Orla had told her agent she wasn’t coming back. Not now, not ever.
She neglected to say that of course she’d be attending the Melbourne wedding of Mamabear and Jim, because that was something an agent didn’t need to know. And nor did her agent need to know that Orla had successfully auditioned for her first role in a stage play, the lead as it happened, with pages and pages of lines.
Orla would have to drive nearly an hour to rehearsals, but that seemed a small price to pay. Wouldn’t a girl do anything for her first serious role? She smiled to herself. No, she wouldn’t do anything. If she didn’t like it, she wouldn’t do it again. And she was under no illusion that her part would lead to fame and fortune, but she didn’t care.
She’d cleaned the cottage and packed her bags, and now she was waiting at the gate to Lilyfields. It was one of those beautiful winter’s afternoons they’d had so many of this year: crisp, blue, and refreshing. There wasn’t a breath of wind, and if she held her own breath she fancied she could hear every movement of life in the length of the valley, from the scurrying of insects in the fallen logs to the snap of a twig when it was stepped on by a young hare. All fancy of course.
She looked up the road to see Michael’s SUV rounding the corner. He pulled up by the letterbox and helped her to load her bags.
‘My, you don’t travel light,’ he teased.
‘Nope. Not anymore.’ She jumped into the passenger seat and put on her seatbelt.
As Michael drove away from Lilyfields towards the summit, she looked down on the empty cottage, abandoned to the bright sunshine and the stunning winter view of the mountains across the sea.
No, not abandoned: that’s how she would have felt if she’d been leaving the Peninsula for good. But she wasn’t. She was only going up the hill, then down the other side to Kukupa House. A mere half-hour at the most, depending on how many tourists had decided to stop their cars smack in the middle of the road in order to take photographs.
This particular trip turned out to be free of the nasty surprise of coming around a tight bend to find a car parked on the white centre-line, and soon Michael was driving up between the trees to the shepherd’s cottage. In deference to Orla, he’d agreed to live there, rather than in the other, bigger, but far less romantic cottage on the property.
He pulled up outside the front door. Oh, the shepherd’s cottage was such a darling — almost as sweet as Lilyfields. No doubt when she and Michael had made it their home for the same length of time, the ‘almost’ would drop from her description.
‘Okay, this is it,’ Michael declared. ‘As soon as we’ve gone inside, we’ll have moved in together. Sure you don’t want to change your mind?’
In reply, Orla leaned over and kissed him on the lips.
They both got out of the car, and Orla was about to unload her bags from the back when Michael scooped her up into his arms.
‘Hey, what are you doing?’ she cried as he carried her towards the front door.
‘Gotta carry you across the threshold,’ he announced, puffing melodramatically. ‘Wow, way too much sourdough!’
She punched him playfully on the shoulder and said, ‘You shouldn’t be doing this — we’re not married.’
‘Is that a proposal?’ he asked.
‘It might be,’ she laughed. ‘If you’re very good.’