verandas and even a turret, for heaven’s sake.
‘I’m working on fixing the house. I got commercial cleaners in as soon as I arrived back in the country three weeks ago. The garden’s next on the list but I’ve been a bit busy.’
‘Did you say you’re working at North Shore General hospital?’
‘Yes.’ Lucas pushed open a front door in need of a new paint job. ‘I took a locum position for three months. I figured that would give me plenty of time to sort things out here.’
And to decide where he wanted to go next to take his career as an emergency specialist to even greater heights.
‘And you’re sure you want to sell?’
Lucas covered his silence by ushering Mike into the house and walking down the wide hallway with its polished wooden floorboards towards the kitchen at the back. Beams of light made mottled red and green coloured shadows on the wall, thanks to the stained glass window over the door behind him.
Did he want to sell the only house that had ever been a home for him?
No. Of course he didn’t. This had been the first place he’d felt wanted. When he was a troubled young teen on the verge of being too old to find another foster home, the Gilmores had taken him in.
And loved him.
It didn’t make any difference that he’d kicked off to accelerate the abandonment process before he could get to like the place. And man, there’d been so much to like. The beach with its tempting surf, the secret silence of the beech forest. The generous home-cooked meals. Even having to take a country bus to the nearest high school had been different enough to be fun. It would have been the biggest wrench ever when the inevitable happened and he wasn’t wanted any longer.
The Gilmores might have been much older than most foster parents but they had been made of tough stuff and they’d seen something no one else had ever seen. They had decided he was worth the effort.
‘You might as well stop acting up,’ they’d told him. ‘Kicking holes in the walls isn’t going to change anything. You’re not going anywhere, son. We’ve adopted you and that’s that.’
But, yes. He did want to sell. There was nothing here for him now. There hadn’t been, ever since the death of Eric Gilmore had revealed that he’d been covering the signs of his wife’s dementia for some time and the heart breaking decision that Dorothy Gilmore needed specialist care had had to be made. He’d found the best home available as close as possible to where he was living and working.
A shame it was in Sydney, Australia, because it meant taking Dorothy away from the area she’d been born and raised in but the alternative was in Auckland and the biggest city in this country had been just as foreign to Dorothy as Sydney and he certainly couldn’t have made his twice-weekly visits. And it hadn’t been long before she didn’t know who he was any more so it really didn’t matter what city was outside the walls of her haven.
And—after five years of being cared for so well—Dorothy had died, at the grand old age of ninety-five, just six weeks ago.
It hadn’t been a surprise to find that he’d inherited this property that had been rural when he’d arrived about twenty years ago but was now within easy commuting distance of what was touted as one of the most desirable cities in the world to live in. What had been a surprise was the distant cousin, Brian Gilmore, a man in his late sixties, who’d emerged to contest the will.
‘You were only a foster kid,’ he’d informed Lucas. ‘Aunt Dorothy and Uncle Eric never formally adopted you. You’ve got no right to inherit anything.’
Brian dabbled in property development. This house and its sprawling garden covered an area of land that had enough space for half a dozen properties. Or a retirement village, perhaps, with this perfect, peaceful location and amazing views of the sea and all the islands in the Gulf.
That would only happen after the house was demolished, of course. And probably more than half the native forest bulldozed.
He’d reached the kitchen. A long room with a slate floor and French doors between big windows that looked out over the garden that Dorothy had loved so much. Down to the huge vegetable garden that had been Eric’s pride and joy. Amongst other outdoor jobs, his contribution to family chores had been to help Eric manage that garden.
He’d hated it, at first.
He’d actually set fire to the potting shed one evening but even that hadn’t been enough to persuade his new parents that they’d made a mistake.
The wash of loss was hard enough to make Lucas pause and take in a long, slow breath. Dorothy and Eric might have been old enough to be his grandparents when they’d taken him in but they were the only real parents he’d ever had and he’d come to love them fiercely. They’d been so proud of him when they’d come to watch his graduation from medical school.
‘We knew you could do it, son. We knew you were special.’
‘This is nice...’ Mike was looking up at the beamed ceiling and then his gaze ran swiftly over the old cooking range and the arched doorway into the big pantry that had once been a creamery for the original farm. He frowned at the masking tape crisscrossing one of the windows where a pane of glass was badly cracked and he was making rapid notes on a tablet device. ‘Good thing you left it fully furnished. It looks like someone’s living in it and these antiques look original.’
‘Some of them probably are,’ Lucas agreed. ‘And it certainly is a lovely home. It needs to be sold to a family that will love it.’ As the Gilmore family had. ‘I’m not selling to anyone who wants to demolish this house.’
Brian’s words still stung. Maybe Dorothy and Eric hadn’t realised what was involved in a formal adoption process. They’d changed his name before enrolling him at his new school and somehow that had been enough and he’d slipped through the system. He’d been Lucas Gilmore ever since.
He’d been their son.
And he wasn’t about to let cousin Brian destroy any part of the miracle that had turned his life around so completely. He had his solicitor working on the legality of the unexpected claim and he was hopeful he could have it overturned in court.
A family of his own was never going to happen—he knew too well the nightmare of things going wrong—and even if he had been planning one, it wouldn’t be here—where the ghosts of what had gone so wrong in his own early life were never very far away.
But that was what this house needed.
A family. Laughter echoing through the rooms and love to be celebrated in meals taken at this old, scrubbed pine table.
Hopefully, what was left of the three months he had signed up for at Auckland General would be long enough to see that happen. As if prompted by the thought, he turned his head to where the grandfather clock in the hallway was ticking again. A slow, steady sound that had always been the heartbeat of this old house.
‘How ’bout I leave you to have a look around at the rest of the place, Mike? If you pull the front door closed, it’ll lock itself. I’m due to start my shift in Emergency in less than an hour and you never know what the traffic’s going to be like on the motorway. I’d better get my skates on.’
* * *
