legacy, by what you want from me. But everywhere I go, I see where my parents have been, where they lived and loved and died, where Adam could have been … the happy places where all those babies should be.’ She choked as she went on. ‘The ghosts of those I love walk with me, but I can’t see them, I can’t touch them. I feel so cold here, never knowing what could have been, and I’m so alone with the pain.’
‘You couldn’t talk to me?’ The rough mutter resonated through her hurting heart, an echo of her endless loss.
She couldn’t look at him as she parroted, with sad irony, ‘“Don’t go there, Anna”’. You never wanted to know—and it doesn’t matter how hard you try, you’ll never understand how I feel. None of you can understand.’
‘Because we can still have children.’ It wasn’t a question.
A tiny sigh, a nod, and she waited for it, the cutting off.
‘I can’t change that. Even if I had a vasectomy it’s not the same thing, is it? Because then I’m giving it away. I can never know what it’s like.’
The truth in his words surprised her into saying, ‘I know.’
‘What will leaving me achieve, Anna?’ he asked quietly, holding her against his heart, as if imprinting her there.
She squeezed her eyes shut, wishing he wouldn’t make this so hard. ‘I barely have a memory without you in it. Every time I hurt, every time I cried, you were there.’ Breathe in, breathe out. ‘I want to be happy—I want to forget it, all of it.’
‘You won’t forget.’ Stark words. ‘You’ll spend your life running from everything you see, from everything you don’t see, and it’s still there.’
‘Is it?’ Without warning the fury was back. Wrenching her hands from his, she pushed against his chest to get away. ‘I wouldn’t know, would I? Because you never tell me what’s haunting you. In all these years, you’ve never once let me in, Jared. It’s always “Don’t go there!”’ With a shove, she loosened his hold but didn’t break it; he refused to let her go. She turned her face and said, huskily, ‘I went into the marriage knowing you didn’t love me, but the day before I left, Lea told me I should talk to you—that you knew about loss because you found your father the day he died …’
Jared dropped his hands from her as if she burned him. ‘She told you about my father?’ Hard words, cutting her like a knife. One step back, two—and the abyss between them widened as he removed his heart from her, just as he always had.
‘She assumed I knew—that of course you’d tell your wife.’ She lifted her chin, reliving that humiliation to keep her strong, and not cave in under the threat of his rejection. ‘The day I left I asked you about your father’s death, and you pushed me away. “Don’t go there, Anna.’”
His voice sounded like metal scraping over rock, raw and burning-hot, but he didn’t acknowledge what she’d said, or the depths of her betrayal. ‘I never thought she’d tell you, break my confidence.’
He’d told her sister his darkest secret, but not her. It was a betrayal as strong as infidelity, and he didn’t even know it. She looked up, feeling dead inside. ‘You’d have married her if she’d wanted you, wouldn’t you? You love her, you really do. There’s a connection, an ability to talk that you and I have never had.’ Suddenly, realising she was free of his hold, she turned—but there was nowhere to go, nowhere to hide. Pelting rain only slowed her down, and separated her from Melanie; he could follow her no matter where she went. She sat down on the top step, feeling the rain cool her heated feet. ‘The water will cover the bottom step soon,’ she murmured, feeling the inconsequentiality of it.
‘I never wanted her either.’
They came from close behind her, the words she’d waited so many years to hear—but now it was a case of too little reassurance, and far too late. She sighed. ‘But you love her. You really do. You might want me in your bed, but it’s Lea you care about. She’s the one you’ve always talked to.’ She wiggled her bare toes in the rain. A reminder that she was alive.
He sat down beside her, pulling off his shoes and socks. ‘These days I barely talk to her. She called this afternoon, but she was looking for you.’
You don’t talk to me at all. Then, tired of thinking and not saying, she said it aloud. ‘That might make a difference, if you ever talked to me at all.’
As if he knew she didn’t want to be touched, he remained those few inches away—but she felt something in him straining, trying to get close, to see inside her. ‘I’ve been the one talking the past few days.’
‘No,’ she said quietly, ‘you haven’t said one single thing that tells me about you. You’ve done everything in an effort to get me to talk. You don’t tell me anything unless it has the ultimate purpose of making me feel, making me speak. Keeping The Curran on Jarndirri. Do you think I’m blind?’ Small tears slipped from her eyes. ‘Even the high chair—our son’s chair—you used it, and your feelings, to make me open to you, so I’d connect to you, and stay. But you won’t open to me. You never have.’ When he didn’t answer after five seconds, she dipped her feet in a little puddle in the dip in the old bottom stair; when he didn’t speak in thirty seconds, in a minute, she stood. ‘I’m going to bed now.’
Jared jerked to his feet then, and twisted her round to face him. ‘What do you want from me, Anna?’
Expecting life and fire and command, all she saw in his eyes was hopeless confusion. Something in her cried out, wanting to help; but she had nothing to give. ‘I’ve told you what I want. Melanie, and no more. Goodnight.’
‘No. That’s not all you want. I know it, can feel it.’ He was in front of her before she could make the door and safety. In his eyes, his whole face, was a desperate kind of resolution. ‘For years I knew when you had something hard to say—and whenever I didn’t want to hear it or deal with your feelings, I told you not to go there. Now I’m seeing it, and I’m saying it. Do it, Anna. Go there.’
His body quivered like a bowstring pulled tight, unleashing what had always been held back before—but now it was she that felt the confusion. ‘Why?’ She spread her arms wide. ‘Why now, Jared, when it’s too late, when it can’t matter?’
‘It isn’t too late, Anna.’ He grabbed her by the shoulders, alive, vivid and blazing with all the emotion she’d wanted to see for so long. ‘And it matters to me.’
‘Why didn’t you want to know when it mattered to me?’ she whispered. ‘Why did you always push me away when it mattered to me?’
The life and eagerness dimmed; he frowned, and slowly shook his head. ‘I don’t know. I wish to God I knew, but I don’t. I thought we had it all. I couldn’t see what you could lack in our life, when I was so happy with what we had.’ Low, he added, ‘I didn’t want to know. I didn’t want to change anything for you.’
She’d always known that. Her head fell, and she stood before him, like a candle snuffed as she told the truth. ‘Love, Jared. I lacked love. Sex and Jarndirri was never enough for me. I wanted talk and cuddles, laughter and jokes and a friend, not just a lover. I don’t want a man who takes me or my love for granted. I wanted—no, I want—someone who cares about how I feel before I walk out.’
His hands fell from
