did she do?’ she asked, after she’d let another little silence pass. ‘Was she a doctor, like you?’
‘No,’ he said, staring at the road ahead. ‘She was a teacher.’
‘What grade?’
‘First grade.’
‘How did you meet?’
He glanced at her as if he found her questions both annoying and intrusive. ‘We went to school together.’ He looked forward again and paused for a second or two before adding, ‘We dated since senior high school.’
Oh, boy, Kellie thought. Losing a childhood sweetheart was a tough call. So many memories were intertwined. It was almost impossible to move forward without some sort of survival guilt. Her father was living proof of it. He and her mother had met on the first day of high school and had never had eyes for anyone else but each other.
Kellie, on the other hand, had had plenty of casual male relationships during her adolescence but after her mother had died her only serious relationship had been with Harley Edwards. It worried her that with just under a year until she turned thirty she was way behind her peers in terms of experience. But with the responsibilities of juggling both her studies and her needy family she hadn’t had time to socialise in the same way her peers had done.
When Harley had come along, with his easygoing charm, she hadn’t given the relationship enough thought before she had committed herself to being his lover. She had known enough about her body and its responses to know she had often been a little short-changed when it had come to their very occasional intimate moments. She had always put it down to overwork and tiredness on her part, but after feeling the fine sandpaper-like touch of Matt McNaught’s hands earlier, she wondered if had more to do with not meeting the right person.
She glanced at Matt’s hands again and suppressed a tiny shiver. They looked like the sort of hands that would know their way around a woman’s body. Long fingered and strong, capable and yet gentle when he needed to be. She had seen that when he had examined Julie’s wound earlier.
‘Look, if you’re really not keen about flying out here, I’m quite happy to do the remote clinics while you hold the fort in town,’ Matt said into the silence. ‘I hadn’t realised you’d had such a frightening experience. An emergency landing would be enough to shake anyone’s confidence.’
Kellie felt her heart swell at his gesture of consideration for her feelings. ‘Thank you, but I really think I need to conquer my demons,’ she said. ‘That’s part of the reason I came out here. I hate being beaten by something. I knew it would be tough and that there would be flying involved, but patients have to take priority over personal feelings, right?’
He met her gaze briefly. ‘Out here patients always take priority,’ he said. ‘Our feelings don’t come into it at all.’
‘I guess they don’t if you’ve got them locked away so tightly no one can even get close,’ she commented wryly.
His mouth tightened into a flat white line. ‘If I choose not to wear my heart on my sleeve, that’s surely my business and no one else’s,’ he said in a curt tone. ‘Ruth had no right to tell you all the details of my private life. She was way out of line.’
‘She cares for you,’ Kellie countered. ‘In fact, I think she understands more than most what you’re going through.’
He was still looking straight ahead. ‘I suppose you mean because we’ve both lost someone we loved.’
‘Yes. She’s a mother who has lost her daughter,’ she said. ‘You’re a man who has lost his fiancée. You have a lot of common ground. Grief is a great leveller—sure, we experience it in different ways but it’s still grief. Take Julie, for instance. She’s lost the father of her children, not from death but because her husband decided he wanted something other than what she could offer. She’s left to bring up three boys on her own. In some ways she might have coped better if her husband had died rather than being left to live with the stigma of being rejected for another woman.’
Matt frowned as he thought about what Kellie had said. He had tried over the years to move on from his grief and each year he felt as if he had taken a few more important steps away from it. But then as Madeleine’s birthday crept up on him each October he felt the guilt start to gnaw at him, like a tiny pebble inside one of his shoes. It didn’t help that Madeleine’s parents expected him to be the same broken man he had been six years ago.
For the first time since he had been travelling to Brisbane each year, Matt had felt like a fraud. He had felt almost sickened this time by the way John and Mary Donaldson persisted in maintaining their daughter’s bedroom like a shrine to her memory. It was as if Madeleine’s parents had never quite accepted their daughter was finally gone. Madeleine’s clothes were still hanging in the wardrobe, even her wedding dress and veil this time had reminded Matt of that scene out of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations where the jilted Miss Haversham lived in a constant state of wearing her wedding finery, even as it creased and rotted around her aging form.
Madeleine’s bed was still made up as if she was coming home to slip in between the neatly pressed sheets, her school trophies and certificates and university degree were on the wall, and her bedside clock was plugged in as if her slim hand would reach out and switch off the alarm the next morning …
Matt gripped the steering-wheel even tighter, fighting against the groundswell of feeling rising inside him. He realised it wasn’t grief but frustration that Madeleine’s parents were not just holding onto their daughter, but to him as well. ‘I’m dealing with it in my own way and in my own time,’ he said. ‘I don’t like talking about it—it brings it all back.’
‘I felt the same about my mother’s death for ages,’ Kellie said. ‘I could barely mention her name. But I’ve come to realise it’s much healthier to deal with what you’re feeling at the time rather than push it aside. It festers under the surface otherwise, and you can’t move on with your life.’
‘As a child, no matter what age you are, you more or less expect to outlive your parents,’ he said tightly. ‘It’s not the same thing at all, losing the person you were expecting to marry a couple of days later. There are issues that crop up from time to time, reminders, that sort of thing. It never seems to go away.’
Kellie took a moment to absorb what he’d said to consider if she agreed with it or not. Losing her mother had been devastating. It had been devastating for her father and brothers as well as it had come right out of the blue. One moment their forty-seven-year-old active and energetic mother had been happy and healthy, doing all the things loving mothers did, and the next she had been diagnosed with a terminal illness.
It had felt at the time like the family had suddenly slammed head first into a brick wall. Life was never going to be the same again and each of them had known it. Yes, they’d had a few months to say what had needed to be said so their mother could die in peace, but it hadn’t really lessened the grief. If anything, it had prolonged it, as they had watched her waste away before their eyes, each of them watching helplessly until she’d taken her final breath and slipped away.
‘I’m not sure I totally agree with you,’ she said. ‘I miss my mother terribly. There are still days when I reach for my phone to call or text her about something and then I realise she’s not here any more. I know for a fact it will get worse if or when I become a mother myself. I have my father, of course, who is absolutely wonderful but no one can ever replace your mother.’
‘Yes,
