and Amina smiled, really smiled, for the first time since she’d met her. It was a lovely smile, and it made Danny smile too.
She glanced at Rob and his stern face had relaxed.
Better to give than receive? Sometimes not. Her eyes caught Rob’s and she knew he was thinking exactly the same thing.
He’d have been on the receiving end of sympathy too. And then she thought of all the things he’d tried to make her feel better—every way he could during those awful weeks in hospital, trying and trying, but every time she’d pushed him away.
‘Don’t get soppy on us,’ Rob said, and she blinked and he chuckled and put his arm around her and gave her a fast, hard hug. ‘Right, Amina, we need a hair salon. Danny, I need your help. A chair in the bathroom, right? One that doesn’t matter if it gets the odd red splash on it.’
He set them up, and then he disappeared. She caught a glimpse of him through the window, heading down to the creek, shovel over his shoulder.
She guessed what he’d be doing. He’d left water for wildlife, but there’d be animals too badly burned...
‘He’s a good man,’ Amina said and she turned and Amina was watching her. ‘You have a good husband.’
‘We’re not...together.’
‘Because of your babies?’
‘I...yes.’
‘It happens,’ Amina said softly. ‘Dreadful things...they tear you apart or they pull you together. The choice is yours.’
‘There’s no choice,’ she said, more harshly than she intended, but Danny was waiting in the bathroom eyeing the colouring kit with anticipation, and she could turn away and bite her lip and hope Amina didn’t sense the surge of anger and resentment that her words engendered.
Get over it... It was never said, not in so many words, but, four years on, she knew she was pretty much regarded as cool and aloof. The adjectives were no longer seen as a symptom of loss—they simply described who she was.
And who she intended to be for the rest of her life?
Thinking ahead was too hard. But Rob was gone, off to do what he could for injured wildlife, and Danny was waiting in the bathroom and Amina was watching her with a gaze that said she saw almost too much.
Do something.
Back in the office, she’d be neck-deep in contracts.
It was Christmas Day.
Okay, back home, she’d have left her brother’s place after managing to stay polite all through Christmas dinner and now she’d be back in her apartment. Neck-deep in contracts.
But now...neck-deep in hair dye?
‘Let’s get this over with,’ she muttered and Amina took a step back.
‘You don’t have to. If you don’t want...’
She caught herself. If Rob came back and found her wallowing in self-pity, with her hair the same colour and Amina left alone...
See, there was the problem. With Rob around she couldn’t wallow.
Maybe that was why she’d left him.
Maybe that was selfish. Maybe grief was selfish.
It was all too hard. She caught herself and forced a smile and then tried even harder. This time the smile was almost natural.
‘Rob is a good man,’ she conceded. ‘But he needs a nicer woman than me. A happier one.’
‘You can be happier if you try,’ Amina told her.
‘You can be happy if you have red hair,’ Danny volunteered and she grinned at his little-boy answer to the problems of the world.
‘Then give me red hair,’ she said. ‘Red hair is your mum’s gift to me for Christmas, and if there’s one thing Christmas needs it’s gifts. Are you and Luka going to watch or are you going to play with your Christmas presents?’
‘Me and Luka are going to watch,’ Danny said, and he wiggled his glove puppet. ‘And Wombat. Me and Luka and Wombat are going to watch you get happy.’
* * *
Almost as soon as they started, Julie realised that agreeing to this had been a mistake.
Putting a colour through her hair would have been a relatively easy task—simply applying the colour, leaving it to take and then washing it out again.
Amina, though, had different ideas. ‘Not flat colour,’ she said, just as flatly. ‘You want highlights, gold and crimson. You’ll look beautiful.’
Yeah, well, she might, but each highlight meant the application of colour to just a few strands of hair, then those strands wrapped in foil before Amina moved to the next strands.
It wasn’t a job Amina could do sitting down. She also didn’t intend to do a half-hearted job.
‘If I put too much hair in each foil, then you’ll have flat clumps of colour,’ she told Julie as she protested. ‘It won’t look half as good. And I want some of them strong and some diluted.’
‘But you shouldn’t be on your feet.’ She hadn’t thought this through. Amina was eight months pregnant, she’d had one hell of a time and now she was struggling.
She looked exhausted. But...
‘I need to do this,’ Amina told her. ‘Please...I want to. I need to do something.’
She did. Julie knew the worry about her husband was still hanging over her, plus the overwhelming grief of the devastation next door. But still...
‘I don’t want you to risk this baby,’ she told her. ‘Amina, this is madness.’
‘It’s not madness,’ Amina said stubbornly. ‘It’s what I want to do. Sit still.’
So she sat, but she worried, and when Rob appeared as the last foil was done she felt a huge wash of relief. Not that there was anything Rob could do to help the situation but at least...at least he was here.
She’d missed him...
‘Wow,’ Rob said, stopping at the entrance to the bathroom and raising his brows in his grimy face. ‘You look like a sputnik.’
‘What’s a sputnik?’ Danny demanded.
‘A spiky thing that floats round in space,’ Rob told him. ‘You think we should put Julie in a rocket launcher and send her to the moon?’
Danny giggled and Amina smiled and once again there was that lovely release of tension that only Rob seemed capable of producing. He was the best man to have in a crisis.
‘Amina’s exhausted, though,’ Julie told him. ‘She needs to sleep.’
‘You
