about waving.’
‘Probably not what you expected. I should have been Terry.’
‘Mmm.’
She almost blurted out that not much in her life had gone according to expectations over the past year and more, but managed to keep the words back. Dear God, it would be so easy to get emotional!
‘I’ll explain as we head to the car,’ he said.
‘Sounds good.’
Unobtrusively, he took control of the luggage cart and began to wheel it towards the exit. She walked beside him, matching his pace.
‘I’m Steve, by the way. Steve Colton. You’ll be seeing me in Theatre fairly regularly. I’m often rostered to handle the anaesthesia. Terry’s wife is…not well. That’s why he couldn’t make it.’
‘Oh, no!’ Candace said. ‘That’s too bad! It isn’t serious, I hope.’
‘So do I,’ he answered soberly. ‘But I’m actually her GP, so I can’t really talk about it. Is this all of your luggage?’
‘This is it,’ she confirmed. Three suitcases and a box, for a one-year stay. ‘My mother helped me pack, and she’s very strict.’
‘Travels light?’
‘Arrives light. Leaves heavy. She’s convinced that Australia will have glorious shopping possibilities, thanks to the state of your dollar.’
‘She’s right, if you can find anything you want to buy. Terry told you Narralee’s not a big place, I hope. Not exactly a shopper’s heaven.’
‘Yes, but my mother has a bloodhound’s nose for good places to spend money. And Terry also told me Sydney makes a great weekend getaway, only a three-and-a-half-hour drive. Oh! Which means you’re making a seven-hour round trip to pick me up,’ she realised aloud, ‘and I haven’t thanked you yet.’
‘Plenty of time for that.’
‘Three and a half hours, in fact.’
They both laughed.
He seemed nice, Candace decided. The kind of well-mannered yet easygoing Australian male she’d heard good things about and seen—in somewhat exaggerated form—in various movies over the years. Three and a half hours, plus a stop for a snack, maybe. This shouldn’t be any kind of a penance…
And it wasn’t. Far from it.
They talked for a while, about the obvious things. Her journey. The city of Sydney. She commented on its red-tiled roofs, bright in the March morning sunlight, and all the aqua blue ovals and rectangles of the swimming pools she’d seen from above in the sprawl of suburban back yards as the plane had come in to land.
Then they left human habitation behind and crossed the wild, wind-scoured terrain of a national park. Steve Colton stopped asking questions and giving out helpful tourist information. Candace pretended to sleep.
She had been doing a lot of that lately—lying in bed with her brain buzzing and the shrill whistle of tinnitus in her ears, totally exhausted, miles from sleep and not fooling herself for a second.
Todd was sleeping with Brittany for six months and I never knew.
He said our marriage was empty long before that. Was he right? If there hadn’t been that electrical problem at the hospital that day, and they hadn’t cancelled elective surgery…If I hadn’t actually walked in on them, naked together in our marital bed…How long before I’d have found out? How long before he would have drummed up the courage to leave? Coming home to find them in bed was bad enough, but having them announce Brittany’s pregnancy before our divorce was even finalised was even worse.
I guess in a way I’m glad Maddy decided not to come to Australia with me—although that hurts, too, to think she’s so positive that she’ll be fine without her mother—because at least, out there, I’ll be able to be alone. I won’t have to pretend.
And here she was, pretending already.
Much easier to pretend to a newly met male colleague than to an emotional fifteen-year-old daughter, however. By hook or by crook, Candace wasn’t going to ruin Maddy’s relationship with her father. She had no right to do that—to deprive her daughter of something very precious and necessary in Maddy’s life purely in order to enact revenge on Todd, when maybe…probably…the blame wasn’t all on his side. She had to behave rationally, not let Maddy see quite how deeply ran her sense of betrayal.
But, oh, that huge, glowing and healthily advanced pregnancy of Brittany’s hurt! She was due in just a few weeks…
The car slowed. It stopped. Then there was silence. She opened her eyes. Dr Colton was watching her. No, Steve. She couldn’t possibly call him Dr Colton! He had to be a good five or six years younger than she was, and she had been told that Australians were informal people.
‘Are we here?’ she asked vaguely. She had no idea how long her mind had been churning while her eyes had flickered behind their closed lids.
‘No,’ he said, ‘But I thought it was probably hours since they gave you breakfast on the plane. It was a toss-up between letting you sleep and getting you fed. Did I pick the right one?’
‘I wasn’t asleep,’ she admitted, finding it easier to be honest with him than she had expected. ‘Just thinking.’
‘That can give you an appetite.’
She smiled. ‘It has. Or something has.’
‘Rightio, then.’
Rightio? Weird word! Cute, actually. The difference, the newness of it in his easy accent, blew across the raw-burned surface of her soul like a gentle puff of wind, and she was still smiling as she got out of the car.
He hadn’t gone so far as to open the door for her. She might have mistrusted that degree of chivalry. But he was standing there waiting, and he reached out a hand to steady her as she stood up.
The kerb was unexpectedly high. She held onto him, closing her fingers around a forearm that was bare and warm and ropy with muscle, while his hand remained cupped beneath her elbow.
‘Oh-h! The sidewalk is going up and down,’ she said.
‘Having your own personal earthquake?’
‘No, it’s more gentle than that. A kind of quavery undulation.’
He laughed. ‘It’s that long flight, and the beginnings of jet-lag. What time is it now in Boston?’
‘Um…’
‘Let’s see…’
They both began a mental calculation.
‘Sydney is sixteen hours ahead,’ she supplied. ‘Which means…’
He got there first. ‘Yesterday evening, then. Around sevenish. You probably are hungry in that case, and an empty stomach wouldn’t be helping.’
‘No,’
