To my more regular readers: hello. This mayn't be quite your area, although I would recommend it so highly.

To Call The Midwife fans: I'm new. Also, please don't tell me what happens in series 1. But hello!

Thoughts, critical or otherwise, are appreciated :)

Sister Bernadette lies still, sheets pulled up to her chin. Dimly, she can see the outline of her suitcase across the little room.

It's cold.

Her breath rises before her in thin white wisps which dissolve into the darkness, leaving her quite alone.

She tries a smile, envisioning in her head the very many things she had to be grateful for. She was getting treatment, after all – and had it not been for the x-ray van and the little girl – well, the Lord had indeed been kind to her. Many had not been so lucky.

In fact, the Lord had been more than kind to her. She closes her eyes, lips moving in silent gratitude.

Her heart feels as though it might break under the pressure. Tears seep from beneath her lashes, either in sadness or joy she cannot fathom. These days, the two seem more intertwined than ever.

More than kind…

The words catch in her throat, or they would have caught, if she'd spoken them aloud. There's the tiniest hitch in her breathing instead, which she tries to ignore. Under the cover of the sheet her fingers trace the scar on her palm.

Appalled with herself, she slides the offending hand from beneath the covers, resting it on top where it cannot be so treacherous.

Sleep won't come. Not tonight.

So, instead, she continues to lie quite still, and contemplates and prays in equal measure. After all, she is well practised in both, and if her consciousness seems unwilling to allow her some respite from her racing thoughts, she may as well seek her own in God.

It is – puzzling – to say the least…that lying alone in a sanatorium with tumours growing in her chest; the issue that weighs most heavily on her mind is Dr Turner, still. She lies, statuesque, and wonders if that is wrong.

It didn't feel wrong, although she can't pretend it wasn't: that split second, just that moment, when she thought she wasn't going to take her hand away from him. She'd like to blame shock, but she's not in the practise of lying to herself.

It has been so alien, so unexpected; but tender and intimate and beautiful – and from a man whom she respected, who was a dear friend and colleague, and…loved? She wasn't quite sure what it was to be in love, but she cared about the doctor greatly, and it was hard to forget the biting hurt that had squeezed in her chest as she'd snatched her hand away. Her heart had beat so wildly she thought it might leap from her breast.

Was that due to the sincere fright at what she had almost been prepared to allow? Or was it something else? Frightening, powerful, thrilling in equal measure. It scared her.

She remembers trying not tremble as he examined her, and the only thing she could think of as a symptom to her condition as 'a little breathless, perhaps'. Foolishly, she had attributed that particular change to him in a fit of frightened, thoughtless sentimentality towards him. It seems silly, girlish now.

Sister Bernadette squeezes her eyelids shut, and prays for reason and clarity.

But most of all, she prays to survive. Not for herself – she's been more than selfish lately – but for those she loves; those people she doesn't want to hurt.

It's Dr Turner's face that she imagines last, and who lingers into her dreams; his eyes guarded and sorrowful behind his kind smile.

She's too ashamed of herself to admit it; not tonight.

The days to come are another story.