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The operation had gone well, Simon Rawlings had told her when he'd bleeped her afterwards, and he'd seemed very pleased with the results. From the unit Tamsin would be transferred to one of the surgical wards in a day or two under Simon's care so, although Annabel intended keeping in contact with Tamsin to see how she was getting on, she was no longer her patient.
    Hannah told Annabel that apart from what sounded like a relatively straightforward transfer from another hospital of one of her own patients who'd been admitted in heart failure they weren't expecting any other admissions. 'Hopefully, I won't have to call you in again,' the registrar said ruefully with a grimace. 'Remember last week?'
    Annabel made a casual gesture. The last night they'd been on call had been extraordinarily busy and they'd both been up all night, looking after two acute admissions and one very ill inpatient, Danny McEanor, the young boy who'd just had his heart transplant.
    'I'm going to visit Tamsin then Danny in the unit before I leave. After that I'll be at home if you need me,' she told the registrar. At St Peter's on-call registrars stayed at the hospital while consultants made themselves available, if needed, from home. 'Tony Grant says Danny's looking marginally better this evening. He's haying his first post-op heart biopsy tomorrow to check for rejection but they're much happier with his progress now.'
    They were lucky at St Peter's in that on-call duties weren't usually arduous. In her years as a junior doctor at the Free she'd grown used to chronically disturbed nights and getting by with little or no sleep, but these days it was unusual for her to need to return to the hospital after hours.
    Not that she lived so far away that it was a trial to come back. The house she and Luke had moved into after their wedding was in a leafy part of Maida Vale, not far from St Peter's, so out of peak traffic times she could generally count on getting from her living room to her office door in less than ten minutes.
    Fortunately, tonight, since she was having trouble concentrating, traffic was light and she made it home without incident. Still feeling strangely vague, as if her body and mind were operating on autopilot, she let herself in. She emptied a can of tomato soup into a pan and turned on the heat to low, put bread in the electric toaster, then went upstairs and absently put water on for a bath.
    In her bedroom she undressed slowly, letting her clothes slide to the floor in thoughtless disorder. Deliberately avoiding looking at the reflection of her face in the mirror, she meandered into the bathroom and climbed into the steaming water, slid down into it and tipped her head back so the warmth of the water lapped her forehead, submerging her hair and ears until she bent her knees and allowed her head to slide completely under.
    Shock, she supposed when she came up again a few seconds later blinking and wet. That was what this dull, empty, strange feeling had to be. She was shocked.
    Not that Luke had touched her—she'd never resisted him before and she understood that her attempts to do so today had inadvertently thrown him a challenge he hadn't been able to stand back from—and although she didn't like it she understood why her body had responded—simply because it always had—but what shocked her had been what had happened after that.
    She'd never, in rage or calm, lashed out at anyone or anything before, and the fact that she could physically and violently strike Luke the way she had appalled her.
    Not that her relationship with Luke—her old relationship with Luke—hadn't been physical. Because it had been passionately, sometimes primitively, physical. There'd even been nights, long, dizzying nights, when they'd deliberately driven each other to the edge of pain simply to increase the intensity of their pleasure. But he'd never, even by accident of his sheer size compared with hers, inside or outside bed, hurt her and she, too, had