home. Her mind ticked and rattled like an engine out of tune.
Cancel the hotel for this weekend. Cancel the two-week honeymoon, planned for just over a month from now, at a time when Alex had been able to make some space in his schedule. Thank goodness she hadn’t handed in her notice at the hospital yet! Where was Alex right now? At home?
‘And anyway, you and Alex, I’m sure, will patch things up,’ Helen said. ‘It would seem silly not to get married just because some idiot of a man decided to get clever during the ceremony.’
Which of those misconceptions, if any, to tackle first? Annabelle wondered.
First misconception—she and Alex weren’t going to patch things up. She knew that. Their relationship was over.
He had put so much thought and time and money into making theirs a perfect, elegant wedding, befitting the strong and sensible partnership they had hoped to create together. He’d wanted a ceremony and reception that would set a benchmark for friends and colleagues to aspire to, the sort of occasion that people would talk about for years. Well, they’d achieved the latter goal! Unfortunately, not in the way he’d wanted.
And he was a very stubborn man. Slinking off next week to a sparse little ceremony in a bureaucrat’s office wouldn’t make the grade, even leaving out the question of Alex’s loss of face.
Which Alex would never leave out. And he was probably right—people would gossip.
Second misconception—Dylan Calford wasn’t an idiot.
She’d known him, on and off, for three and a half years now. In some ways, she knew him better than she knew Alex, since there wasn’t such a gap in status between them. She knew what he looked like first thing in the morning, fresh from a snatched sleep in the doctors’ on-call room. She knew what he ate for lunch, and the places he’d been to for holidays since his marriage. They called each other by their first names.
He was proving himself as a fine surgeon, he was good to work with, and by all scales of character measurement, he was a pretty decent man. What Annabelle knew of him, she liked—had liked until today—and along with the rest of the hospital staff who worked with him, she felt for him over the issue of his divorce. He wasn’t quite the same person he’d been a couple of years ago. Harder. More cynical, and less patient.
And, finally, he hadn’t ‘decided to get clever’. He hadn’t intended his words to be overheard. Possibly, he hadn’t intended to speak them out loud at all.
Which means he genuinely thinks our marriage would have been a mistake.
How could something be a mistake when you needed it so badly? Annabelle knew that she and Alex weren’t in love the way most couples believed themselves to be when they married. They’d talked about that, seriously and at length.
Alex had exhibited his worst qualities today—as he sometimes did in surgery—but in their private time, he was thoughtful and interesting. They respected each other. He approved of her. They could talk about plans without friction. He was a tender, undemanding lover, and he worked hard at his relationship with Duncan.
And, oh, dear Lord, she’d needed their marriage! She needed to be able to give up work for a few years in order to focus her attention on caring for her mother and Duncan. She needed Alex’s financial support, not for herself but for the people she loved.
When they’d started going out together four months ago, it had been like being rescued from a dragon’s lair by a white knight. She’d started sleeping again. She’d seen light at the end of the tunnel.
Whereas now…
Suddenly, she felt sick. Anger towards Dylan Calford rose in her throat like bile. The concern he evidently had about the dire possibility of her making a mistake in marriage, of her ‘being unhappy’, was a luxury she couldn’t afford.
‘I wouldn’t have let it be a mistake!’ she muttered to herself. ‘I would have made it work, no matter what it took. I would have been happy! Imposing his cynical stance on other people just because he’s having a bad divorce is unforgivably arrogant!’
‘Are you angry with him?’ her mother asked.
‘Yes. Absolutely and utterly furious!’ Annabelle said aloud.
‘Don’t let it get in the way when you talk.’ Mum put out her hand and rested it heavily on Annabelle’s arm. ‘And try to talk to him soon. He acted out of pride. He’ll make it up to you. I’m sure you can work it out.’
‘Oh, Mum, no, I’m not angry with Alex. I understand why he walked out. It’s Dylan Calford I’ll never forgive for all this!’ Annabelle said.
DYLAN appeared at Annabelle’s house at nine-thirty the next morning.
Duncan had awoken, as usual, at six. No matter how late he stayed up, he never slept in. Right now, he was running wildly around the back garden, pushing a big toy truck, and he would barely slacken his pace all day. Annabelle often wondered what sort of a child his father had been. This active? This unstoppable? There was no one to ask about him.
‘Hello,’ she said coolly to Alex’s registrar at the front door of her little weatherboard Queenslander.
‘Uh, yeah, hi…’ he answered.
‘I suppose you want to come in,’ Annabelle prompted him, not sure why she was taking the trouble to help him out, even to this limited extent.
She had never seen him so at a loss for words. Had never seen him dressed so casually either. His body was one hundred per cent male. Broad shoulders, strong legs, dark hair and darker eyes, football player’s waist and hips. Orthopaedic surgeons had to be strong.
Since this was Brisbane in January, he wore shorts—navy blue and topped with a polo shirt subtly patterned in a beige and khaki print. He was freshly showered and shaven, and radiated an energy that was only partly physical.
He looked good, and he’d recovered his equilibrium already. He was intimidating, if she’d been in the mood to feel intimidated by anyone. Right now, she wasn’t.
‘Look, I won’t apologise again,’ he said, his tone that of a man who was sure of his ground.
‘No, don’t,’ she agreed. ‘But, please, don’t stay here on the veranda. It’s cooler out the back, and I need to keep an eye on Duncan.’
‘Sure.’ The word sharpened his slight American accent. Annabelle knew he had been here since his early teens, had been a star rugby player at Brisbane’s most illustrious boys’ school and held Australian citizenship, but sometimes his Chicago origins still showed.
She led the way through the house and he spoke behind her. ‘But I do want to do what I can to make this whole thing less difficult for you.’
‘Sure.’ She turned her head and smiled as she echoed the word he’d used, but the smile didn’t do much to soak up the pool of dripping sarcasm in her tone. There was nothing he could do to make this ‘less difficult’!
He didn’t reply, yet somehow this time his silence was
