Dan glanced down at the papers on the seat beside him. There wasn’t much time to make it into town. He’d been to Ted’s to make sure everything was going okay. Tom was doing a good job fixing a fence there and Ted had nearly finished cutting his hay.

Happily for Ted, his crops looked like he would actually make something from them. It was touch and go at Wood Dell but many of the crops on farms closer to town were already lost. Things were going to be tough. He suspected it would be breaking point for a couple of families he knew.

He drummed the steering wheel with his fingers. He’d only had time for a quick search before Paula had come into the office, but there was nothing with the loan papers that reflected Rowena’s belief Glen Barrett had agreed they had permission to go ahead with it.

Dan checked the time again as he reached the bitumen. He’d managed to get a late appointment with the bank manager but he’d be cutting it fine. He was hoping for answers. There had to be some way to sort out this mess.

Chapter 16

CHAPTER

16

“There it is.” The sonographer, who’d introduced herself as Jenny, pointed to the screen. “Say hello to your baby.” Dan clutched Paula’s hand tightly and leaned in closer. Paula forgot about the weird sensation of the scanning device sliding over the cold jelly on her belly and tried to make sense of the grainy outlines on the screen.

“There’s the head.”

Jenny pointed to the screen.

“It actually looks like a head,” Dan said, voicing Paula’s thought.

“I’m just moving down,” Jenny said. “There’s the arms and…it’s just as well you don’t want to know the sex of your baby. The way it’s lying, I can’t get a good view.”

“Is that bad?” Paula asked. She had assumed it would be simple to tell the sex of the baby and that she and Dan would have to do the ‘look away now’ thing.

“Not at all,” Jenny reassured her. “Sometimes it’s quite easy to tell but babies move about, so not always. There’s the heart. See that?”

Paula looked at the little line blipping across the bottom of the screen. “Is it okay?”

“That’s a good strong beat.”

“It’s amazing,” Dan murmured in Paula’s ear.

She glanced at him. He had a smile stretched from one side of his face to the other and his gaze was locked on the screen. Paula hadn’t seen him look so happy for – she tried to think of the last time Dan had really laughed. It had been weeks.