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‘I talk too much about her when I do go out. Mum says I need to do some speed dating to get back into the way of speaking to women. She says Charlotte needs a mother and she’s probably right.’
Serious brown eyes met Alex’s across the table.
‘But I’ve got out of the dating habit,’ he admitted, before adding ruefully, ‘Not that I was ever that good at it. Do you remember Isobel telling me—some time that year—that I should write out a list of things to talk about before going to a party? Questions, she said, ask women questions about themselves and actually listen to their answers—that’s very flattering.’
Alex smiled.
‘I suspected at the time she was talking to me as well. She kept encouraging me to go out and meet young people. As I remember, you were all of a dither because you thought this girl you liked would be there, right?’
She studied Will, whose entire attention now appeared to be on his meal.
‘Did it work for you?’ she asked.
He looked up and smiled, and although the now-familiar reactions to his smile tumbled through her body, they stilled when he answered.
‘It did,’ he said quietly. ‘The girl was Elise.’
Which killed that conversation dead, Will realised as the words landed between them with an almost audible thump.
He had to think, to say something—anything—because talking to Alex was making him feel good inside, while looking at Alex—well, best he didn’t consider how that was making him feel!
But where was his list?
Ask questions, Isobel had told him way back then.
He stopped pretending to be eating and looked up at the woman across the table from him, delicately cutting morsels of lamb from her cutlets.
‘How did you feel about coming back to Port?’
She met his eyes, and smiled.
‘Ask questions, huh?’ she teased, then looked thoughtful, as if actually considering her reply.
‘Hearing from my father—that was a shock. After so many years, it took a while to take it in, but then I reread his letter, saw the bit about his health, and coming back seemed the only possible thing to do—the natural thing. As if it was time …’
How could he not reach out to rest his hand on hers?
How could he not squeeze her slim, warm fingers?
‘It must be hard,’ he said, and her smile brightened.
‘I don’t really know yet,’ she said. ‘In the taxi, coming from the airport, seeing the river and the sea, well, it felt right. In fact, I felt a surge of excitement, as if this was where I should be. But since then I’ve been at the hospital and then here—not really home at all.’
‘But you’ll go home—to your old house—stay there?’
She nodded.
‘I think so—for a while at least, while Dad convalesces, then we’ll see how it works out. It’s been nearly twenty years since I left home, Will, and I don’t really know him any more.’
Her smile this time was less joyous, nothing more than a slight curl of her lips, and her eyes held Will’s as she added, ‘It might sound strange but up to that time I was happy here, you see. I had a wonderful childhood with the river right beside us. I think I’ve let what happened to me affect my life for far too long. I want to start again, back in the place where I belong.’
He wanted to kiss her, in praise of her courage, nothing more—well, almost nothing more.
‘If anyone can do it, you can,’ he said.
‘Thanks,’ she said softly, lifting her hand from under his and replacing it on top, where it sat, warm and comforting, although wasn’t he supposed to be comforting her?
She really should stop holding his hand. This was just a dinner between colleagues—old friends—not a date.
But holding Will’s hand felt … nice. Pathetic word but it covered the situation.
Very nice would be even better—
A low ping of a message arriving on Will’s mobile broke into her thoughts, and the gravity on his face as he read the message told her it wasn’t good news.
‘I’m sorry, Alex, but your father’s had a setback—heart attack or stroke. His surgeon is on his way, but I’ll have to go.’
‘I’ll come with you,’ Alex said.
Will was on his feet, asking the waiter to put the dinner on his account, shrugging into the jacket he’d hung on the back of his chair.
‘I’m so sorry,’ he said to Alex as he walked her to the door, slipping a comforting arm around her shoulders and giving her a hug. ‘His surgeon was worried about him undergoing the operation when he’d had a heart attack three years ago but the leaking heart valve was restricting his life and eventually would have killed him. Now this!’
Will insisted on driving her to the hospital.
‘I can drop you back at your car later,’ he said.
‘No car. I got a cab from the airport earlier and walked from the hospital this evening,’ Alex whispered, while all the ‘what ifs’ clamoured in her head. She should have come sooner, tried harder to heal the wound between herself and her parents, at the very least thanked Dad for getting in touch with her in the end.
Now it might be too late. A post-surgical patient was too fragile to have heroic lifesaving measures practiced on him.
‘He’d signed a health directive stating he didn’t want to be resuscitated,’ Will said quietly as he opened the door of his car for her.
Alex found a wan smile.
‘I was just thinking he was hardly a candidate for the more heroic revival techniques.’
Will patted her hand. ‘Let’s wait and see.’ He closed the car door and walked around the hood to get in beside her.
They arrived at the ICU to find a flurry of activity as they prepared to take the patient to Radiography for a CT scan of his brain, a stroke now seeming the most likely cause of his deep unconsciousness.
Alex stood beside her father’s bed, with Will on the other side.
‘If it’s a stroke it would have to be haemorrhagic, rather than a clot—he’d be on blood thinners post-op,’ Alex said, trying to think professionally so she could block out the emotion and nerves.
Will nodded glumly. ‘Any bleed with already thinned blood could be catastrophic.’
Alex watched helplessly as gentle hands stripped away the tubes and monitors before lifting her father onto the scanner’s stretcher and sliding his head into the machine.
In ten minutes they had the answer, a subarachnoid haemorrhage where an unsuspected aneurysm had burst.
Her father was returned to his bed and reattached to monitors and breathing apparatus, but Alex knew it was too late. Such a catastrophic bleed had only one outcome, especially in her father’s weakened post-op state.
And heroics, had any been available, weren’t an option. Within an hour of them returning to the hospital her father was dead. Alex looked down at the man who, in her childhood, had been so good to her. It had been a strict upbringing, but Dad had been patient, and caring, and always kind.
Until the end …
She looked across the bed at Will, who’d stayed quietly there to support her.
‘I suppose I’ll have to organise a funeral in that damn church!’ she muttered, again using practicalities to keep the fear and pain at bay. ‘And face those women who spat at me when I took their precious Mr Spencer to court.’
‘I don’t think so,’ Will said, something in his voice making her look up from the figure on the bed. ‘I get to see the health directives of all patients coming into the ICU, and also any personal requests in the event of a patient’s death. Your father left very specific instructions. There were to be no services at all, from memory.’
‘Poor Dad,’ Alex whispered, then she turned away from the bed, aware that tears were close to falling and not wanting to give in to the mix of rage and grief inside her until she was on her own. ‘I’d better get home and go through his papers and just hope he left some instructions.’
Will could hear the tears thick in her voice, and knew instinctively she wouldn’t want to cry in front of him. The teenager who’d lived next door was all grown up now, and he had to respect her adulthood for all he wanted to take her in his arms and comfort her.
He insisted on driving her home, aware that if he missed the last ferry he’d have a long drive out to the highway and back into town, but he knew she’d been tired and jet-lagged before her father’s death had hit her, and he didn’t want her returning to that house of hurt on her own.
He kept the headlights shining on the front of the house, while she dug around under pot plants for a spare key.
‘It’s always here,’ she muttered when he joined the search, and it was he who found the hollow rock among the pebbles on the path.
He unlocked the door for her and pushed it open, wondering just how hard this would be for her. She was standing back, just a little, and he sensed she was gathering the nerve to walk into the place that had once been her home.
He was about to suggest she stay somewhere else—at his mother’s place or a hotel in town—just for tonight when an unnerving voice yelled from the darkness.
‘That you, Bruce?’
To Will’s surprise, Alex laughed and laughed, stepping past him and reaching out to switch on a light, calling, ‘Buddy, where are you? It’s Alex, Buddy.’
The pink and grey galah shot like an arrow down the hall, landing on Alex’s head and dancing a little jig there before settling on her shoulder, turning his head a little to one side as he studied her, then letting loose with a loud ‘Who’s a pretty girl, then?’ as he nuzzled his head against her cheek.
Now the tears she’d held in check spilled from her eyes, although through the dampness she was smiling.
‘Silly bird,’ she said, turning back to Will. ‘We’ve had him since he was a fledgling and we have no idea where he got the name Bruce, but no amount of patience on Dad’s part ever got him to say another name. He talks a lot of other rot, but he always comes back to Bruce.’
The galah was brushing his feathers against the tears as if to dry them up, and seeing the love between the pair made Will’s heart twist, but at least the bird had made it easier for Alex to step back into her childhood home.
She had found a tissue and finished the mopping up operations.
‘Thanks, Will, for everything,’ she said quietly. ‘Not only for now but for before, because that first year with the Armitages you were always around and so—so normal you helped me be normal too. I’ll be okay now I’m home—home with Buddy. I’ve left my luggage in the visitors’ room of the CCU, but I can collect it tomorrow. I imagine there’ll be a ton of forms to fill out and arrangements to be made.’
He was being dismissed in the nicest possible way and although he’d have liked to help her—to save her the pain of making arrangements for her father whatever they might be—he knew he had to go.
He touched her shoulder and, daring the bird to object, kissed her lightly on the cheek.
‘You thought he’d take your eyes out, didn’t you?’ Alex teased, smiling now, then she reached out and gave him a hug. ‘Thanks again!’
He walked away, aware of the woman in the lighted doorway, blue eyes watching his departure, a pink and grey bird dancing on her shoulder, still enquiring about the whereabouts of Bruce.
CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_6b3e789a-2f0b-5845-91ea-84914cf6ce39)
THE RAUCOUS CRIES of ‘Where’s Bruce?’ woke Alex long before she’d have liked to awaken, but as the bird was sitting on the pillow beside her head and tugging at her hair, she gave in and clambered out of bed.
Blearily making her way to the kitchen, surprised by how automatic her movements through the house were, she made a coffee and took it out onto the big deck that looked over the river, suddenly glad to be awake as the rising sun turned the placid waters pink and mauve and gold in turn. She breathed deeply, taking in the eucalypt-scented air, watching an osprey swirl across the sky in search of breakfast, hearing the putt-putt of dinghy engines as fisherman set out up the river to set their crab pots or try their luck with lines.
Another breath …
Yes, she was home.
All the pain of long ago hadn’t damaged the sense that this was where she belonged—maybe not for ever, or even for very long—heaven knew what the future held—but for now it was enough.
Not quite enough to heal the pain of the past or the loss of the man she’d come home to make peace with—only time would do that—but here she could handle it, cope with it, do whatever had to be done.
Finishing her coffee, she walked back into the kitchen, surprised to find a note she hadn’t noticed earlier, although it was propped in a prominent spot on the sill of the window looking out over the deck.
Thank you for coming, Alexandra. I hope with all my heart you will stay here at the house. Bacon and eggs in fridge, fruit and veg in the bottom drawers, and meat in the freezer.
Later we’ll talk but for now it is enough to know that you are here.
Please forgive me.
Love, Dad.
Alex smoothed the paper, willing away the tears, then held it to her cheek as if she could feel her father’s touch in it.
A noise out the front—on the road side of the house—turned her in that direction. Buddy was still on the veranda railing, giving cheek to the gulls and oystercatchers on the mudflats of the river.
The noise was barely there—someone trying to be quiet—but surely not a burglar at this time of the morning.
She made her way to the front room and peered through the curtains. A dark maroon SUV was parked outside, the driver’s side door open. Had Will’s car been maroon?
But why would he be sneaking around outside her house at the crack of dawn?
One way to find out. She walked down the hall and opened the door, and there he was, as large as life.
‘You shouldn’t open a door like that—you should have a locked screen or a spyhole in the door.’
Alex laughed, and hoped it was because of his lecturing tone, not because she was glad to see him.
‘I brought your luggage from the hospital and the forms you’ll need to fill in. Apparently your father had left instructions for his body to go to the university. It was with his health directive and a note from the university telling you whom to contact. I was going to leave the papers with the baggage—I thought you’d still be sleeping.’
‘When I’ve got a bird who’s better than any alarm clock?’ Alex complained, as Buddy swooped back from the deck to inspect the visitor.
‘He’s obviously disappointed I’m not Bruce,’ Will said, holding out his hand towards the bird, who eyed him cautiously for a moment before condescending to jump onto Will’s forearm.
Alex watched the little scene, curiously unsettled by it, not just Buddy on Will’s arm, but Will being here at all. But she could hardly leave him standing on the doorstep with her luggage.
