Hudson had pulled out his magnifying glass and was finding ants to study, while Daisy lined up dominos to stand in a row only to have them fall again and again. Sunlight beamed through the open window next to them, lighting up their hair with shimmers of gold. Midnight squirmed in Sunny’s lap—she was now firmly an inside dog, under lock and key.
What Dave had done…
Sunny had never been someone who found life frightening. Quite the opposite. Yet in a very short amount of time, Dave had brought her to her knees. The stakes were simply too high. She was a nervous wreck. She had no faith in the law; it was up to her to protect them.
As she watched her children play, her mind reeled back to that day in Sydney when her life changed forever.
Lara, having had a seven-week scan, knew that there was not just one baby, but two. She’d been crying for days in the dingy one-bedroom flat they’d rented, engines revving almost constantly outside the windows, the men in the street frequently shirtless, the women pushing strollers and smoking. The deep scratches on her wrist looked red and inflamed. Sunny had been trying to convince Lara to at least put antiseptic cream on them, but Lara wasn’t interested in taking care of herself. She hadn’t showered for three days, and had barely touched the food Sunny cooked for her.
Lara was folded over on the couch with her head on her knees, her hands in her greasy hair, scratching at her scalp as though trying to dig through to the terrible thoughts in there and pull them out.
‘I thought I could do it,’ she whispered.
Sunny rubbed her back, feeling her own sanity tested to the limits. How long could this go on?
‘But I can’t.’
Sunny nodded silently, though she knew Lara couldn’t see her. She had no idea if Lara was referring to the abortion or to having the babies. On the issue of having the babies, she had to agree. Right now, given what Lara had been through with Dave, her sister wasn’t in a fit state to raise one baby, let alone two.
A termination made all practical sense.
And yet.
Watching the ultrasound, Sunny had felt something deep for those twins—little blobs, with blobby heads and blobby bellies, blobbing along together in their watery home. Just blobs.
But they were her blobs too.
Those babies shared her genes. They were as close to being her own babies as they could possibly be.
Lara bolted upright then, her pupils huge, her hands shaking. ‘Help me. Please help me,’ she begged, and grabbed Sunny’s shirt, tearing it at the collar. ‘I can’t kill them.’ She shook her head wildly, till Sunny restrained her so she didn’t hurt herself. Lara stilled under her hands. And then she broke down. A wild, primal, animal wail erupted. ‘But I can’t be their mother either.’ She collapsed into Sunny’s lap, rigid.
Sunny took a deep breath and looked at the 1970s-brown curtains covering the barred window. They’d hit bottom. For a second, she was seduced by the darkness that was engulfing Lara, tempted to fall apart and drown in it too.
But the thing with the darkness, she learned that day, was that it only made the light shine brighter. Suddenly, it was all very clear.
‘I’ll do it,’ she said. She nodded strongly to herself, to the darkness that was waiting to ruin them both, and to Lara. ‘I’ll be their mother.’
Lara sat up, her eyes bloodshot, red-rimmed, puffy. She wiped her arm across her nose. ‘What?’
‘I’d hardly be the first to do it. It’s been done all through history, aunts raising babies as their own. Half the royal family’s probably got dubious bloodlines. And none of it makes a bit of difference.’
Meaning. Her life suddenly had meaning. All the drifting she’d done, all the rubbish relationships, all the waiting for…something. That something was here. Sunny was thirty-two years old, and this was where life had led her.
‘You’ll do it?’ Lara squeaked.
‘Yes!’ Sunny said, suddenly smiling. She put her hand on Lara’s abdomen. ‘If you want me to, of course. It is your choice, Sprout,’ she affirmed, though she was hoping beyond hope that Lara wouldn’t choose to abort them. ‘Only you can decide your future,’ she said gently.
Lara looked down at Sunny’s hand, then covered it with her own. ‘Oh, Sunny.’ And then she crumpled over and slept for sixteen hours, a deep peaceful slumber, as though knowing that everything would be okay.
While Lara had slept, Sunny sat nearby, guarding her, and talking to those little blobs. Those two little blobs that had grown up into these laughing, cheeky, inquisitive children in front of her now.
Dave could destroy them all.
Martha’s opinion was that Lara’s medical records would stand for little in court as a way to keep Dave from the kids. And she had a mental illness. Dave was a respected physician and any day now he would know that Lara and Sunny had committed fraud by naming Sunny as the mother on the birth certificates.
It had been stupidly easy. No one asked Lara to prove her identity when she went to the doctor or to the hospital. They only asked for a Medicare card. That was it. Sunny handed over hers and Lara became Sunny for a while. The babies were born to Sunny Foxleigh and they stayed that way. When the sisters registered the birth, the paperwork simply asked for copies of identification documents—mother’s passport, birth certificate and so on—and the signature from the midwife that the babies were born to Sunny Foxleigh, which, as far as the nurse knew, was true. Sunny presented all her documents and that was that.
The intention had been to hide the children from Dave. Formal adoptions left paper trails and laws seemed to change all the time about freedom of information around sperm donations, open adoptions, surrogacy and the like. Hiding down in Sydney, keeping the pregnancy away from Dave’s eyes, it seemed the simplest, cleanest thing they could do to stop him from finding them. But now Dave could take them to court to prove paternity and then ask for amended birth certificates naming him as the father. And then their fraud would come to light and Sunny and Lara would be in even more trouble.
Dave must not get his hands on her children. Sunny had failed in protecting Lara from him. He had tortured her. The revelations had taken years to all come out, and whenever they did, they gave Eliza and Sunny nightmares for weeks. And they knew the man would never change.
There was no way in hell he was ever going to touch her children. She would do whatever it took to protect them, or die trying.
Given the options available to her, the answer was simple. She had to take them and hide. She could take them on a road trip, and Dave wouldn’t be able to find her, delaying court proceedings again. She’d be gone long enough that he’d hopefully get bored and, regrettably, find another victim to torment. Because that was what men like Dave did. They destroyed one life and moved on to another.
But even if he kept trying to get the kids, the one thing she could hope for was that the older the kids got, the less likely it was that a court would take them away from their mother. From her. She had to buy as much time as possible. Years, if necessary.
She’d long ago bought an ageing but reliable Ford Falcon, a model with not many comforts but a lot of grunt, and it had a tow bar for towing the furniture pieces she picked up for her work. It was capable of towing a caravan.
Sunny spent a total of thirty minutes considering the difficulties—money, homeschooling, sharing the caravan with an energetic puppy, not having Eliza with them—wondering if she should be trying to talk herself out of the plan. But she was a good problem-solver, a capable child carer and talented handywoman and she poured a mean beer: that should be enough to get her started with some odd jobs. She was a gypsy at heart. She got out her laptop, typed in long-term caravan hire and watched as the screen filled with websites.