Brian was sitting in front of the computer in the chair that had once been Freya’s. Three bottles of variously coloured, glittery nail varnish were lined on the desk in handy reach and a fluffy pink cardigan was draped over the chair’s back.
Freya tried not to feel humiliated, but it still hurt to know she’d been so quickly and happily replaced.
At least Amber was nowhere in sight, so that was something.
And Brian leapt to his feet as Freya entered. It had only been a few months since she’d seen him last, but she was conscious of an extra roll around his middle and new grey flecks in his receding brown hair. There was also a decidedly harried expression in his pale hazel eyes.
Had he always looked so – ordinary? So lacking in earthy sex appeal?
She wondered how they should greet each other under these strained circumstances. Politely shake hands? Would Brian kiss her on the cheek?
He did neither, but simply remained where he stood and gave a nervous nod. ‘I’m really sorry about the fire, Freya. It was such a shock.’
‘It certainly was.’ And a way bigger one for me, pal.
‘It’s so hard to believe.’ His frowning gaze was intense, almost fearful. ‘Do – do you know how it started?’
‘The fireys seem to think it was the solar panels.’
Brian blanched at this news and Freya might have grabbed the opportunity to get stuck into him, to let out her anger and lay on the guilt, reminding him that he’d agreed to continue any electrical maintenance as part of their divorce settlement. His ashen complexion, however, suggested that he didn’t need reminding.
‘You’d better take a seat,’ he said next, pointing to one of the padded chairs usually reserved for waiting customers. He, meanwhile, lowered himself back into the chair at the computer and began a nervous tapping on the desk.
‘What’s this about, Brian?’ Freya couldn’t help being alarmed by his manner as she sat where she was told. ‘Why did you need to see me?’
Now he looked more worried than ever. He opened his mouth to speak, but then shut it again and swallowed, reminding her of a goldfish.
Thoroughly disconcerted, she sat straighter.
Brian cleared his throat. ‘It’s about the insurance.’
A zap spiked through her, an electric shock of pure terror.
‘What about it?’ she managed to ask. Before the divorce, the insurance for their house and these office premises had been automatic deductions from one of their business accounts. After the legal matters were settled, Freya had kept the house, but relinquished her share in the business. In return, Brian had grudgingly agreed to take care of her home’s rates, insurance and general maintenance.
At the time Freya had thought it was a fair enough deal.
But now, her ex looked way too uncomfortable. Watching her, he gulped, making his Adam’s apple jerk.
‘Brian, for God’s sake, don’t tell me —’ She couldn’t voice her sudden fear.
‘It’s my fault,’ he said. ‘I should have reminded Amber. I should have checked.’
What the hell?
Freya leapt to her feet. ‘Are you telling me my house isn’t insured?’
‘I’m so sorry,’ Brian said again.
Shock robbed Freya of breath. As she stared at him, her heart banged as if she’d rushed up a dozen flights of stairs. ‘You mean it, don’t you? You haven’t paid the bloody insurance?’ She was gasping as she stood, fists clenched, shaking with rage. With disbelief. With utter despair.
Brian lifted his hands, feigning helplessness. ‘Poor Amber’s been distracted, with the pregnancy and everything.’
‘Poor Amber?’ Freya screamed. Was the man for real? Was he actually blaming ditzy Amber? ‘Do you know what you’ve bloody done to me?’ she roared next. ‘You and your damn midlife crisis?’
‘Freya, please —’
‘Shut up, Brian. Bloody hell. Don’t you dare try to make excuses, or tell me how to behave. For God’s sake, it wasn’t enough for you to dump me. You’ve taken away my job, my business – and – and now —’ She was shaking so hard she could barely get the words out. ‘Now, my home.’
Fuelled by more fury than she’d ever experienced in her life, Freya picked up a chair and hurled it across the office. As it crashed to the floor – missing Brian’s feet by mere inches, worse luck – she burst into uncontrollable, noisy tears.
CHAPTER SIX
When her father found her, Billie was sitting on a huge smooth boulder, gazing out at the stunning blue vista of the Coral Sea. Monday was one of the two days in the week when Island Thyme was closed and she was free, so she’d followed her favourite walking track that wound around the rocky headlands and offered gorgeous glimpses of a succession of little bays below.
She was in a brooding mood. Brooding over Petros, of course.
Sitting on a sun-warmed rock, hugging her knees and staring glumly at the crescent of white sand that fringed a half-moon bay, she could almost imagine she was back in Santorini. When she drew a deep breath, she could just about catch the scents of oregano and basil, the aroma of Greek coffee and the salty-sweet clash of fish and ouzo.
With her eyes closed, it was all too easy to picture Petros, her own personal Greek god, striding towards her along a cobblestone pier. His long legs in sun-bleached jeans, dark hair lifting in a soft breeze, while his white teeth flashed in a brilliant smile.
The memories were so entrancing, Billie ignored the sound of approaching footsteps. After all, there were always plenty of hikers on this track. Day trippers, backpackers, divers with snorkels and flippers searching for the next bay to explore.
She just wanted to concentrate on Petros.
‘We knew from the start that this couldn’t really last,’ he’d said at the end. ‘It’s probably best if we don’t drag it out.’
But Billie hadn’t known anything of the sort and Petros had never really explained why he’d wanted out. Surely she deserved to know?
‘Billie.’
Her father’s voice brought her whirling round, her thoughts spinning, her cheeks aflame. It was her dad’s day off, too, but he’d been busy answering emails on his laptop when Billie had left the house. Now, with his jaw shadowed by a day-old grey-speckled beard, he was dressed in faded denim shorts, a loose, even more faded grey T-shirt and battered sandshoes, with an old red towelling hat that shaded his eyes. He smiled at her. ‘Thought I’d find you here.’
‘Yeah.’ Billie edged sideways to make room for him on the rock. ‘This is still my favourite spot. It’s a gorgeous day.’
‘Isn’t it just?’
Her dad settled beside her and she was relieved that he seemed happy enough to sit quietly, soaking up the winter sunshine and admiring the glittering sea.
‘Look,’ she said, determinedly closing a door on her Grecian heartache as she pointed to a cute rock wallaby emerging shyly from between two boulders.
Troy grinned. ‘Yeah, he’ll be looking for a handout.’
‘I didn’t bring any food. Did you?’
‘No, but he won’t be hungry for long. The tourists are always feeding the wallabies. They can get quite cheeky and game.’
‘Yeah, I remember.’
‘Of course you do.’ The lines around her dad’s eyes deepened as he smiled again.
For several minutes, they remained sitting there in companionable silence, watching a yacht plough around the point, sails billowing, snowy white against the blue. Eventually Billie’s curiosity forced her to speak. ‘You know you can ask me, Dad.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘Well, you seem to have come looking for me, so I assume there’s a question.’
He grinned broadly then. ‘You always were too smart for your old man.’
Billie turned to him, remembering the thread of tension she’d sensed between her parents, and she felt nervous now. She kept her tone casual. ‘So what’s bugging you?’
‘It’s not a huge deal, Bills. I just wanted to sound you
out.’
‘Uh-huh?’
‘You’re doing such a great job at the bistro. The staff love you and, well, we – that is, your mother and I – thought maybe you could stay on for a bit.’
A bit? She had no idea what that might entail. ‘Well, I wasn’t planning to rush straight off.’
‘We were actually wondering if you could stay, keeping an eye on everything, while we take a break.’
This was unexpected, not that her parents weren’t entitled to a break. Billie couldn’t remember the last time they’d gone away on a proper holiday. They’d often joked that living on Maggie Island was like being on a permanent holiday. Boredom of seeing the same old, same old had never seemed a problem for them.
‘Your mum’s got it into her head that she wants to take off. You know – do the lap of honour.’
‘The what?’
‘Heading around Australia in a caravan.’
‘Really?’ Billie blinked in surprise. She’d been thinking along the lines of a couple of weeks in Tasmania, or New Zealand, or even Bali perhaps. ‘Like grey nomads?’
Her dad shrugged. ‘Yeah, I guess so. We’d get one of those low-profile vans. They’re not such a hazard on the road.’ Picking up a small pebble, he rolled it between his fingers and thumb before flicking it to bounce from rock to rock. ‘Your mum’s been talking about it for quite a while now, actually. It’s pretty important to her. Seems she’s realised there’s a whole country out there that she’s never explored, while you’ve been travelling and your aunt Freya’s had all sorts of overseas trips.’
‘And Mum’s been working her guts out on this island.’
‘Yeah.’
‘She’s been hit by a major dose of FOMO,’ said Billie.
‘What’s that?’
‘Fear of missing out.’
‘Well, yeah.’ Momentarily, her dad’s eyes lost their sparkle and took on a worried, distanced look instead. But then the moment was gone, making Billie think she must have imagined it, and he was grinning. ‘FOMO. I’d say that’s it in a nutshell, love.’
Wow. If this idea had been brewing for some time, Billie was surprised she’d heard nothing about it till now. ‘Well, it would be fun for you both,’ she said cautiously, as she juggled the warring concepts of family duty versus entrapment. ‘You guys haven’t done a lot of travel.’ Then quickly, before she found herself too committed, ‘How long would you be gone for?’
‘Only six months.’
Six months. Yikes. At least it wasn’t a whole year, but still. Twenty-six weeks. ‘Can you do the whole of Australia in six months?’
‘Your mum’s been checking everything out and she reckons we can. I guess we’d have to pick and choose the places where we’d stay on for a bit and those that we’d more or less whiz through.’
‘I guess. But what about your work, Dad? Can you take six months off?’
‘Yeah, yeah. No worries. I’m well overdue for long service leave and I can add on my annual leave, plus all the other days I’m owed.’
‘Right.’ Billie had run out of questions for the moment, but she was still trying to take this in. It was so unexpected. Mind you, she’d known there was something in the wind. All those looks that had passed between her parents. The unmistakable tension. She was relieved it wasn’t anything more serious. But had they really been nervous about broaching this with her?
It seemed her father had drawn the short straw when it came to raising this subject with her, but she supposed that made sense. Billie and her mum got on okay, give or take the usual mother–daughter flare-ups that had happened over the years, but her relationship with her dad had always been way more relaxed.
Perhaps he’d had it easy, though. During her childhood, her dad had taught her the fun stuff, how to swim and skin dive, how to throw a cast net or to build a camp fire on the beach. Her mum had been the one left to supervise her homework, her chores, her wardrobe and her social life, so there’d been inevitable friction.
These family dynamics had been laid down decades ago and Billie guessed they would remain the same when she was fifty.
‘So what d’ya reckon?’ her dad asked now, as the yacht they’d been watching disappeared around a northern headland.
Billie would have liked more time to think, but she was conscious that her father tactfully hadn’t mentioned that it really was time for her to pull her weight, especially as she was their one and only and she had no other obvious plans. It wasn’t as if they’d be dragging her away from an important career. And she didn’t have any other work lined up at the moment.
The sad reality was that Billie had been drifting for years now, with no clear goals. Mind you, she’d started out with ambitions. At art college, she’d put in three and a half semesters before she realised she would never make a living out of painting and drawing. After that, she’d worked in a shoe shop in the Townsville mall, travelling back and forth on the ferry each day, until she’d saved enough money to travel further.
Then she’d headed for Thailand and that had become the pattern. She would find a low-key, no-stress job and save until she had enough money to set off again.
‘You’d have the house to yourself,’ her dad said.
Billie slid him a sly, sideways smile. ‘You can spare me the sales pitch.’
‘But it’s true, Bills. You’d be able to invite anyone you wanted to stay.’
Fair enough, but right now Billie could only think of one person she longed to invite and he’d made it heartbreakingly obvious that he wasn’t available.
‘And maybe your mum could stop worrying about you, if she knew you were going to be here, in one place, for a goodly stretch of time.’
‘She worries about me?’
‘You’re joking, right?’
‘Well, I guess I sort of knew.’
‘Of course she worries when you take off for the other side of the world on a shoestring budget and then only communicate when the whim hits you.’
Her mum had certainly carried on when Billie first announced that she had her passport and was heading overseas, but when you grew up on a tiny island, you reached a point where you just had to get off.
‘And this last jaunt,’ her dad went on, ‘I know you were on your way home and running low on cash, but – seriously, Billie – hitching a ride up the coast on a yacht with a stranger? When you do things like that, your mother can fret for Australia.’
‘I wasn’t just hitching. I was crewing,’ Billie defended. ‘It was a paid job.’ Or at least it had been until the lecherous prick who owned the yacht had pressured her one too many times and she’d jumped ship in Shute Harbour. But her parents didn’t need to hear every unsavoury detail. Her mum would have had a heart attack if she’d known the whole story.
‘Anyway, about the bistro,’ she said, steering away from that unpleasant topic. ‘I can’t imagine I’d be any good with the business side of things. I’m no bookkeeper.’
‘Your mum’s spoken to Aileen Jones about that.’
Aileen was an accountant who lived in Horseshoe Bay. Her daughter, Mandy, had been a great mate of Billie’s, years ago in their school days. Sensible Mandy had become a school teacher and was now married with two kids and living in Brisbane. Most of Billie’s old schoolmates were similarly settled. Billie was the failure among her classmates, it seemed. The black sheep. Or was that the lost sheep?
‘But what about all the other managerial stuff?’ she asked next. While she’d worked in offices, she’d only ever been a general dogsbody, typing, printing out documents, filing and fielding phone calls. ‘I spoke to Mum and it sounded full on.’
Her dad’s lips pursed and he gave a slow nod. ‘There’d be a bit to learn, I must admit. But I reckon the most important thing is making sure Island Thyme continues to offer good service. Restaurants and cafés are mostly about serving others. Giving them a good experience.’
This was something Billie innately understood. ‘So it’s a bit like nursing?’
Her dad smiled. ‘Yeah, a bit. And I reckon that’s your talent, Bills.’
‘Well, yeah, I can wait on tables, no sweat, and I can make tea and coffee – but —’ She sighed. ‘I really don’t know about managing. Wouldn’t you want someone with business experience?’
‘That would be the ideal, of course, but your mum could show you the ropes. It’s a small business, really. I don’t think it’s all that hard.’
Billie was about to protest. She had visions of her parents arriving home from this so-called lap of honour, sun-tanned and happy and looking more relaxed than they had in absolutely ages, only to discover their business was in all sorts of trouble, a financial disaster, simply because they’d had naïve faith in their precious child. And she hadn’t measured up.
She might have blurted out this fear if Mrs B’s words from a couple of nights ago hadn’t echoed in her head.
You’ve always had huge potential. Make sure you don’t waste it.
Yeah. Easy enough for an old Year 7 teacher to throw around a compliment, but did that potential include fast-track lessons in how to take over a business at short notice?
‘Can I think about it?’ she asked. ‘I won’t drag out my answer, I promise.’
‘Of course,’ came the speedy response.
In the distance she could now see the ferry chugging towards the island from the Townsville mainland. Before she lost her nerve, she asked, ‘So what about you guys otherwise? You and Mum? Is everything okay?’ She shot her father a quick searching glance.
‘Sure,’ he said, perhaps a shade too quickly. ‘Why do you ask?’
Billie sighed again. ‘I don’t know. I thought you both seemed a bit strained.’
‘You think so?’
Was it her imagination, or was his expression too carefully neutral? ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘I thought so.’
‘Well, we thought the same about you.’
Clunk. Was her broken heart really that obvious?
Billie tightened her jaw, trying to look way tougher than she felt. ‘I’m okay.’
‘And so are we, love.’
If she’d been game to look her father in the eye, she might have seen the truth, but she was too busy hiding the precise state of her own emotions.
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