And the company? Unexpected. Unbelievable. Unstoppable.
But unavailable.
I’m married, Joe.
Anna’s parting words went round and round in his head. There was another thing they had in common. So was he, technically. Legally. In name only. His wife Jasmine has said goodbye to their marriage when she’d taken off with his best friend and walked out on him months before. As crushing blows went that had been like a wrecking ball. So he’d said goodbye to that part of his life when he’d driven out of Sydney last December and crossed the dry and dusty Hay Plain on his way back to South Australia.
There were footsteps in the hallway. The door opened and Lizzie peeked around, all little-sister curious. She was draped in a dressing gown and had a blue towel wound around her head. She looked scarily like Marge Simpson.
‘What are you doing in my room, Stinkface?’
Joe rubbed his hands over his eyes, trying to scrub away the memory. He’d dragged Anna there the night before, knowing it was a bit of a passion killer to bring a hot woman home to the bunk bed in the spare room. He’d seen Lizzie leave the wedding with Dan and knew she wouldn’t be needing her more accommodating queen-size bed.
And since Anna had stormed off, he barely had the energy to get up, thoughts about his own disaster of a marriage lying like last night’s dinner in the pit of his stomach. He found just enough enthusiasm to lie.
‘Give me a break, Mosquito. You weren’t here, so I decided to get a decent night’s sleep. For once.’
Strangely, Lizzie didn’t bite his head off. And unless he was imagining things, she was checking out her room, glancing from floor to pillow to window and back to his face. Like a detective inspecting a crime scene.
‘Good night last night?’ She twisted her lips in an attempt not to grin.
‘Yeah,’ he answered, trying to not make it sound like it actually had been.
‘I saw you getting into some no-strings-attached dancing with Anna.’
‘You did, huh?’
‘She’s a good dancer. Unlike you, you klutz.’
Joe scoffed. He’d been protecting his sources for years. Lizzie was dreaming if she thought she could get information out of him that easily.
‘Yeah.’ That was all he was going to give up. ‘But Mosquito,’ Joe sat up, swung his legs over the side of the bed and planted them on the floor. ‘I’m surprised you could see anything but the sun shining from Dan McSwaine’s eyes. Or was that his arse?’
She didn’t bite. ‘You all alone, then?’
‘As you can see.’
‘Mmm.’
‘Mmm what?’
‘Did you come home alone last night?’
‘Last time I looked I was the journalist around here which means I get to ask the questions, remember?’
‘Just wondering.’
‘And where the hell were you all night?’
‘No comment,’ Lizzie replied with an enigmatic smile. Hell, he didn’t need her to answer. He knew she’d spent the night with Dan McSwaine, who’d been working with her on the Middle Point pub reno. The guy who was Ry’s best man and one who, no doubt at some time in the future, would be his brother-in-law. He was sure of it and he was happy for Lizzie that she was going to get her happy ending. She’d waited long enough for it.
As for him, he didn’t believe in happy endings anymore.
Not since his own had crashed and burned.
So, Anna was married.
She’d obviously been after exactly what he’d been after. Great sex. Simple. Uncomplicated. No strings attached and no phone numbers.
Good. He wasn’t looking for anything else. Not anymore.
CHAPTER
3
‘What’s the week looking like, Gracie?’
Anna closed the back door of her suburban GP practice with a heavy thud, double-checked to make sure it was locked, and dropped her keys into her handbag. Her practice had begun its life in the 1960s as a three-bedroom cream brick house, but had been converted into a GP surgery by the previous owners. That was what she’d liked about it the first time she’d seen it; it still felt like a home. The back door and laundry led to a hallway, her consulting room, the reception area and the waiting room.
At the sound of her stilettos, Anna’s little sister popped her head into the hallway from the reception area and executed a simultaneous tongue cluck and eye roll.
‘What do you think? You ask me the same question every Monday and every Monday the answer is exactly the same. Chock-a-block. And,’ Grace checked her watch, ‘at nine o’clock that phone will go crazy. The whole world gets sick over the weekend apparently and can’t possibly see anyone else but Dr Morelli, pronto.’
Grace turned to the window overlooking the suburban street and adjusted the white venetian blinds, directing the bright morning light to the ceiling. Outside, cars already lined the street, filled with patients who were always fifteen minutes early. Grace knew to keep the front door locked until precisely 9 a.m., or she’d have to start serving breakfast.
Grace smiled and started her familiar sing-song refrain. ‘You’re so popular. Everyone wants you. Dr Morelli this. Dr Morelli that.’
‘What can I say, Gracie? I can’t help it if my patients love me.’ Anna stood in the doorway, surveying her sister’s domain. The consulting room was hers. But this space, where Grace met and greeted patients, organised accounts, answered the phone, and basically ran the show, was like the helm of a ship and Grace was it’s captain. Anna had hired her five years before when she’d bought the practice and it had been a brilliant move. Grace was organised, fastidious, loved patients and spoke fluent Italian. In other words, she was just like her big sister.
‘Did you get to Luca’s birthday lunch at Mum and Dad’s yesterday?’ Anna asked.
Grace rolled her eyes. ‘You think I could get away with a no-show as well as you? Of course I was there. Five courses. Mum went crazy.’
‘What did Nonna say about me not being there?’ Nonna Alessio, her Mum’s mother, was a hearty eighty-four years old and possessed the uncanny skill of spotting an unmarried man at fifty paces.
Grace began counting on her fingers. ‘Let me recap. Nonna’s worried you’re working too hard, that it means you and Alex won’t have time to make babies. Mum wants you to eat more ’cos you’re fading away. Dad says you need to buy another house. And Luca has a weird rash he wants you to look at.’
Luca. The baby of the family. The six-foot-two baby. And that made her think of babies. Anna shivered, despite the early warmth of the summer day. She would never have babies with Alex. And suddenly it hit her. Thank God I’m not pregnant. They were words she’d never imagined she would think, not after everything she’d been through.
Four weeks ago, she’d discovered Alex had been unfaithful to her numerous times with too many women to count.
Three and a half weeks ago, she’d kicked his guilty arse out of the house.
And two days ago, she’d done the most irresponsible, irrational and illogical thing of her entire life. Something so utterly unlike her that she still had trouble believing it had actually happened. For a fleeting half second, she played with the idea that someone at the wedding might have spiked her drink. Yeah, right.
‘Anna? You okay?’ Grace was staring at her suspiciously.
‘Just a busy weekend, that’s all. Didn’t get much sleep.’ Anna swallowed and forced a smile.
‘So how was the wedding down in the middle of nowhere?’ Grace sat down, crossed her arms and began her familiar chair swivel. Back and forth, back and forth. It was Grace’s thing. It seemed to rev her up to cope with the onslaught of patients about to descend.
‘Middle Point.’ Anna cleared her throat. ‘It was at Middle Point.’ Anna rearranged her handbag on her shoulder, checked her watch, anything to avoid looking into her sister’s eyes. ‘It was beautiful. The bride was stunning. The groom was gorgeous. It was a lovely, summery night.’
‘Many people?’ Grace
twisted and turned on her chair.
‘Forty, maybe.’
‘Only forty?’ Grace’s red lipsticked mouth dropped open in disbelief. ‘Don’t they have any friends?’ In the Morelli family, forty was a Sunday lunch, not a party to celebrate the beginning of a life with the one you love. In the Italian community, a wedding was hundreds of people and relatives you barely knew and eight courses and six bridesmaids and pouffy meringue wedding dresses and dry ice on the dance floor and bomboniere on every plate.
Anna remembered her own wedding with wistful agony.
She wasn’t ready to come right out and tell Grace about her visit to Slutsville. Not yet. That would be like putting it on Facebook – and promoting the post. For God’s sake, she hadn’t even told her sister about Alex and the divorce. It had been so hard to turn up every day to work and hide the truth from Grace. Anna’s little sister was her go-to girl for everything, from which shoes to buy to which magazines they should stock in the waiting room. But this? It was too big. Anna still wasn’t sure she’d be able to talk about it without raging and sobbing, without admitting how stupidly foolish she’d been for so long. How blind she’d been to the truth.
And telling Grace meant she’d have to tell her whole family and that would be another circle of hell to endure and more failure to admit. Her parents had almost four decades of marriage behind them. Her grandparents had been married for sixty-two years before Nonno died. Anna had always thought she’d be just like them and had imagined herself at their age with grandchildren of her own to smother with love. That dream had disappeared from her life too. She knew that after the shock and the disbelief and the tears, would come the advice from every single one of them. Loud and extremely forthright advice. Anna felt empty at the thought. It wasn’t advice she needed. It was the loving and non-judgmental arms of those she loved the most. And she wasn’t sure she would have it. That doubt, that uncertainty about how they would react, was paralysing because Anna knew that it she didn’t have that support, she might not get through it. The idea that she might be alone in her journey through heartbreak to the other side of her marriage was almost too much to bear.
‘Anna?’ Grace regarded her with narrowed eyes. ‘You’re off with the fairies today.’
Anna pulled a smile from somewhere. ‘I’m fine.’
She needed the familiar routine of work and the inevitable cavalcade of patients to help her get her through the day. Maybe that way she wouldn’t have time to think about cheating husbands and telling her family about her failure as a wife. Or about sexy men at weddings.
‘You want a café latte?’ Grace asked.
‘Make it a double espresso,’ Anna called as she walked into her consulting room. She would need at least one caffeine hit to get her through the morning.
Twenty patients later, Anna dropped her head to the desk, rested it on her crossed arms and let out the breath she’d been holding since 9 a.m. when her patients had swarmed through the front door like bees. She’d suppressed all her doubts and misery and had seen them all with her usual smile and professionalism. She’d written blood pressure prescriptions, completed two Pap smears, found a potential case of diabetes and diagnosed an ear infection in a six-month old. Her Nonna’s next-door neighbour, Señora Farina, had shuffled in with vague complaints of headache and tiredness. She’d been in once a week since her husband had died six months before.
Anna knew that if she had a cure for the loneliness of widows, she’d be rich.
She lifted her head and repositioned herself in her chair, leaning back against the black leather and linking her fingers over her stomach. What about the loneliness of the cheated on? The separated? The childless? That’s what she was now and it was a whole new and scary road for her to navigate. While she would never be truly alone – what Italian could? – Anna knew that loneliness was something else altogether and it had already hit her. When she’d arrived home from Middle Point on Sunday, the day after the night of her disgrace, the stark emptiness of her house had still been a shock. There was always noise with Alex; news on the radio, the television blaring. She’d spent the night before surrounded by loved-up couples and happiness and music, promises and new beginnings.
And she’d driven home to a mausoleum. The king-sized bed was exactly as she’d left it, its sheets stretched to within an inch of their life, so pristine and tight a twenty- cent coin could have bounced off them. Positioned at each side, like ears, sat two squat Asian-style wooden side tables, decorated with matching lamps and artfully arranged books at perpendicular angles. They were actually art. Purely decorative. Anna hadn’t had time to read a book for pleasure in about a decade.
When she’d begun unpacking her weekend bag, hanging things in the walk-in robe, the emptiness hit her. There was a great gaping space where Alex’s suits had always hung on pressed-to-perfection display. His sparklingly polished black shoes were, of course, gone. So were the professionally ironed shirts he’d lovingly organised into plain white, striped and coloured sections.
Now there was silence and an empty space in the wardrobe. Part of her wished she’d taken to his suit trousers with a sharp pair of scissors. Anna had seen that in a movie once. But she was a good girl and good girls didn’t do such ridiculous things. And anyway, revenge like that was never as satisfying in real life as it was portrayed on the big screen; it sat inside you and metastasised, grew into a ball of hatred that only withered, taking you with it.
Anna had been there and done that since she’d found out about his cheating. She’d already obsessed over every stupid detail of Alex’s numerous affairs: where, when, how, what was the first lie, what was the last. Whether the trip to Sydney for work last August had been real or not. Which of the many, many women he’d taken with him. His new haircut and the way he’d become fixated with it. His emotional distance. Only in hindsight did all the pieces fit together like a jigsaw puzzle. And once she’d obsessed and nitpicked over every piece, once she’d seen the whole picture, she’d broken it into pieces and put it back in its box. Where she hoped like hell it would stay.
A ping from her computer alerted Anna to a new email. She pulled her chair closer to the monitor and peered at it. There was nothing in the subject line but she could see it was from Alex.
Can we meet for a coffee? When would be a good time?
Anna’s fingers flew over the keyboard.
When hell freezes over.
She pausing and then deleted it, replaced it with a curt:
I’ll let you know. I have patients. And I would like your keys to my house.
With a furious poke at the return key, Anna’s message zipped off into cyberspace. She wasn’t being melodramatic. It was her house. She’d owned it outright when she’d married Alex. When she was in her twenties, her parents had convinced her to sink her savings into real estate. She’d done as they’d wanted, she was a good Italian girl after all. And now? She loved them all the more for it. It would make the separation so much easier.
And the divorce?
She’d have to think about that later. Much later.
Her phone buzzed. ‘Yep.’
Grace sigh was heavy down the line. ‘It’s Mum.’
‘What does she want?’ Anna sighed back.
‘What do you reckon?’
Anna reluctantly lifted the receiver to her ear and crossed herself for the lies she was about to tell.
‘Hi Ma. How was your weekend?’
‘You should have been at Luca’s birthday lunch. Did you and Alex have a good time at the wedding?’
Anna pinched the bridge of her nose, felt her chest constrict. Fudged her answer. ‘It was lovely.’ That part, at least, was true.
Sonia Morelli tut-tutted down the line. ‘Who gets married in a hotel? And so far away. I don’t understand it.’
Anna steeled herself with a deep breath and kept breathing in until she felt it right down to the bottom of her rib cage, until the lower lobes of her lungs were filled with oxygen, and she tri
ed to find some patience.
‘Ma, it’s not a hotel. It’s a beachside pub and Ry owns it. He and his wife love Middle Point. It makes sense if you know them.’ Not that Anna did all that well. Their lives had gone their separate ways since university, even more so after she’d married Alex, but Ry had called her late last year to enlist her help with his best friend Dan McSwaine. It had taken Dan months to get over his injuries from the shocking car accident he’d been in, and even longer for the emotional scars to heal. She was proud that she’d been able to help Dan with that, and help him get well enough to realise that he loved Lizzie Blake. She was genuinely happy for him that his life was regaining its equilibrium.
Just when hers was spinning into space like a rogue satellite.
‘I wish you’d been there for lunch. Your Nonna is driving me crazy.’ While her mother talked, Anna checked her emails, the afternoon’s appointments and the latest online edition of a respected medical journal. She liked to call it family multi-tasking.
‘So. I’ll see you next Wednesday,’ her mother said in a rush.
‘Sorry, Ma. What?’
‘For dinner. I’ll see you and Alex on Wednesday night, as usual.’
Oh shit. Anna knew she had to make a choice, one that would send her straight to hell if she wasn’t on the fast track in that direction already. She could either lie to her mother now, or later. She would tell her mother, of course she would, just not today and not over the phone. When she was feeling stronger. And braver. ‘Sorry, Mum. Alex has a work dinner but I’ll be there.’
‘A work dinner on a Wednesday? Who has a work dinner on a Wednesday?’
‘Lawyers do, Mum.’ Anna needed to distract her mother, and fast. ‘So what are you cooking?’
‘A surprise.’
‘I’m sure it will be delicious,’ Anna tried to sound excited about the prospect. She was done with surprises. She wanted her mother’s comfort food – home-made pasta and fresh ciabatta, tomato sauce made from last year’s crop and fresh basil from the garden.
‘See you Wednesday, then. Ti amo.’
Our Kind of Love Page 2