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Hope was startled awake the next morning from a dream-fuelled slumber by the sound of a whimper. She forced her eyes open. It was pitch-black and for a split second she had no idea where she was. The sound of crying grew louder, and she remembered.
The Anchorage.
She stared at the glowing red numbers on the digital clock on the bedside table. Three-sixteen. A second cry joined the first and footsteps padded down the hallway past her room. She debated getting up, but Courtney had said while Lachie was still home, Hope could stay in bed. Once he went back to his work schedule, Courtney would need all Hope’s help, especially for the middle of the night feeds and nappy changes.
She snuggled back under the heavy covers and listened to the patter of rain against the window. The weather had turned nasty overnight. After dinner, she’d sat watching a home renovation show on television with Margot and after Margot turned in, Hope had tried to read but was so tired the words had blurred on the screen. Eventually, just after ten-thirty, when the house was finally quiet, she showered, got into bed and was asleep before she knew it.
She rolled over onto her side and tried to catch the fragments of her dreams. Lachie had been in them. And Mitch. She exhaled slowly and failed to quell the rush of heat to her cheeks. After all these years, he’d returned to her dreams and all it had taken was returning to Macarthur Point.
Turning her pillow over, she focused on her breathing until she finally drifted back to sleep.
The next time she woke it was to the smell of coffee. She checked the time again. Seven-thirty-five. A much more civilised hour.
Swinging her legs out of bed she hopped to the ensuite. After a shower she went through her familiar routine of putting on her prosthetic leg before throwing on some clothes and slipping her feet into Ugg boots. She didn’t bother with makeup and simply pulled her hair into its usual messy topknot. Courtney and the babies wouldn’t care what she looked like.
After making the bed she opened the curtains. A stunning sunrise painted the sky a palette of bright blue and hot pink. She wasn’t a morning person, but it was worth getting up to see that.
She rounded the corner into the expansive kitchen. A collection of pots hung over the centre island from a suspended timber frame. The country-cottage look worked well with the grey shaker-style cabinets and marble counters. It was a lovely room, lit by flooding sunlight from French doors overlooking the garden. She’d always loved this part of the house.
Lachie was there, already dressed, making coffee. ‘Good morning. How’d you sleep?’
‘Like a baby,’ she said.
He chuckled. ‘Once you’ve had kids, you’ll learn that statement makes no sense. We were up every hour,’ he explained, ‘and I don’t think either of us slept more than about three hours each in total. Between feeds and nappy changes and burping, you finally get one of them to sleep and another one wakes up and wants to be fed and burped and changed. It’s a never-ending cycle.’
Guilt wormed through her. ‘Sorry Lachie, I could have helped. You should have woken me. That’s why I’m here. I heard them cry sometime around three, then I fell asleep again and didn’t hear another thing.’
‘It’s all good. We wanted you to have at least one night of sleep. I’m heading off to Geelong this morning for the next three days so you’re it.’ He passed her a cup of coffee like it was a baton. ‘I hope you’re up to it.’
‘Absolutely. I figure all those years of pulling night duty will make this a breeze.’
Lachie took his plate of toast and his cup of coffee over to the table. ‘That’s what you think. By the way, you left your phone out on the kitchen bench and it’s rung about four times in the past hour. I was about to come and wake you up in case it’s something important.’
Hope took her phone from Lachie. The battery was almost flat. Four missed calls and a text, all from the same number. Sean, her boss. When she’d handed in her resignation, he’d begged her to reconsider and promised her there was always a job waiting. She put the phone on silent before laying it face down on the bench. When she’d told Courtney and Margot about breaking up with Brett, she hadn’t mentioned she’d also quit her job. They presumed she’d taken long service leave and she hadn’t corrected them. It was nice that Sean wanted her back, but she needed this break.
Lachie nursed his coffee cup with both hands. Dark circles rimmed his eyes.
‘Still loving your job?’ he asked.
‘Actually, I resigned.’
Lachie’s head snapped up. ‘Not because of us?’
Hope shook her head. ‘I needed a change of scenery.’
He frowned. ‘I thought you loved it at RCH.’
‘I do. I did.’ Hope’s job as a paediatric oncology nurse at the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne had seemed like a dream job two years earlier, but the work was demanding both physically and mentally. ‘I love it, but some days the work gets to me. I love the kids, but the oncology side of it is depressing. I needed a break.’ It was partially the truth. Brett was the larger part of the equation.
Lachie nodded in understanding. ‘Yeah, I imagine it would. And what about you and Brett? Court told me you guys split up.’
‘Yeah. I needed a change of scenery from him too.’
Lachie raised an eyebrow.
‘It wasn’t working out,’ she said. The understatement of the century but all she was prepared to give away for now.
‘I thought you were planning on getting married.’
‘Brett was.’
Lachie tilted his head to look at her. ‘Was Brett the problem, or was the idea of marriage and staying in one place the thing that scared you?’
Hope ran her finger around the rim of her coffee mug. Lachie had always been perceptive, and although she didn’t mind him asking the tough questions, she wasn’t ready to tell anyone the real reason she’d left Brett. It was easier to just say they were two different people heading in different directions.
She put on a smile. ‘You know me, Lach. I can’t settle in one place and you’d need a rocket to get Brett to move from his cushy life in Melbourne.’ She grimaced. ‘I can’t imagine living in the same house in the same place for the rest of my life. It would kill me.’
‘You make it sound like a life sentence.’
It would have been, if she’d stayed with Brett. Or a death sentence.
Deep down Hope wanted what Lachie and Courtney shared, but she had no idea how to get it without giving in to a man and settling down in one place. The idea terrified her.
Lachie finished off his coffee before he spoke again. ‘Did Brett know you felt this way before you started going out with him?’
Hope nodded. ‘I told him that many times. He knew from day one I’m a nomad.’ She lifted a hand and let it fall. ‘Blame my parents. You know what they’re like. I lived in four countries and had twenty different addresses before I’d finished Year 12. I wouldn’t know what to do with myself if I had to stay in the one place for longer than a year or so.’
Lachie brushed stray toast crumbs off the table onto his plate and stood, taking his plate and empty mug to the dishwasher. ‘You make it sound like marriage is a trap.’
‘It’s not. It’s just . . .’ She let her voice trail off as she searched for the words to explain herself. ‘If I’d married Brett, I would have felt trapped. He wanted the whole marriage, nice house in a nice street with nice neighbours. He wanted to have kids, have more kids, buy an investment property, then another one. He wanted to holiday for two weeks in Bali every year then spend the rest of his holidays working around the house.’
Brett had seemed so normal and predictable when she first met him, but it was a façade she’d never noticed until it was almost too late.
‘He seemed like a nice enough guy.’
Hope pinched her lips. Brett wasn’t a nice guy. He was a control freak. If Courtney and Lachie had known the real Brett, they would have urged her to run a lot earlier. Brett’s inflexibility wasn’t the only reason she’d left him.
Lachie seemed to sense she didn’t want to say any more. ‘You know you’re welcome here as long as you need, okay?’
She smiled. ‘Thanks, Lachie, I appreciate that. But, like I said to Courtney, I won’t stay for too long. I know the saying goes that guests are like fish—they go off after three days, so I’ll be sure I don’t overstay my welcome.’
Lachlan laughed. ‘Just remember, you are family, not a guest.’ He kissed the top of her head before leaving the room.
After Lachlan left to go to the supermarket, Hope checked on Courtney and the babies. They were all sound asleep, so she let them be. The shower was going in another part of the house, which meant Margot was up also.
The tug to get out of the house and explore Macarthur Point was too hard to resist. Grabbing the keys to Courtney’s car, she left a note to say she’d gone for a drive.
Once outside, she inhaled deeply. The air was cold and heavy with the smell of more rain. She wrapped her scarf tighter around her neck and headed for the garage. A quick drive was what she needed. Sitting still for too long was a struggle.
As she drove down the familiar roads leading from The Anchorage to the beach, she began thinking about Brett and the night she knew with hundred percent clarity she had to leave him. She’d felt like such an idiot that night. She’d been raised in countries where women were assaulted for being women and because of that she’d always been vigilant of her surroundings, never walking alone at night and always making sure people knew where she was. She thought she knew how to be careful, but she never thought the person she most needed to fear was the one she was sleeping with.
She clenched her hands around the steering wheel then released her grip. No point dwelling on the past. She’d learned that lesson early in life. Sometimes crap happened and it was best just to move on. If she focused on the past, her mistakes would hound her.
Mistake number one was believing Brett was something that he was not. She shut the door firmly on the memories and slid the bolt into place. Brett was her past and the future was in front of her. What did it matter that she had no idea what it looked like?
When she came to a crossroad, she slowed the car. If she turned left, she’d end up at the beach. If she went right, it would take her inland through the Otways which eventually opened to rolling green hills and farmland.
She chose right. The beach could wait for another day.
Some people preferred the beach, but Hope loved the mountains and the bush. She loved the way the massive gum trees grew straight and tall, side by side, the canopy of leaves fighting each other for sunshine. She also loved this part of the Victorian coastline and the way the dense bush gave way to cleared paddocks and farmland. Woodsmoke hung in the air, the way it would until mid-October. It was always a couple of degrees cooler up here.
She steered Courtney’s car carefully, mindful that it cost way more than her cheap run-around that she’d left parked outside a friend’s place in Melbourne. The road was narrow, and the edges were potholed and jagged after all the rain, and the last thing she needed was to run off the road.
She emerged from the trees at the top of the hill and neatly fenced paddocks appeared on either side of the road. Cows and sheep dotted the landscape. To her left was a large paddock which sloped up, away from the road. At the top of the paddock, near a copse of gum trees that surrounded a farmhouse, a herd of black cattle stood, many with calves at their side. She smiled. She’d always loved black cows best.
She slowed, pulled off to the side of the road and got out. Using her phone, she snapped a few photos. Everything was so green and pretty. She spotted a lone cow, well away from the others. It kept lying down then getting up again. As it stood, turning slow circles with its tail in the air, Hope’s heart started to pound. If she wasn’t mistaken, what she was looking at was a birth sac hanging from the back of the cow. Her heart raced. How cool. She was about to see a calf being born.
She got as close to the fence as she could, but far enough away so as not to scare the cow. An icy wind whipped across the paddocks, scattering leaves and branches along the road and she shivered. Setting her phone to video mode, she waited, ready to capture the moment the calf was born. After watching for a few minutes, she frowned. Not that she knew a single thing about calving, but the cow was bellowing and turning in circles as if it was in distress.
She stopped videoing, opened a web browser on her phone and searched for signs and symptoms of a cow about to give birth. There was so much conflicting advice that she gave up. Better to call a vet. She searched for local vet clinics and called the first number that popped up.
‘Macarthur Point Animal Hospital.’
She didn’t bother to introduce herself. ‘There’s a cow giving birth and she looks like she’s in trouble.’
‘Where?’ the man asked.
‘Gellibrand Road at the top of Lavers Hill.’ Hope looked around, searching for anything that would identify exactly where she was. There were no street numbers out here. To her right was a gate leading to another property. ‘I’m parked at the farm opposite the entrance to Chapel Vale. It’s . . .’
‘I know Chapel Vale. I’m about half an hour away.’
‘Hurry.’
Hope pocketed her phone and went back to the car to sit and wait in the warmth. She glanced down at her canvas sneakers. She wasn’t dressed for traipsing around paddocks but there was no way she wanted to miss this, so she did a U-turn and drove quickly back home. With any luck she could get there and back, and not miss the birth.