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No, but she was a pretty full-on four and a half!
He should have insisted that it was too much for Mum. She’d looked so tired when he’d come home each day, but she’d kept saying that everything was fine, that she loved it, that Tori was no trouble. Since when had Tori ever been ‘no trouble’?
Even Elizabeth’s mother Monica, who was active and energetic and only fifty-four, would throw up her hands some days and say, ‘Take her home! I’ve had enough!’
Mum was sixty-eight.
In the bed, his daughter stirred and moaned, and Byron’s eyes pricked with stinging tears that he steeled himself not to give way to.
Victoria Louise Galloway Black had a personality even bigger than her name. She was so bright, so confident. Dangerously so, it had proved. She wouldn’t have thought twice about getting lunch on her own for herself and Grandma. Her favourite, of course, soft-boiled eggs with bread-and-butter fingers to dip into the runny orange yolk.
And he kept wondering about the ‘nap’, too. He knew that Mum and Tori watched children’s TV shows together on the ABC in the late afternoons. Play School and Madeline and Bob The Builder. Maybe today wasn’t the first time Mum had taken a nap on the couch. She often fell asleep in front of the television at night, he knew.
Did Tori regularly end up pottering around by herself, having ideas more ambitious than her small hands could manage, while Mum snoozed?
He should have insisted that it was too much...
Byron heard a soft movement behind him and turned, expecting it to be Tori’s nurse, come to carry out her scheduled set of observations. Instead, it was Hayley Kennett. Except, no, she wasn’t Kennett any more, he remembered vaguely. She’d married Chris someone. Only...wasn’t she divorced now? Someone had passed on that bit of news to him. So perhaps it was Kennett again, after all.
He ransacked his brain, trying to fill in the landscape of her life in more detail, but couldn’t do it. He also felt bad that he hadn’t recognised her at first today. She had always been one of the nicest girls at swim club—fun-loving, hardworking, competitive and zestful, with a body as sleek as a seal’s and no falseness in the way she’d congratulated those who’d been more successful than her.
He wasn’t surprised that she’d succeeded in the demanding career she had chosen. The NSW Ambulance Service often received over a thousand applications for every advertised trainee position. Odds like that wouldn’t have scared Hayley off.
‘Hello,’ she said quietly. ‘I wanted to see how she was getting on. And your mother.’
‘I’m sorry I didn’t recognise you today.’ He touched her hand briefly. It was pleasantly cool.
She shook her head, and her dangling earrings caught the light. ‘You had other things to think about.’
‘Thank you for being there.’
‘I was just doing my job.’
‘You’re not doing it now, though. You didn’t need to follow up.’
‘I wanted to.’
‘I really appreciate it, Hayley.’
It was the sort of thing that you said anyway, but he discovered, as he tasted the words in his mouth, that he really meant them. What was this new feeling that had been nagging at him lately? Whatever it was, the sight of Hayley made it diminish immediately. Something uncoiled inside him, and the perpetual tightness at his temples and in the back of his throat slowly and fractionally eased.
‘How’s Tori?’ she asked.
They both looked down at the sleeping child. Byron knew that she was the most beautiful child in the whole world, with her creamy skin and long lashes and fine, blond-streaked light brown hair. He accepted that there was perhaps a tiny hint of parental bias in his opinion, and that other people didn’t think the same way, but that was their problem!
‘We pulled her through the real danger—the shock—and she’s stable now,’ he said. ‘Kidney output is good. We’re still giving her a lot of fluid, high pain relief. There’s very little full-thickness burning. She’ll only need a couple of small grafts, which I can take her to Canberra for. Thank heavens. I keep thinking, if she hadn’t known how to dial OOO... If she hadn’t remembered our address...’
‘But she did. Those what ifs are dangerous, Byron,’ Hayley said. ‘What if she hadn’t burned herself at all, and she’d gone on thinking that your mother was just having a sleep? Your mum could have lost her airway while she was unconscious and choked to death. Maybe Tori’s burns have saved your mother’s life.’
‘Don’t follow it any further.’ He shook his head, his closed mouth firm and tight, then added, ‘You’re right. I’m thinking too much, when action is what I prefer. I checked on Mum a few minutes ago, across the corridor, and she’s asleep as well. Otherwise I’d take you across, so she could thank you. I mean,’ he revised, ‘she’s not talking yet, but she was squeezing my hand earlier.’
‘That’s good.’
‘She’s looking a lot better than she did at first. Look, have you eaten? Would you like to grab something? What is it?’ He looked at his watch. ‘Just after six? We could...catch up, or something.’
Dear Lord, what was that odd little thread in his voice? he wondered. Was it shaking?
‘Uh, well, I was about to head home,’ Hayley answered him reluctantly.
She saw the disappointment in his face at once, and guessed its source. He was restless, anguished. He didn’t want to eat with just the company of his own tortured thoughts tonight.
‘But I could hold off on that,’ she added quickly. ‘Just for an hour or so. My son’s with my mother.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he answered. ‘No, please, keep to your plans.’
‘Look, I’ll phone her, OK? Max is probably fine to stay a bit longer. He’s very comfortable at Mum’s, and she was going to feed us anyway. I’m not rostered tomorrow, and I’m taking him to his first preschool session. He and I get to see plenty of each other.’
‘Tori’s starting preschool, too. Supposed to be,’ he revised in a bleak tone. ‘Is your son going to Arden North?’
‘Yes, it’s just around the corner from us.’
‘And it’s halfway between my place and the hospital. I live at—Well, you know where I live.’
‘It’s a beautiful house,’ she offered. ‘So dramatic and cleverly designed. You must have enjoyed getting it right, and once you’ve got the garden going...’
Byron shook his head. ‘It’s not beautiful to me at the moment. Stupid to blame the house for what happened!’
‘Pizza?’ she suggested, to change the subject. He looked as if he wanted to veer away from it—like a racing driver taking a tight turn.
‘Sounds good.’ It was automatic, and Hayley guessed that he didn’t care what they ate.
‘I’ll ring Mum and Max from my mobile when we get outside,’ she said. ‘Want to take my car?’
‘Whatever...’
She suspected he might have more male ego at stake on the issue normally, but tonight he either didn’t care or he realised, as she did, that he was too preoccupied to be safe at the wheel. The latter, probably. She somehow had the impression he’d become a man who kept pretty close tabs on his own emotions.
‘Something’s come up,’ she said to her mother on the phone. ‘Could you handle it if I’m not there till about seven-thirty or so?’
‘We’re fine. Not a problem, I hope?’
‘I’ll tell you later.’
It was almost comical to watch Byron folding himself into her small car. Chris always refused to drive with her at all. ‘That thing? I’d rather walk! Come on, look at me! Do you think I’d fit? We’ll take my car.’
Byron was tactful enough not to comment on the dimensions of the car. Perhaps he didn’t care tonight. He had his knees tipped sideways and pressed hard against the door, and a painfully tight frown on his face.
Hayley didn’t try to talk to him as they drove. He probably wanted to make this quick, and he might well end up regretting that he’d asked her. She’d seen enough of the way people behaved in a crisis to know that moods could swing back and forth like the boom of a runaway yacht in a storm.
There were two pizza restaurants in Arden, and she picked the closest, able to park directly in front of it because it was early and a weeknight.
‘Whatever you like’ was his preference in toppings.
Helpful! But she didn’t want to push, didn’t want to waste time and energy over something that trivial. Suddenly remembered the pizza nights they’d had after swim meets and confidently told the man behind the counter, ‘Large ham and pineapple, please.’
‘Take-away?’
‘No, to eat here, thanks.’ There! Easily dealt with!
There were four tables at the back. Plastic tablecloths. Postcard-style prints of Sicily on the cheaply panelled walls. Red vinyl tiles on the floor. The place wasn’t glamorous.
And it could have been the bottom of a stairwell full of garbage cans for all Byron cared, Hayley realised.
She was swept with a churning wave of tenderness for him. Perhaps it was the kind of thing you could only feel for the man who used to be the boy who’d given you your first real kiss. They’d never had a falling-out. Life had just swept them off in different directions. Heaps of the girls at swim club had had crushes on him, but he’d been too focused on his goals to even know it, and too honorable to have taken advantage of those silly female hormones if he had.
And now he’d grown up. He was a man in every sense of the word. Thirty-four years old, successful in his profession, with a physique that had more than adequately filled its adolescent promise. He had known a man’s joys, and the unique grief of losing a spouse which didn’t touch most people until they were well into old age.
Without thinking about how he might interpret the gesture, she stretched her arm across the table and covered the back of his hand with her palm and fingers, chafing his warm, smooth skin gently.
‘She must be an amazing little girl, Byron,’ she said. ‘I’m looking forward to meeting her properly at preschool. Maybe Max will have met his match at last.’
‘I’ll believe that when I see it!’
He laughed and gave his hand a half-turn so that his fingers met Hayley’s and actively returned her touch. He squeezed her fingers, then stroked the ball of his thumb back and forth over her knuckles. It was slow and hypnotic. Shouldn’t have been erotic as well, but it was, and suddenly Hayley remembered in exact and vivid detail just how good that kiss of theirs had been, sixteen years ago.
Slow, questing, exploratory. Not a prelude to a more intimate goal, but the goal itself. Just to kiss. Just to hold each other. Just to melt inside. She had mussed up his hair. Those short, dark strands weren’t spiky at all, but soft and slippery and clean.
He had slipped his hand beneath the hem of her top and the waistband of her jeans to touch her skin. It must have taken him half an hour to reach her breast. He’d caressed the neat, firm swell the way he was caressing her fingers now, slowly and without demands.
‘It’s good to see you again, Hayley,’ he said at last. It sounded as if he meant it, but it was clearly an effort all the same.
‘Mmm, it was a good time in our lives, wasn’t it?’ she answered. ‘Those years in swim club? We had fun.’
‘Do you still see any of the others? Any people from that group of us who went to state championships two years in a row?’
‘Craig’s still around. Samantha. Rob.’ She sketched a summary of their lives, and mentioned one or two others as well who’d left Arden and moved to bigger places like Sydney or Melbourne or Canberra.
‘And what about you?’ he asked. ‘You and—?’
‘Chris and I are divorced,’ she came in quickly. For some reason, it was important to get this across very clearly. Important for whom? Byron? Or herself?
‘I’d heard, I think.’ He nodded.
Their pizza arrived, giving Hayley the excuse—she suddenly needed it—to pull her hand away. She felt disloyal to Chris, touching another man’s hand and enjoying the sensation so much. It was crazy. Chris had been the one to leave. He had wanted to ‘find himself’. He hadn’t been able to ‘handle being a father’. She’d ‘sprung it on him’.
His problem. All of it.
She had seen some signs, on her recent trip to Melbourne, that Chris was growing up at last. Maybe he had ‘found himself’ now. He’d started a self-defence school the previous year, called the Cee-Jay International Tae Kwon Do Academy, and was working hard to recruit students. If he kept it up, the school would provide him with a decent income. He still couldn’t manage his accounts or his taxes, but she didn’t mind helping him out with those from time to time. She didn’t want to see him fail. Which meant she still cared. Enough to—?
‘Yes, it’s tough,’ Byron said.
She jumped at his words, and realised she’d been miles away, hardly tasting the salt of the ham and melted cheese and the juicy sweetness of the pineapple. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
‘I get the impression that the break-up wasn’t your idea,’ he clarified.
‘Uh, no. No, it wasn’t. I’m...stubborn. I don’t like to let things go, or admit defeat before I’ve given it everything I’ve got. And I have Max’s needs to consider.’
He nodded and didn’t pursue it, which she was relieved about. Why had she told him all that?
‘I’m not brilliant company tonight, am I?’ he said instead.
‘I wasn’t expecting you to be.’
‘Thanks for that.’ He pressed his palms against his eyes and let out a gust of breath. ‘When something like this happens—I mean, I miss Elizabeth badly enough at the best of times, but when something like this happens...’
‘I know.’ She nodded.
Although she didn’t, of course. Not truly. A divorce wasn’t the same thing as a death. The pain was focused in different places.
‘I’ve stopped looking for it to go away,’ he said. ‘I used to try and measure it. I’d think, It’s less today than it was a month ago. I’m healing. But I’ve stopped doing that. Because it’s not linear, is it?’
‘No.’ That she could agree with, in full understanding. ‘Not at all.’
‘It goes up and down like—like share prices on a stock-exchange index or something.’
‘Bad today,’ she guessed, and out came her hand again, reaching across to his.
‘Pretty bad,’ he confirmed, and returned her touch for the second time. ‘Four years! Some people have married again after four years.’
He shook his head.
‘Do you think you’ll ever remarry?’ It should have been an intrusive question, but somehow it wasn’t.
Byron shook his head again. ‘No, I don’t expect so. Just can’t imagine that I could ever find that...that totality again. Bits of it, maybe. The physical part. Or the friendship. But not the whole of it, not the certainty of it, not in one person. Not the same.’
‘No, it wouldn’t be the same,’ she agreed, out of that same tenderness she’d felt for him before.
‘I’ve had it, though. I’ve been lucky. A lot of people don’t even get it once.’
‘No...’
Their hands separated and they each ate a little more pizza in silence.
Hayley thought, He’s romanticising. But who wouldn’t, after what he’s lost? He obviously did love her very much, and now that she’s gone, he’s forgotten the tensions they must have had, the disagreements, the disillusionments. Everybody has them!
It was one of the things which made her wonder—uncomfortably—if she and Chris could still have a future together. She understood him, she cared about him, he was Max’s father. What more did she want?
‘I’ve been away from her long enough,’ Byron was saying, and for a second Hayley thought he was still talking about Elizabeth. ‘I don’t want her to wake up when I’m not there.’
