Chapter Nine

As much as Trent loved his job—getting his hands dirty and seeing the fruits of his labor rise up from the ground, something he was damn good at—there was one thing he hated: the early starts. Even now, having worked for more than a decade in the construction industry, getting up before sunrise was a kick in the nuts.

He padded through his sister’s quiet house. It was still dark outside, the dusky twilight casting a purple-tinted filter over the world. Soon the magpies would be warbling and rousing Patterson’s Bluff from sleep.

Cora’s door was closed, and not a sound came from the room. She’d crashed early last night, still thrown off by jetlag and—more likely—avoiding him after the glitter incident. Despite his telling her it wasn’t her fault, Cora seemed determined to take responsibility. The poor woman had spent more than an hour trying to clean up the mess, vacuuming and wiping the table down and washing the bath mat and towel that had also been tainted with sparkles. He’d tried to help…but no dice.

It was a rare quality, he’d found. Most people seemed eager to toss blame onto the person next to them, passing it along like a game of hot potato. But not Cora.

By the time Trent made it to the building site, the sun was finally peeking above the horizon. The light was reddish and warm, predicting it was going to be another scorcher of a day. At the hottest part of the year in Australia—February, which was also known as the “holy shit everything is melting” month—construction work started early and finished early.

Trent’s boots crunched over the loose gravel and soil as he walked from his ute onto the site. Nick was already pacing, speaking firmly into the mobile phone he white-knuckled beside his head. It didn’t take a genius to figure out he was bitching out some supplier who’d failed him.

Woe anybody who failed Nick Walters.

“Bad day?” Trent asked when Nick hung up the phone.

His brother tipped his head back and looked up at the rapidly lightening sky as though God might poke his head out from behind a cloud and offer some advice. “Like every other bloody day on this job.”

“You love it.” Trent slapped a hand down on his back. “I don’t know what you’d do with yourself if there wasn’t someone to bark orders at.”

“Good thing I’ve got you around,” Nick said with a rueful smile. “Speaking of which, when are we getting started on your place?”

Ah, this old chestnut. “You know I’ve got a lot on my plate at the moment. I need to finish up with Liv’s place before I even think about starting.”

“Bullshit.”

“It’s not bullshit. Just because you’re the kind of person who wants everything done yesterday doesn’t mean I’m going to shirk my responsibilities to rush into my own project. Besides, I haven’t found a design I like yet.”

“I thought you met with that architect I recommended,” Nick said, frowning.

“I did.”

“And what tiny little flaw did you find with this guy, huh?” Trent’s brother rolled his eyes with the kind of exasperation he often leveled at people who didn’t match his breakneck speed. “The last one was too modern. The one before that was too traditional. And the one before that was too much of a mix of both.”

“If I’m going to be laying down a few hundred grand and a year of my life for a house, I want it to be right.” Trent shrugged. “What’s wrong with that? I thought you were Team Never Settle.”

“There’s a difference between settling and being so picky that you don’t move forward with anything.” Nick reached for his silver thermos that was perched on a clipboard sitting atop a foldout chair. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you were scared.”

Trent snorted. Of all the big brother tactics Nick liked to pull as second-eldest of the Walters family, this one was not going to work. “If you’re not a little scared of that level of commitment, then I’d question your understanding of how money works.”

“Of course Mr. I Like To Keep My Options Open is worried about commitment. Why would I expect any different?”

Trent was used to Nick and his oldest brother, Adam, ribbing him about this. After all, Trent was the only one who’d hightailed it out of school, who never stuck to one sport, who liked to change his tastes so he could enjoy any passing whim. Hence the goth phase of 2009. Adam, on the other hand, had married his university sweetheart. Nick was married to his job. And his middle brother, Jace…well, Jace disliked change more than all of them.

But today, Nick’s comments got under his skin. Maybe it was all the memories he’d dredged up yesterday by looking at old photos. Most of the time, he didn’t like being reminded of the past…even if it looked happy on the outside.

And of course, looking at Cora was basically like looking into the past.

“Says you,” Trent replied peevishly. “I don’t see you in a hurry to get yourself hitched and settle down for the three-point-two-kid life.”

“Fuck no.” Nick wrinkled his nose like he’d smelled a combination of chicken shit, rotten eggs, and month-old milk. If Trent wasn’t so annoyed, he would have laughed at the comical reaction. “But that’s not because I’m afraid of commitment. It’s because I don’t want anyone to get in the way of my career goals. I’ve got bigger dreams than finding a wife and making babies.”

Yeah, world domination. In reality, it was probably a good thing Nick wasn’t interested in a relationship, because he would be hard-pressed to find someone who’d put up with him.

No living woman has that much patience. He’d be searching for a needle-sized unicorn in a haystack.

“Then you should be busy enough that you don’t have time to keep harassing me about my life,” Trent said. “Besides, I thought you’d be happy with how dedicated I am to my job. And really? You’ve been helping Liv out, too. We all have, because she deserves it.”

“So long as you don’t keep using other people’s houses as an excuse not to build your own,” Nick pointed out. The comment was a thorn.

Okay, sure. Trent was the kind of guy who liked to help people. Maybe it was a crutch, so he didn’t have to confront the things about himself he wasn’t so proud of. Maybe there was part of him that felt like he needed to earn his place in the world.

Or maybe he was just living by the Walters Way principle his father had drummed into him. Helping others was important. Being selfish made you an asshole.

And Trent did not aspire to being an asshole.

“It’s not an excuse.” He reached over and stole his brother’s thermos right out of his hand and took a long swig. Ugh, mistake. Nick took his coffee like most things in his life—as intense as possible and without anything to make the process easier. Trent pulled a face. “How do you drink this stuff? It’s like liquid masochism.”

“Milk is for cheaters, bro.” Nick winked. “Now, seriously. I’ve got another guy for you to check out. He designed that cool place in Portsea that we visited a few months back. I can put you in touch.”

And of course by “can” Nick meant “will.”

“I’ll look at him,” Trent conceded. “But I’m not going to pull the trigger because you’re putting the peer pressure on.”

His brother observed him for a moment, brows furrowed. All the Walters siblings shared the same blue eyes from their mother’s side of the family—a striking feature Trent had regularly used to his advantage with the opposite sex. They also shared the same skin that tanned and freckled the second the sun came out and the same naturally broad, muscular frames.

But despite sharing so many features with his siblings, Trent was different in other fundamental ways. Adam, Nick, Jace, and Liv all seemed to have such strong visions for their lives, such crystal-clear goals…even if sometimes those goals did change, like when Jace decided he didn’t want to be a hermit anymore and now had a wife and four puppies to keep him busy.

But they all knew what they wanted. They were ambitious. Sure of their positions in the world.

Trent, on the other hand, was a bit of a drifter. A wanderer. A go-with-the-flow-er. The idea of making too many decisions and locking himself into something permanent seemed…more trouble than it was worth. He knew what it was like to have everything you thought you knew suddenly crumble in your palms. He knew that certainty could be shaken and cracked open, like dry earth in the middle of an earthquake.

His siblings didn’t understand that. They were different than him.

Fundamentally.

“Careful,” Trent drawled, deciding to go with his most comfortable tactic and joke his way out of emotions he didn’t want to deal with. “The wind might change and you’ll be stuck with an uglier mug than you started with.”

Nick sighed. “You’re a lost cause, mate.”

“I’m enjoying life.” He gestured to the site around them. “New tools to play with, new shit to build. New mounds of dirt to conquer.”

“And new problems to be solved,” Nick grumbled. “Because we won’t be building anything today if these panes don’t come in soon. We’re supposed to be at lockup already.”

“You worry too much.” Trent folded his arms.

“And you don’t worry enough.” Nick was back looking at his phone again, his brain already skipping ahead to the next thing. Good. The deeper he got sucked into work, the less brain space he’d have to stick his nose into Trent’s business. “If this delivery doesn’t come in the next hour, I am going to lose it.”

“Everything will be fine, you’ll see.”

But Nick was already walking away, head bowed as he tapped furiously at his phone. A second later, something vibrated in the depths of Trent’s utility shorts. He pulled his phone out to find a message from his brother with the link to the new architect’s website.

Maybe he’d take a closer look later. Or maybe he’d forget all about it and let Future Trent worry about where he was going to live when his sister returned.

…

Cora woke up around nine a.m., startled out of sleep by the sound of knocking against her window. For a minute she sat there, clutching the bedsheets to her chest. The knocking persisted. Liv’s house wasn’t exactly surrounded by people, which meant that if someone had approached the house and Trent was already at work…then she was totally alone.

Shit.

Knock. Knock, knock, knock.

Were the spiders big enough to knock here? It certainly sounded that way from all the urban legends she’d heard. What if they crept up to quiet houses and tapped on the window to lure unsuspecting victims to their venomous death?

Come out, come out wherever you are…

She shuddered. The knocking only got louder. Maybe it was a kid from a nearby house or someone who’d gotten lost on the road? She swung her legs over the edge of the bed and padded quietly to the window. She couldn’t see any shadowy figures through the gaps in the slatted blinds.

With a tentative hand, she reached for the lift cord.

“Come on,” she said to herself. “Don’t be such a chicken.”

She yanked on the blinds and was met with…nothing. Knock, knock, knock.

Her gaze dropped to the ground outside, where a rather indignant-looking cockatoo stared at her as if to say finally. If birds could cross their arms and stamp their feet, then Joe would absolutely have been doing that. Instead, he gave her the most epic side-eye of all time, then stomped off in the direction of the back door.

“Well, excuse me for sleeping in,” Cora muttered. The jetlag had hit her pretty hard, and she’d barely made it past nine p.m. before crashing faster than a toddler coming down from a sugar high.

She pulled her silky robe from the bench at the end of the bed and wrapped it around herself as she walked out of the bedroom and toward the back door, picking up her book along the way. When she opened the door, Joe made a ton of noise, fanning his crest and stomping around like he couldn’t believe he was forced into the indignity of waiting.

“You’re a demanding little guy,” she said as she dove her hand into the bag of seed by the back door.

No longer afraid to feed the bird by hand, she walked onto the back deck and dropped onto the wicker chair, uncurling her palm. The day was pleasantly cool and a welcome reprieve from the persistent, beating sun that had been present since she arrived.

Joe immediately hopped up and started pecking at her palm as if he’d been left to starve…which she knew wasn’t true. But clearly the little guy had an appetite. “No need to be greedy.”

He squawked. “She’ll be right! Fair dinkum.”

“I don’t know what any of that means.” Cora laughed. They sat for a while in the quiet, Joe eating from her hand, the natural beauty of Liv’s garden spread out before them. When he was done, the bird hopped onto the arm of the wicker chair and climbed up next to Cora’s head. She wasn’t intimidated by his talons now that she knew he was gentle…for the most part.

“Have you come for a hug, sweet thing?” She stroked the bird’s downy chest and he made some happy-sounding bird noises. “Do you want some company as well as a meal?”

Joe seemed content to climb up and down the arm of the chair, trying to pull at the silk tie around her waist. Eventually he settled, seemingly happy to sit and soak up the atmosphere like she was. Cora reached for the romance novel she’d picked up at Maddy’s bookstore the day before. The colorful font and half-naked man on the cover made her feel almost…giddy. Indulgent. Her mother hated Cora reading too much in general, but she’d expressly forbidden romance novels, so reading one now felt gloriously defiant.

Something about this vacation was making her want to try new things. After the game of cricket, where she had sucked beyond belief, nothing bad had happened. Nobody had laughed at her. Nobody had teased her or excluded her.

In fact, at the pub afterward, they treated her like she’d been the best player on the team. They’d made her feel welcome, valued. One of them.

It had given her a spark of confidence that she hadn’t known she needed. A spark that she wouldn’t waste by doing the same old, same old.

Cora flipped the book over to read the back. According to the blurb, the heroine was a bookish woman on the hunt for a husband to appease her controlling family.

“Well, I’m not on the hunt for a husband, but I can totally understand the controlling family and bookworm bit,” she said. Joe looked at her with a cocked head. “Want me to read to you, bud? You might like this one.”

Joe bobbed up and down, and Cora took that as a good sign.

She cleared her throat. “‘Chapter One. Kylie Kirman needed a man, and not just any man. A man who was husband material and who was happy to hop, skip, and jump straight to matrimony. No dating, no trying before you buy, no thirty-day warranty.’”

Joe cocked his head as if to say: this is a recipe for disaster.

“Tell me about it,” she said to the bird. “Who jumps straight into marriage and expects it to work? Hell, I gave Alex five years. That’s half a decade. And what did I get?”

The bird stayed silent.

“Exactly, nothing. A big fat freaking rejection like I got with all the other guys I dated.” She sighed. “I could tell this Kylie chick a thing or two about what a big mess she’s going to make for herself.”

“Bloody oath!” Joe fanned his crest and bobbed up and down.

“See, even you know.” She laughed. “I bet you would have pulled the pin before I did.”

He gave a little wriggle that Cora could interpret only as his agreement. Great. Even the bird was judging her. Oh well, it was hardly like she deserved any better. She was the one who had stayed with Alex even though he hated her family, and sometimes he’d ask her not to come to important events because he didn’t want the media asking about her famous mother and father.

Alex said she stole the spotlight without trying. She’d tried to be a good partner, tried to fit in with his conservative, tailored life by wearing pearls and cardigans, by learning about all his interests and making nice with his friends and his uptight parents. She’d tried to be everything he wanted in a wife-to-be.

But it was never enough.

“‘The funny thing was, Kylie had never wanted to get married before,’” Cora continued reading to the bird. “‘She was always the independent one, the career-driven one. But now that she’d returned home to Little Creek, a town so small it could be mistaken for a speck of dust on a map, she knew things had to change. Her grandma was dying. And she’d never seen any of her grandkids get married. Not a single one in all fourteen of them.’”

Cora looked at Joe, who turned his head away.

“I’m guessing, judging by the cover, Miss Kylie gets herself tangled up with a fireman,” she said to the bird. “But she shouldn’t settle for less than love.”

Love had always been her goal. Watching her parents’ marriage go from rocky, to rockier, to holy shit the bridge is about to blow! had been painful. But it all became clear one day when she found her mother in a drunken stupor in their smoking room—which was a ridiculous name, since no one ever smoked in there—rambling about all the mistakes she’d made in her life.

“I should never have done it,” her mother had croaked, one talon-tipped hand sliding around the back of Cora’s neck as she attempted to lift her mother from the couch. “I should never have married that sonofabitch. He never loved me and I never loved him.”

The conversation—if you could call it that—had stuck with Cora. Love was important, and settling for anything less would lead only to misery. Too bad Cora seemed to fall for jerks time and time again.

Her BS radar was officially broken.

“But we’re not going to think about any of that, are we?” she said to Joe. The white bird swung his head back and forth. It wasn’t quite a “no,” more like the love child of a yoga stretch and some heavy metal headbanging, but she’d take it.

Just as she was about to dive back into the story, her phone rang. A familiar picture appeared on the screen, and she swiped her thumb across it to answer the call.

“Hi, Dad.” She smiled.

“Is that… Are you carrying a parrot on your shoulder?” Her father peered at the camera, getting so close that the image blurred a bit. He wasn’t wearing his glasses, as usual. The man could barely see a thing without them, but he was vain as hell about it.

“It’s a cockatoo,” Cora replied, and Joe made a trilling noise in response. “He says hi.”

Her father frowned. He wasn’t big on the outdoors, and the whole “no pets” rule was one of the only things he and her mother had actually agreed on.

“Well, anyway,” he said. “I wanted to give you a call about the book.”

She stifled a smile. That was her dad, always and forever about business. He’d probably forgotten she was even in Australia. Well, if the cockatoo hadn’t given it away.

“I was worried when I didn’t hear back after I sent that email. I know I can be a tough critic—probably the toughest—but I want you to know it’s for your own good, Cora. I would never send you into the industry unprepared.”

She bobbed her head. “I know, Dad. I appreciate that you push me.”

Even if the hollow ache of his disappointment felt like it might split her in two sometimes. It had taken her months to work up the courage to tell him about her manuscript. Months beyond that to show him anything. No matter how Cora tried to brace herself, at the heart of it, she was a sensitive soul, and every rejection cut like a knife.

That’s part of being a creative person—you need to draw on that pain for your stories.

“This industry is…” Her father sighed. “It’s brutal. I’ve seen authors come and go. I’ve seen the rejection tear them apart. Only the most talented and resilient have even a hope of surviving.”

“I’m resilient,” she protested. Lord knows that resilience was the very thing she’d required to get through her childhood. “And Professor Markham said I had real talent. It’s raw, maybe, but I’m a hard worker. I don’t mind putting my pedal to the metal if it means a shot at my dreams. I know…I know this story could be something great.”

She was meant to be a writer. Books were her life, and the time she spent dreaming up worlds and characters to inhabit them was the only time she felt truly like herself. The rest of the time, she was drifting.

“I can do this.”

“Cora…” Her father’s forehead folded into a deep crease. “You know I want only to protect you, right? I saw what fame and a life in the spotlight did to your mother. The rejection and constant criticism twisted her. It turned her into someone I didn’t even know anymore.”

The pain in his voice lashed like a whip across her heart. Her mother had been wrong that day—he had loved her. They’d loved each other.

Maybe, on some level, he still loved the woman her mother used to be.

“I’m not her,” Cora said stubbornly. “Trust me, I spent every waking hour of every day making sure I am the very opposite of who she is as a person.”

Her father nodded. For a moment, he said nothing, simply looked at her through the phone screen a whole hemisphere away. Cora wanted to plead with him. Beg him.

Trust me. Believe in me.

But she couldn’t open herself up like that. Rejection for her work she could handle, even though it hurt. Rejection of herself, however, was a whole other—deeper—wound.

“I have to get back to work,” he said gruffly. “I just wanted to make sure you were okay after I gave my feedback.”

“I can handle it,” she said, pasting on a cheery smile. In return, she saw some of the worry evaporate from her father’s face.

“That’s my girl.”

The call clicked off, and Cora stared at the tattoo peeking out from where her silky robe had parted over her thigh.

Metamorphosis.

She wanted to be better. To be good enough to do all the things she craved in life—publish a book, fall in love, have a happy marriage strong enough to erase the scars created by her parents’ tumultuous one. Eventually she would find the right combination to unlock those things, right?

If only she worked hard enough. If only she kept trying to do her best. Eventually good things would come.