For Siena stubborn was a promise.
An hour later Siena made plans for Rufus to pick her up the next day for her interview, took his business card in case she needed him for anything—car trips, tourist outings, dinner reservations, hits on annoying family members—and let herself into Rick’s home.
It was just as she had expected. Within the freshly painted walls of the brand new house lived ancient mismatched furniture from the old family home mixed with assorted Ikea decor. And there was an inherent scent of tomato pasta on the air.
Family pictures littered the top of their old piano, its keys yellowed by time. Memories crowded in on her as she remembered Rick forcing her to practice at that very piano every single night. While her friends had been at the mall or going to movies, from the day he’d become her legal guardian she had been chained to her weekly routine like a prisoner serving out a sentence for a heinous crime.
Siena lumbered up the stairs, dragging her small case into the obvious spare bedroom where she found a set of keys and a note reading: ‘The keys are for the green car. Dinner’s at seven.’
After changing into a thankfully cola-free filmy sleeveless black top and skinny dark designer jeans, she searched the Yellow Pages for the name of a dry cleaner. Grabbing her grimy suit and the keys for the green car—not wanting to bother poor Rufus for a quick trip to town, especially since she wasn’t entirely sure if she was partial to him or if she was slightly scared of him—she headed out.
The innocuous sounding green car turned out to be a great, hulking, Kermit-green, eight-cylinder Ute which looked so neat and sparkly clean it couldn’t have been used to haul anything more gritty and cumbersome than plants for Tina’s garden.
She started up the monster, took a few moments to familiarise herself with the feel of the pedals as it was the first right-hand-drive car she had driven in months, then backed out of the driveway.
She had to admit it was a beautiful day. Hot and sunny, like every day in Cairns—a huge tourist destination, poised on the edge of the magnificent Great Barrier Reef, one of the seven wonders of the natural world. It really was paradise. For some. For others the hot air felt heavy, smothering, suffocating…
She switched on the air-conditioning, her breathing coming easier when the car smelt less like the past and more like the inside of a plane.
After about five minutes of driving Siena passed an intersection with an antique shop on one corner and an antiquated milk bar on the other and felt a massive wave of déjà vu.
Ignoring the map on the display of her PDA, she took a right turn down a familiar-feeling suburban street, shady with gigantic overhanging gum trees. The stillness of the place washed over her as she meandered deeper along the windy road past lovely large two-storey homes with gables and shutters and front porches and grassy front gardens. It was a picture postcard neighbourhood for a young family.
But familiarity soon morphed into prickly realisation.
This was her old street. The home she had lived in for the first eighteen years of her life. The home in which she had grown up as a late child with a bossy older brother and an absentee father…
She rumbled down the street in second gear. Piano music pealed from one house, making her feel giddy. She peered at numbers on letterboxes to draw her focus elsewhere.
And then she found it. Fourteen Apple Tree Drive. Even the street name was picture perfect. But she knew that the lives going on behind such façades weren’t anywhere near perfect.
A flash of movement loomed at the corner of her vision and she looked up from the letterbox to see a kid riding his bike out into the street.
Swearing loudly, she slammed on the brakes, the big car tugging and shuddering as she held on for all her might. But her unpractised arms couldn’t keep the car straight.
The wheels locked and skidded sideways and, with a crunching jolt, she mounted the kerb. The car slammed to a halt when it came face to face with a hundred-year-old tree in a mass of screeching tyres, grinding metal undercarriage on concrete gutter and the acrid smell of burnt rubber.
Siena’s shallow breaths couldn’t dull the sound of her thudding heart.
Then she remembered the kid on the bike. She looked through the windscreen.
Nothing.
She looked out the driver’s window, then craned her neck to see over her shoulder to the road behind.
Neither child nor bicycle were anywhere to be seen.
CHAPTER TWO
JAMES was sure he heard the screech of car tyres over the sound of his electric sander. He let the sander whirr to a slow stop and whipped his protective goggles to the top of his head.
He stared through the sun-drenched dust floating in the air about him in his backyard workshop, listening.
But there was nothing bar the regular sounds of suburbia—a creaky Hills Hoist clothes-line twirling in the tropical breeze, noisy miner birds fighting over scraps, an amateur pianist a few houses over practising his scales…
He must have imagined it.
His hand moved back to the goggles on his head, ready to get back to work, when he heard a car door slam in his front garden.
He was out of his workshop and sprinting down the driveway before his work gloves even hit the ground.
The first thing he saw was a green Ute mounted halfway up the kerb, its driver’s side door open wide, its front bumper crunched in against his front tree and a soft wisp of smoke spiralling from the bonnet.
The second thing he saw was Kane’s bike lying on its side on the street behind the car.
The image ripped through him like someone tearing a photograph in half. If Kane was taken from him too…
Determined to just know, his numb feet took him to the kerb, and once there he saw enough to stop him from thinking such dreadful thoughts.
Kane sat on the road, leaning back against the far side of the car. He was alive. He was animated. And he was talking to a young woman who was crouching down in front of him, running frantic hands over his limbs and head.
A slight young woman with shaggy brown curls finishing just below her ears. A gauzy sort of black top sat high on her back as she crouched, revealing a wide band of olive skin above the waistline of her tight dark jeans.
James stared at the skin, realising in a completely unexpected flash of awareness that it was the first time he had seen that part of a woman’s anatomy in an age.
James brought the disturbing thought and his feet to a very definite stop with a crunch of work boot on gravel.
Kane looked over, his pale brown eyes widening as he saw that he and his new friend weren’t alone. Instant tears ensued as though the magnitude of what had happened was only realised once James was there to witness it.
‘Dad?’ Kane said, his high voice cracking.
‘I’m
