Tess picked Rachael up from the station at five that afternoon, after a train journey across the mountains and out to Parkes that had seemed as long as the flight from Paris.
“Why are you on the train?” was Tess’s greeting when Rachael had called ahead. “I thought you were getting a lift?”
“There wasn’t room,” Rachael had lied.
The first five minutes of the drive to the farm passed in painful silence. The fields slid by, some newly planted, others showing the remains of the harvest stalks still standing as they waited. Rachael had scheduled her own plant to start in a couple of days, pending a weather check. She’d planned it like that partly as insurance in case she needed something to take her mind off the wedding. Her fancy Parisian nails were all gone now, and she’d chewed the newly grown stubs underneath back to pink.
“So,” Tess finally said, “aren’t you going to tell me how it was?”
“It was okay.” Rachael’s voice was flat.
“You go all the way to Paris and it’s just ‘okay’? What happened to the handsome man?”
“Later, Tess.”
When they rolled into the drive, Rachael could see her niece Emily and nephew Felix playing outside the shed. She told Tess she was exhausted, which was true. As she carried her case into the house, her body ached as though she’d aged twenty years. A food-splattered high chair was half pulled into the kitchen table. Toys were strewn across the lounge, a dump truck sitting in her mother’s chair. Rachael turned away from the window so she wouldn’t have to look at her mother’s tree.
In her room, she pulled the curtains closed. After the opulence of the Maison Lutetia, the simple bed frame, hand-made quilt, and threadbare carpet seemed to belong to an entirely different universe. She imagined her room in Paris still strewn with the evidence of her swift departure, the Bvlgari watch left on the bed, and wondered whether someone might puzzle over what had happened, like the picture Antonio had shown her in the Louvre.
She tried not to think about the offers that Yvette, Antonio, and Bonnie had made. The idea that she’d lost those opportunities through her own stupidity was too awful to contemplate. Would she otherwise have been heading to London to work at a magazine? Or helping Bonnie organize the fundraiser fashion show? Or applying for an internship with a designer? She’d been offered so many different new lives and given them all up for a lie.
Rachael bit her lip and snorted back the tears. Maybe she could drive out of town in a flurry of dust. Turn up the highway and just keep going—past Dubbo, all the way to the Queensland border and beyond—and never come back.
Only her ties to the farm stopped her. Unless a tornado blew in overnight, the planting would start in two days and she couldn’t leave Tess and Joel to do everything. Joel had already managed the preplanting weed control so she could go to Paris. No matter how ashamed she was, Rachael would always have the fields to care for, and the sooner she resigned herself to that fate, the better off she’d be. She had to harden up and get on with it.
* * *
After a restless, jet-lagged night, she dragged herself out of bed just after six thirty, the sun still a squashed apricot on the eastern horizon. Today, all the equipment needed going over and the plans and seed-density calculations had to be rechecked.
Tess was already in the kitchen with the news radio turned up, dropping batches of bread in the toaster as the kids climbed on and off the kitchen table chairs, spreading crumbs. The baby was in the high chair, happily smearing shredded wheat across the tray.
“Is Joel up?” Rachael asked.
“Good morning to you too,” Tess replied, dropping a tea bag into the bin. “He’s been up for an hour already making a start.”
“He didn’t have to do that. You could have gone home. I had seasonal workers booked for this.”
“Well,” Tess said, her ponytail swinging as she turned around to spread Vegemite on another slice, “lucky we did stay. What would have happened if you’d run off? Just let the fields sit fallow?”
Rachael blinked, wondering how on earth Tess knew. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Really? You know I don’t like listening to gossip, but for pity’s sake, what were you—” Tess broke off and held up a hand. “It doesn’t matter. I’m not going to repeat anything I’ve heard. Let’s just forget it.”
Appetite lost, Rachael poured her tea away, hot shame burning her up. Crumbs stuck to the soles of her feet. Emily was feeding a piece of toast into the slot of Marion’s Heinz 1957 money box. Rachael extracted it and was rewarded with screaming.
“Just let her have it,” Tess said.
“It’s Mum’s vintage money box,” Rachael protested, wetting a cloth to wipe away the globs of butter.
“She shouldn’t have had it down there with kids around,” Tess argued. “And don’t hover with a cloth like I don’t know how to clean up.”
Rachael wanted to yell that she didn’t need Tess hanging around, judging her too. She’d planned for the planting weeks ago and Tess had been so strident about them leaving as soon as Rachael was back. She didn’t understand why they were staying longer. Instead, aware of her nieces and nephew watching, Rachael capped her boiling temper and backed out.
She found Joel in the office poring over the weather report, his big shoulders hunched awkwardly in the chair.
Still shaking with annoyance at Tess, Rachael pulled down a sheaf of plans. “Don’t let me hold you up if you want to get back home,” she said. “I’m okay to run the plant myself.”
“Boss is in control on that one,” Joel said. “Think she likes the place. Besides, with the rain situation we’re still a few weeks off any planting at home. And cleaning the equipment after is a shit job. Happy to lend a hand.”
Rachael went out into the fields. Her feet crunched through the stubble as she turned her face into the gusting wind, trying to read the indecisive sky. The rhythms of the farm, the sunrise and set, the wind and rain—they had always defined the edges and substance of her life. Yet now the smell of the earth and the air, the shape of the clouds, even the color of the fields seemed veiled and foreign, as if the part of her that understood their meaning had withered to the root.
She didn’t go back to the house until lunchtime, and found everyone around the kitchen table.
“Do you normally just mosey around the day before planting?” Tess demanded. “Joel needed to run some errands.”
“It’s fine,” Joel said around a wad of bread.
“It’s not fine. We came to cover for you so you could go to Paris and now you’re taking us for granted.”
Joel shot Rachael an apologetic look.
She glanced at Felix and Emily, but they seemed occupied with putting holes through their bread and making mustaches with slices of cheese. The baby watched her siblings, giggling with glee.
“If you need to go home, I’m not stopping you,” she said, and retreated to the study, trying to get her mind back to the planting.
She could hear Tess crashing dishes around the kitchen sink, muttering. The children had been banished to the verandah. Rachael stared at a list of seed densities and soil moisture content results, all the time wondering how long Tess would take to leave.
“Knock, knock.” Joel stood in the doorway. “She doesn’t mean it, so don’t take it personal,” he said, as if he’d heard her thoughts. He glanced over his shoulder, then stepped inside and gently pulled the door shut behind him. “She’s just stressed about things up north.”
Rachael slid the sheet of paper back into the pile. “On the farm, you mean?”
“Yeah. We’re pretty close to the wall there, Rach.”
She looked up in surprise. “I know you said you were going to be late to plant, but—”
“We’ve had lean years these last few. We didn’t get enough rain, and then prices were low—you know the story. I bought new equipment to help us plant faster, but that drained the capital, and the place was only marginally profitable in the good years. I should have waited. Or used the money on some new bores. But that’s all hindsight now. We can’t take on debt with little hope of repaying it, so I’ve been looking for a buyer the past year. No takers yet.”
Rachael paused, letting it sink in that Tess and Joel were about to lose their home. “I had no idea.”
“Yep. Well, we didn’t want to say anything. Been hoping it would turn around. Your mum did the right thing here going to no-till. She was a smart woman, how she slowly built things over the years. Production’s still good here even in a dry year.”
“What are you going to do?”
He shrugged. “Depends if we can get a fair price. Whoever buys it will need to put some money in.”
Rachael’s mind raced to her bank balances. They weren’t huge, but if it would help. “If there’s anything I can do, Joel.”
“I know. But I’m not telling you ’cause I want something. Just didn’t want you thinking Tess is on your case. She was really leveled by your mum’s passing, but she’s been trying to hold everything together, pretending it doesn’t matter so much. Don’t say anything—you know how proud she is.”
The plans rested in Rachael’s lap, forgotten. Instead, she saw Tess crying in their mother’s room two days after the funeral. She sighed.
The kitchen had gone quiet. A moment later, the door swung in and hit Joel in the back.
“Oof!”
“Why’re you standing behind the door?” Tess demanded.
Joel ducked out without a word, leaving the sisters facing each other.
“Thought you were planning for tomorrow,” Tess said, wiping her hands on a tea towel.
“Just finishing.”
“Well, good, because before we go I want to sort out some of Mum’s things.”
“Tess . . .” Rachael tried to find the words to approach her sister about her own farm without ratting out Joel for telling her, but nothing would come.
“Rachael, it’s been months. Her walk-in closet is still full, and her dressing table hasn’t been touched. This isn’t healthy.”
“I’m not ready,” Rachael said. “There’s no rule about how long that takes.”
“It’s all gathering dust. And mold. Tell me the last time you looked at any of it? I’m not waiting anymore.”
“Tess, no!”
Rachael leapt up and ran after Tess. She overtook her in the hall and made it first to their mother’s room. She stood stupidly in the doorway.
Tess uttered a frustrated noise. “I don’t understand why you don’t want to sort it out. You had your trip overseas. Now you need to move on. Find a man, have your kids.”
Rachael saw tears in Tess’s eyes. Any retorts she might have thrown at her sister to mind her own business dissolved like rain clouds in a dry year. She knew how proud Tess was to be a farmer’s wife, and now that life was falling away from under her. Rachael could understand what that was like. For the first time, she saw Tess’s fear and hurt and uncertainty. That her intrusions were a way of controlling the things she could while being at the mercy of everything else.
Rachael counted her own blessings. Joel was right—this farm was doing okay. She might have wished to reclaim her lost years or go to university, but she’d made a grave mistake in Paris, and those dreams were the price. Her mother had made a good life for herself here on the farm. Maybe it was time to give in and make peace with that.
Rachael let the tension out of her body and conceded. “Maybe you’re right. I know it was a while ago, but what was that you mentioned about Joel’s cousin?”
Tess paused, clearly flummoxed. “I thought you’d forgotten about that.”
Rachael firmly closed the door to their mother’s room. “Maybe you could set us up after all.”
* * *
“His name’s Harrison. He’ll call you,” a delighted Tess told Rachael after she’d hung up the phone not ten minutes later.
Harrison did, before the hour was out. Rachael wasn’t sure if he was overly keen or just scared witless of Tess, but on the phone he had a deep voice and sounded amiable enough. She was slightly encouraged.
“I’m sorry, the plant’s about to start,” she had to say when he asked when they could meet. “It’s going to be flat out for a while from tomorrow.”
“How about dinner today, then?”
Rachael glanced at Tess, who was hovering in the doorway, and agreed. They arranged to meet up in Parkes for an early café dinner.
Harrison rolled up in a dusty truck wearing a good checked shirt with his hair still wet from the shower. “You must be Rachael,” he said, climbing down. He wasn’t bad-looking. Nice eyes, and he smelled of aftershave and soap. “Thanks for making it short notice. Might not have managed to meet up for weeks otherwise. I know how it can get around plant.”
“Must be a good sign,” Rachael said with a small kernel of hope.
They took a table, talking shop because that was safe. Rachael could hear herself speaking about the farm, about the advantages of dedicated tramlines or their weed-control regimen, but she wasn’t quite within her own body. She wished she wasn’t constantly reminded of how this wasn’t Paris and it wasn’t Antonio sitting across from her. Her heart dipped a little each time she thought of him.
“Jailhouse Rock” began pumping through the café speakers and Harrison—or rather Harry as he’d asked to be called—said, “Elvis is a big thing around here. I looked in on the festival back in January. Never seen anything like it.”
“It’s a Parkes thing,” Rachael said. “Up in Milton we’ve got Bernie Collins and his bakery.”
“That’s Blue Suede Choux, right? I remember it. Did you know they had an Elvis dinner out at the big Dish? It was good fun. Nice to be in a place with some personality.”
Rachael smiled around the ache in her chest. She loved home, but Paris had shown her how much bigger the world was. The conversation faltered for ten minutes.
“Tess says your farm’s been running no-till for a good while,” Harry finally said, trying to steer back to neutral ground.
They recovered slightly, talking about the relative virtues of plowing versus not, and then more about Harry’s cherry orchard, then a bit more about their families.
Then he said, “Tess mentioned you just had a trip to Paris.”
Rachael pushed her half-eaten pasta around her plate. “Yes.”
“Must have been quite something.”
“It was.”
He waited expectantly, but Rachael was incapable of describing any of the things she’d seen. It all reminded her of Antonio, or Yvette, or that little dressmaking studio near the Arc de Triomphe. Her reluctance put him at a distance and so the little kernel of hope never germinated. Conversation dwindled until she and Harry were both politely looking out the windows, or talking about the weather. Rachael knew it was her fault; she kept imagining herself in Tess’s life—on the farm with a husband and children—and couldn’t shake a need to run away.
They parted amiably, but without organizing to meet again.
* * *
“What happened?” Tess asked when Rachael walked in the door. “I thought you’d be out for hours yet.”
“It was okay,” Rachael said, but her disappointment was dark and deep. She went to her room and didn’t come out, despite Tess sending Joel to ask if she wanted tea.
Tomorrow’s work loomed. Rachael paced around like a prisoner, straightening her bedspread, reorganizing her drawers. Finally, needing some kind of catharsis, she dropped to the carpet and opened her dresser’s bottom drawer. She pulled out a photo of her and Matthew from their last school dance. Rachael looked absurdly young, her face soft and round and unlined. Her cheeks didn’t have that roundness now, and a curved line was etched from the outside edge of her nose down to her mouth.
She put the photo aside and dug underneath for more. She found Matthew, Bernie, and a group of friends all dressed as Elvis; and another of Matthew in just his shorts about to jump into the waterhole, head back and arms spread, brave and carefree.
She pulled out the pile of letters. Some were just notes they’d passed in school; others were from the first half of the year he went away, when Rachael had written every week and so had he . . . at first. After a while he’d argued that email was so much easier, even though the farm’s connection was often on the blink. She reread some of them, but couldn’t feel any fondness now. They just sounded immature and dreamy, thoughts from another life.
She added them to the photos, and the rest of the drawer followed: little velvet bags and boxes of jewelry he had given her, a smooth river stone she’d picked up the first time they’d gone to the waterhole, a dozen other obsessive reminders of their relationship.
What a joke. Matthew had never apologized for his actions, for misleading her. Had never even tried to make it right.
In the very bottom of the drawer was Matthew’s senior jersey, carefully folded and wrapped in acid-free tissue paper. He’d given it to her when he was accepted into medical school, the same night they’d made love out in the field. Rachael had fallen asleep holding it for months afterward. Now, she didn’t want to touch it. It smelled of the same cologne he’d been wearing in Paris.
She bundled all of the keepsakes into a bag, wanting to burn them. And yet she couldn’t bring herself to do it. Despite everything—leaving her, lying to her, leading her on, undoing all her chances of something new—she remembered him sitting in that rowboat and saying he still loved her. All the wrongs he’d done her should have burned him out of her like fire through stubble. Instead, the sadness of what could have been, and her own lack of insight, lingered.
Rachael put the bag back in the drawer. She would keep it to remind her in five years, in ten, in twenty, what a folly it was to think you could go back.
She stood and stretched. On the dresser was a framed photo of her and Sammy as teenagers, gray with mud after swimming in a low dam, both squinting their eyes and grinning at the camera. For the third time, she picked up her phone, and again the call switched straight to voice mail. Rachael hung up—she’d already left two messages—and sank onto her dresser chair. She was rigid with jet lag and despair, incapable of sleep. She might be able to bear losing everything but the farm, but not without the friend she’d had since school.
She tore out three pages from an old exercise book and uncapped a pen with fingers that trembled with fatigue. Dear Sammy, she began.
An hour later, the letter was done. Rachael pushed it into the pocket of her jeans. Tomorrow, she told herself, after the long day of planting, she would drive over to Sammy’s. If her friend wouldn’t talk to her, maybe she would read the letter instead.
* * *
Rachael woke at dawn. When she went outside, the sky was all gold and pale blue, the fields rolling away all around, the air crisp on her cheeks as the birds sang their chorus. Planting day had always inspired her—going out and running over every inch of the fields, coming back in the breaks to update her mother on their progress. In earlier years, Marion had watched with binoculars from the verandah, or even hobbled down to the shed with the aid of her walking stick, bringing a thermos of tea and a packet of cookies, which Rachael, hot and dry, would polish off without guilt. Last year, Marion had slept until after noon, and Rachael had paid a seasonal worker to take over in the middle of the day so she could get her mother up, showered, dressed, and seated in her chair. Still, she had determinedly worked until dark.
Now, despite the glorious day, Rachael could summon neither inspiration nor enthusiasm. She was running purely on habit. She checked the weather reports, and was backing the tractor to hitch the drill when Joel came down to the shed with two mugs of coffee.
“Keen,” he said. “You want me to kick off?”
Rachael climbed down from the cab. “No need. I’ll take it until ten, then could you take over for thirty? I’ll take it back after that.”
“You’ll need a longer break than half an hour.”
She paused. “Well, maybe an hour, and I can make a trip into Milton.”
She didn’t make it through to ten. Just before nine, when she turned the drill for a run back toward the house, she saw Sammy’s green hatch with the mismatched door panel coming down the driveway. She instantly killed the tractor engine and was down from the cab in a second, running across the field. The car pulled up on the drive, and Rachael skidded to a stop when Marty unexpectedly climbed out.
He squinted at her like someone who’d been flushed out of a dark place by torchlight, his cap pulled low, brow furrowed. But unlike the last time Rachael had seen him, he was also clean-shaven, his shirt tucked in, and clearly on a mission.
“Have you seen Sammy?” were his opening words. “She didn’t come back last night.”
How much had Sammy told him?
“Ah, no.”
“Shit. I thought she’d be here. I’ve checked everywhere else.”
“I haven’t seen her since the plane from Paris. I don’t know if she said anything, but we had a fight. She hasn’t been answering my calls.”
Marty took off his cap and rubbed at his hair. “Us too, yesterday. She wasn’t happy after she got back. Did something happen over there? She rang me almost every day and said she was having a great time. Made a change from the last year. She’s been upset about this business thing for a while, you know, ’cause money’s been tight and we had to wait, but I thought she was over it. I don’t understand.”
“Um . . .” Rachael couldn’t say anything about Peter; that wasn’t her place. “I’m not sure. She didn’t say anything?”
“Not a word. Took off after the spat. I guess she caught a lift with someone. I mean, it’s Milton. Where’s she gonna go?”
“Did you check at the motel?” Rachael asked. “And with Bernie?”
“Yeah. The motel says she’s supposed to be on later today, but Bernie says he hasn’t seen her since they drove back from Sydney. The cops reckon it’s too soon to worry, especially as it’s happened before.”
“What did— Wait, it’s happened before?”
Marty shrugged, then looked away, embarrassed. “Uh, yeah. Twice in the last few months. But she said she’d stayed at the motel.”
Rachael put a hand to her forehead. She stank of sweat and dirt, and dust and straw coated the inside of her nose. Her hands were numb from the vibration in the cab. She glanced at the drill, immobile in the field, at the acres and acres left to go. And yet all she could think was, Where the hell was Sammy? She obviously hadn’t said anything to Marty about Peter or the baby.
“I’ll look,” she said. “I’ll call you.”
Marty thanked her and turned for the car.
The letter was a lump in Rachael’s pocket. She dropped her pretense of calm and made for the big shed, where she ran straight into Joel.
“Whoa,” he said. “Don’t tell me the drill’s packed it in?”
“Sammy’s missing. I know there’s so much to do, but no one’s seen her and—”
“You want to split?” Joel said, holding up the keys for the truck. “Needs fuel anyway.”
“You’re the best,” she said, kissing him on the cheek.
Two minutes later, she was flying down the drive, alive for the first time since Paris. She couldn’t do anything about her own wrongs, but she could find Sammy.
* * *
Rachael’s first idea was to head to the motel in Parkes and wait for Sammy to come in for work.
“Called in sick,” complained the owner, who was manning the reception himself and seemed rather oversize for the job, his generous gut upsetting the printer tray every time he turned for his coffee cup. “Though can’t say I’m that convinced.”
“When did she call?”
“An hour ago. Which gives me such ample time to call in someone else.”
Rachael left him to his sarcasm. While she was relieved Sammy wasn’t lying in a ditch somewhere, she still wasn’t answering her phone. Her parents lived in Bathurst, but Rachael knew Sammy wouldn’t go there even if she was paid. But after fueling the pickup and visiting all her favorite places in Parkes, Rachael was running out of ideas. Maybe Sammy had bought a bus ticket after all.
She even drove out to the Dish, and found the visitor center deserted except for a small clutch of tourists.
“You want to buy a ticket?” called the counter staff as Rachael stuck her head inside the theater.
In desperation, she turned back for Milton and, after a slow drive past the shops, and taking a moment to bury her shame, pulled up in the residential streets behind. Bernie answered the door wearing a half-finished rhinestone Elvis suit, a set of bifocals balanced on the tip of his sweating nose. “Rachael!” he said with a grin that held no trace of reserve or disapproval.
Rachael let go of a huge tension she’d been carrying. Even after seeing her in the lobby with Matthew, Bernie was exactly the same.
“New costume?” she asked.
“Started it yonks ago,” Bernie said, rolling a fat crystal between his fingers. “But these things and the hot glue are sending me bats. Stuck three fingers together already. Come in. I’ll put the kettle on.”
“Thanks, but I won’t stay. I’m just looking for Sammy. Marty says he can’t find her.”
“I know, he asked me already. We thought she was out at your place.”
Rachael shook her head.
“I did wonder if you’d had a tiff when she said you were making your own way home,” he added.
“Do you have any idea where—”
“Your eyes are better than mine,” Bernie interrupted, proffering the rhinestone with glue-spattered fingers. “Is that blue or cobalt?”
“I couldn’t say.”
“And this? Yellow or amber? I got the packets all mixed up.”
This was all very odd. Bernie didn’t seem at all worried about Sammy. Almost like he knew he didn’t have to be.
Rachael reached into her pocket. “Bernie, can you please give this to Sammy if you see her?”
He took the letter with his gluey right hand, then, finding it stuck, transferred it to the clean left one. He frowned. “Rach, it’s not serious, is it? This argument between the two of you?”
Rachael’s lip wavered. “I hope not. But it’s really important I find her.”
Bernie offered the letter back. “When a man gives his word not to say anything, it’s important not to break it. But if you were to ask me if I’d given Sammy a lift to the creek drive and I didn’t say anything, well, I wouldn’t have said anything, would I?”
Rachael stared at him. “Are you saying . . .”
“I’m not saying nothing,” he said, tapping his nose.
Hope bloomed in Rachael’s chest. “If you see Beverley, tell her I’m sorry too.”
“What for?” he called after her, but Rachael was already gone.
She raced the truck back home. The creek drive was one turnoff up the highway from the farm gate and had once led to a pump station at the river. The road had been disused for years and was overgrown and undrivable, but it provided an easy walking track to the waterhole if you knew where you were going. But the walk took at least half an hour.
Rachael ran to the shed and leapt on a trail bike. Across the far field, she could see Joel running a straight line with the drill, swirling dust obscuring the tractor’s wheels like a magic trick.
She pulled up at the edge of the river trees, knowing that if Sammy was here she’d have heard the bike. Rachael climbed to the highest rock over the water and scanned the area. The breeze softly whistled between the rocks, and the creek burbled into the pool. It was such a long way from the Seine: this was a wild waterway, one never likely to be settled, at least not by many. But Rachael needed only one person.
Please, she thought, please be here. She couldn’t fail at this too. A real friend would have known that something was badly wrong in Sammy’s life, and Rachael hadn’t. She would have given up again every chance she’d squandered on the Paris trip to spare Sammy feeling that she needed to run.
“Sammy!” she called.
An echo came back, but no reply.
Rachael couldn’t see any signs of someone being here—no tent or scraps or wet marks by the pool.
She climbed down and circled through the trees. The tumbled boulders and trunks made lots of blind spots, but she found nothing in any of them. Once, she thought she heard a nearby crunch of leaf litter, but when she stopped to listen, nothing else came.
Just as she was climbing back, she spotted a patch of freshly turned earth the size of a scraps burial or a bush toilet. Definitely made with a camping trowel.
“I know you’re here,” she called.
No response. Sammy clearly didn’t want to talk.
Rachael took the letter from her pocket and weighed it down with a rock in an obvious place. Then she plucked another stone from between two boulders and cast it into the water with a wish. The resulting ripples sparkled in the sun, inviting, but she had to get back. Joel had already done longer in the cab than he should have.
* * *
By the time blue twilight was dwindling into night, Rachael’s bones hurt. She drove the tractor into the shed and trudged back to the house, tasting grit between her teeth and wondering how long she could stand under a hot shower before falling asleep. Through the kitchen window she saw Tess stirring a pot while the kids ran around the table. Joel, fresh from the shower, took turns to catch them and lift them up above his head.
After her shower, Rachael yawned as she tried to pull a brush through her hair, listening to the shrieks and squeals floating down the hall. Then she heard Tess telling them to be quiet, and the verandah door being opened. Rachael put her brush down as footsteps came down the hall. She turned and there was Sammy standing in the doorway.
Rachael’s fatigue evaporated. Three steps crossed the distance between them, and she crushed Sammy in a hug.
“I was so worried,” she said. “And I’m so sorry.”
Sammy said nothing, but she held on in the same way Rachael remembered doing the night her mother had died.
“Was it Bernie?” Sammy asked finally.
“He told me that a man doesn’t go back on his word.”
Sammy grunted. “How ironic.”
“I was starting to worry you weren’t there at all.”
“Good thing I had the quick-fold tent or I’d never have hidden in time. I didn’t want to talk to anyone.” Sammy held up the creased sheets of paper, a small smile on her lips. “You’re lucky. I might have mistaken this for loo paper.”
“So you read it?”
She dropped the letter onto the bedspread. “You really mean all that stuff about me being as important to you as your mum?”
Rachael nodded.
“Wow.”
“I also meant it when I said I’d tell you everything that happened if you want to hear it.”
Sammy nodded, so Rachael laid out every detail between when Matthew had left her room on the Wednesday night in Paris until the drive to the airport.
“He was already married?” Sammy repeated when Rachael had finished.
Rachael nodded.
“That dirty bastard.” She shook her head. “Not that I’m really surprised. I never liked what he did to you. But you know that already.”
“You were right. I shouldn’t have let him in again.”
Sammy sighed and pulled up the desk chair. “Don’t do that.”
“What?”
“Go thinking it’s all your fault. He played his part. Believe me, I understand that. But I wish you’d told me.”
“I wish you’d told me.”
Sammy looked away, then stepped back to the door and closed it. “Shit, what a mess.”
“What are you going to do? Are you really . . . ?”
“Yep.” Sammy tipped her head back, clearly trying not to cry. “I’m terrified, and I have to tell Marty.”
Rachael bit her lip, thinking about everything that had happened in the last weeks. “Do you really want to do that now? You don’t even know what you’re doing yet. How is Marty going to feel about it?”
“I can’t keep it from him.”
“Do you want to stay with him?” Rachael asked softly.
Sammy’s voice was tiny. “Yes. I didn’t know how it was going to work out, but I never wanted to leave him.”
“You can’t take it back once you tell him. I don’t mean that you shouldn’t, just think about what might happen. I wish Matthew had kept his trap shut.”
“It’s not the same thing. How could I possibly let Marty think the baby’s his?”
Rachael sighed. “You don’t know it isn’t. You could get a test done or something.”
A long silence sat heavy between them. Rachael plucked at the bedspread, catching a ragged nail on the coil of an embroidered rose.
Finally, she said, “Is it over with Peter?”
“Yes. He’s worried sick that his business will be affected if people find out. Should have seen that coming. He offered me hush money, can you believe it? I told him to piss off.”
“I can’t believe he’d do that. What a jerk.”
Sammy made a helpless gesture. “And I thought I knew him. I was so insulted. And then I was mad at you. Peter was covering his own arse, and my best friend had left me in the dark. I felt so utterly alone.”
“I know,” Rachael said, tears threatening to spill down her cheeks. “Sammy, I’m so desperately sorry.”
“I know.”
They hugged for a long minute before Sammy stood. “I have to go. You look like you’re about to collapse.”
“Going home?”
“Yeah. I have to. I can only hide out for so long. And if I want to make calls at the waterhole, I have to scramble to the top of the rock pile and hold the phone in the air.” She paused. “I’ll think about what you said, but I have to tell him. Peter might have played his part, but I have to take responsibility for mine.” She scooped up the letter.
Rachael nodded. “I’ll give you a lift back. And remember, I’m here, no matter what.”
She trailed after Sammy through the house, which was now in the midst of the kids’ bath time. Sammy glanced toward the sounds of splashing and laughter, and Rachael wondered if she was thinking about her own child and what the future held.
They drove back to town in relative silence. When Rachael had pulled to the curb just down from Bernie’s place, Sammy paused with her hand on the door catch. “Were you really offered two jobs?”
“Yeah.” Rachael tried to smile. “A magazine editor friend of Antonio’s was looking for an intern. And Bonnie wanted to talk about me helping with some kind of fashion show for charity.”
“Seriously?”
Rachael shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. I screwed up, so they’re gone. The internship wouldn’t have paid much anyway, and it’s not like Bonnie’s ever going to talk to me again.”
“True. But what’s the problem with the internship? You could afford to do it, couldn’t you?”
“Umm . . . Antonio was there when Bonnie caught me and Matthew.”
Sammy leaned back in her seat. “So there was something going on with him?”
Rachael pressed a hand to her forehead, awash with regret. She could now barely remember his face across the table from her, or the warmth of his arms around her as Paris glittered all around. All she could recall was feeling like they were at the center of the whole world.
“I think there could have been, but not after what happened. Besides, I don’t know if that’s really what I want. I think journalism was something Matthew thought I should do. Maybe that’s why I couldn’t focus on it.”
Sammy watched her carefully. “Are you happy here, Rach?”
“Oh, I’m fine. Just tired. The plant is always so draining.”
“I should go.” Sammy opened her door.
Rachael reached out to touch her arm. “Good luck.”
After Sammy had vanished down the driveway, Rachael slumped. She was desperately tired, but not exhausted enough to quiet her troubled soul. Sammy was taking responsibility for her actions, coming clean whatever the consequences. Rachael knew she had to make amends too, assuage the shame, or she would never escape it.
She drove home under the gathering night, the stars appearing overhead like tiny eavesdroppers.
Later, as she lay in bed, still restless, an idea drilled a seed into her mind, one that grew as she worked the next day in the tractor cab.
The day the planting finally finished, she knew what she had to do. She told Tess and Joel she would be gone for a day, and early the next morning she fueled the car in Milton and took to the highway.