style="font-size:15px;"> ‘Gina, do you have to go back to the States?’ he asked, and she stilled.
‘What are you suggesting?’
‘We need to work things out.’
‘Maybe.’ Be careful, her head was screaming. Be very careful. But there was a tiny hope…
‘Gina, you loved working in Townsville.’
So I did, she thought. Because you were there.
‘What if I did?’ she asked, and managed to keep her voice steady.
‘You had your kids’ club. You enjoyed it. You loved the emergency work.’
‘That’s right.’
‘If you were to go back there…Townsville’s only an hour’s flight from here. I spend a lot of time there.’
The world seemed to have stopped breathing. She tried to make herself think. ‘So…why would I go to Townsville?’
‘I could see you,’ he told her. ‘I work a roster of three weeks on, one week off. I could spend a week at Townsville and get to know CJ.’
‘I guess you could.’ Her glimmer of hope had faded into nothing. Her voice sounded leaden, defeated. What else had she expected? she asked of herself. Fairy-tales were for storybooks. Not for her. ‘But where would that leave me?’
‘You liked Townsville.’
‘My family and friends are in Idaho.’
‘I’d be in Townsville.’
‘Once a month.’
‘Gina, we could see how it went.’ His voice was softly persuasive and he bent to kiss her again.
But she was having none of it and she shoved him away.
‘Yes, we could,’ she said. Anger was her only aid now, but she had it in spades. More than anger. Pure, blind fury. ‘I could give up my very good job in the States. I could abandon my friends. But why, Cal? So you get to see CJ once a month?’
‘He’s my son.’
‘Prove it,’ she snapped. ‘What makes a father? A one-night stand?’
‘We never had a one-night stand. You know that.’
‘I know it. Do you?’
‘Gina, I’m saying that I’ve loved you.’He put a hand through his sodden hair, raking it with the air of a man past his limits. He was as exhausted as she was, she thought, and had to fight an almost overwhelming compulsion to reach out to him. But no way. No way! ‘These last few years have been hell.’
‘But not enough to reach out now and say let’s be a family. Not enough to even want me to stay in the same town as you.’
‘I don’t do—’
‘You don’t do commitment,’ she finished for him, almost cordially. ‘So what’s new?’
‘You know as well as I do what happens down that road,’ he told her, and he was drawing away from her now. ‘Look at what happened tonight. One minute these people had loving, laughing teenagers, the next they had nothing. You had Paul and he’s dead. And me…I learned that lesson over and over again. The only way of sanity is independence. You can love someone and stay independent. You must.’
‘Can you? Can you really love them?’
‘That’s what I’m saying,’ he told her, as if explaining something to a child.
‘Then you’re talking nonsense,’ she managed. ‘I can love CJ and stay independent? I don’t think so.’
‘That’s what I mean,’ he said wearily. ‘You’re caught. If anything happened to CJ, you’d break your heart, and why put yourself there?’ His eyes grew bleak and distant. ‘Of all the stupid, irresponsible acts. Stuffing up birth control. Us! Two doctors. We should never have messed up like that. For me to have put you through that…’
And that was the limit. Her anger had boiled straight over to full-blown fury, a fury mixed with desolation, rejection and loss.
She stared at him for a long, baffled minute—and then she reached out and hit him.
A wave caught her just as she did, knocking her sideways into the surf. She’d hit his face but her slap had been deflected, much of its force lost. But she no longer cared. She lay where she’d been knocked, letting the water wash over her, thinking about not even bothering to surface, and when Cal’s hand reached down to grab her and haul her up she reacted as if his touch burned.
She kicked out, a futile act in three feet of water, smacked his hands away from her and backed out of the waves. Dumb, useless tears were mixing with the salt water.
‘You low-life! Get away from me.’
‘Hell, Gina, I didn’t mean to say…’ Cal sounded horrified.
‘You did say,’ she spluttered, backing further away from him. ‘Get lost, Cal Jamieson. You say you loved me. That’s ridiculous. You don’t know the meaning of the word. Leave me be. I’m going back to the hospital. I’m going to check on our baby in the morning and the minute he doesn’t need me I’m out of here. I’m out of your life. I’ll send you a photo of CJ every year on his birthday. I’m sure that’s all you want, Cal Jamieson, and it’s all you deserve. Get lost.’
Three hundred miles away another drama was being played out. Another consequence of loving.
‘Megan?’
‘Go away.’ The girl’s voice dragged as though there was no strength left in it and her mother’s surge of fear grew even stronger. What was happening?
Honey had hoped this day could be different. When she’d persuaded her husband and daughter to go to the rodeo she’d almost allowed herself to be optimistic. She’d hoped it could be time out from the depression that draped this sad old farmhouse and the people in it.
But Megan had been silent and sullen all the way to the rodeo, and as soon as they’d arrived she’d disappeared to be by herself in the bush. Well, what was new? Honey had wondered sadly. For the last few months Megan had glumped round the house in her oversized men’s clothes, she’d worked in sullen silence, she’d eaten like there was no stopping her, not caring care how much weight she put on…
Honey Cooper had been concerned about her nineteen-year-old daughter for months, but then she’d also been terrified about her husband’s failing health. More. She’d been terrified that the bank would finally foreclose on the farm. She’d been terrified that Jim would kill himself. There was only so much terror one woman could hold, and Megan’s depression had seemed the least of it.
But today there’d been something new. Worse. On the way home from the rodeo Megan had huddled into the back of the car like a wounded animal. She’d stayed there until Honey had got
