“Ric!” He stopped short as he heard Connie calling him.

“Connie? What’s up?” he asked her, seeing the almost frantic expression on her face, and waiting for her to catch up with him.

“I’ve been running through half the hospital trying to find you!” she said, stopping as she reached him, and trying to catch her breath.

“What’s the matter?” He was worried now, and it showed. “Is…?” He left his question unfinished, unable to voice any of the horrors that had occurred to him.

She bit her lip as she realised how much she’d scared him, and laughed. “Oh, it’s not… no, don’t worry. You just, you dropped your pager.” She handed it over to him. “It beeped a few minutes ago… but I didn’t look at it, don’t worry. I respect your privacy and all that.”

He nodded absent-mindedly, checking the pager to see who had paged him. “It was Zube, I’m wanted in theatre.”

“I won’t keep you then,” Connie told him, smiling. “You’re coming round tonight, aren’t you?”

“Wouldn’t miss it for the world,” he replied, kissing her cheek lightly before walking off.

“For God’s sake, Ric, you’ve been ages!” Zubin greeted him, as he arrived in theatre. “I was starting to think that you weren’t coming!”

“I dropped my pager,” was Ric’s excuse, as he began to scrub up. “Connie apparently ran through ‘half the hospital’ trying to find me.”

“Connie, huh?” Zubin asked, his tone laced with suspicion. “How are you and she getting on, anyway?”

“How many times do I have to tell you that it’s purely platonic?” Ric demanded. Not for worlds would he have told Zubin that he had proposed to Connie – and how she had turned him down, in a manner that was heartbreakingly similar to how Diane had done exactly the same thing. I don’t think I could stand being your fifth wife, Ric… if you loved me, if I loved you, if we were more serious, if I thought we could make it work… I’m sorry… let’s be friends, yeah? I don’t want to lose you, I need you, you’re my friend…

“Ric, she met you, neither of you made any pains to hide the fact that you did it in her office, and then two weeks later she separates from her husband… I think it’s okay to be suspicious!”

Ric strolled over to the operating table. “That was five years ago and it was nothing to do with me. Marriages break up for any number of reasons –”

“And you know all about that…” Zubin began, not able to resist the chance to make fun of Ric’s traumatic love life.

“Shut it.” Ric allowed himself a brief glare at Zubin before he looked down at the patient. “Fill me in, then.”

“Five-year-old boy, brought in after an RTA, possible abdominal injuries…” Zubin trailed off. “Brian opened, and that’s where we left it.”

Ric nodded at Brian, the young registrar who had been at Holby as long as he had, but who still wasn’t as familiar as Diane. He shook himself mentally. Diane wasn’t his, and never could be. Not now, not now she had Owen, and she wasn’t around any more.

“His name’s Jack,” Zubin told Ric. “That was all the ED could get off the mother, apparently she was almost hysterical.”

She was still hysterical when, after handing over to Paul, Zubin left theatre about thirty minutes later. He found himself collared by a young woman in her mid-thirties, her hair coming undone and her expression frantic, who grabbed onto him as he passed. “Jack, Jack Lloyd, is he…?” She trailed off as she saw Zubin’s face. “Zubin Khan.”

Shocked that this woman could know his name, he glanced at her a second time. Suddenly it was as if the years had dropped away, and he was standing there talking to her five years ago; a young woman in scrubs, hair tied tightly back, that same anxious expression on her face… “Diane.”