in her crazy blue swimsuit.
    He felt totally out of his depth.
    Medicine. When all else was confusion, focus on medicine. It was a mantra that had served him well for years and he retreated to it now.
    ‘His leg shouldn’t be taking so long to heal,’ he told Kate, trying to sound professional, two medical colleagues discussing a patient. Two medics in swimsuits. ‘His femur was badly fractured but, even so, most kids with intramedullary nails are weight-bearing almost straight away. But we haven’t been able to get him to use it.’
    ‘He’s had no reason to use it,’ Kate said gently. ‘It hurts and he’s had enough hurting, losing his parents. Why put himself through more?’
    He thought of the last physiotherapist Harry had seen—a young man not