Our Kind of Love (22 page)

‘What’s my excuse?’ Lizzie sniffed. ‘Why do I suddenly want to rush to the pound and adopt every mutt there is?’

‘You’re a big sook, that’s why.’ Anna watched as Dan wiped the tears from Lizzie’s face and then kissed her closed eyes. It was such a simple, intimate gesture and on top of the dead dog ending of the movie, she almost lost it right there and then.

Ry reached over and flicked on the lamp on the small table at the end of the sofa.

‘Bloody hell, that was a work over.’ Ry looked at Anna and saw her tears. When she saw his, she smiled back at him and waved her hand as if to shoosh him. She knew that she wouldn’t get words out of her mouth unless they came on a sob.

How long had it been since she’d cried? She screamed and ranted and cursed the world when she’d found out about Alex’s affairs, that was for sure. He’d accused her of going all Italian on him and she’d certainly lived up to the stereotype. Then she felt all right, for a while. Could even fake a smile or two when she needed to. Had managed weeks of faking it to Grace and her parents.

But she’d held everything else in. The truth. The tears. The honest reality.

And tonight a sweet movie about a red kelpie seemed to expose everything she’d been holding in. She squeezed her eyes shut to quell the stinging but it didn’t work. A sharp pain in Anna’s chest gripped around her lungs, squeezing the air from them in a quick huff. If she breathed out she wasn’t sure she’d be able to breathe in again.

She had to get out of there.

She leapt to her feet and before anyone else in the room realised what was going on, she’d fled through the front door.

Everyone heard the door slam. Conversation stopped. Lizzie and Julia exchanged glances.

‘Is she all right?’ Lizzie whispered.

‘Doesn’t look like it,’ Julia replied.

‘Maybe she really misses her dog,’ Ry added, confused about the whole situation.

Dan released Lizzie from his arms and moved to stand up. ‘I’ll go talk to her.’

‘No, I’ll go.’ Joe was already loping across the living room, his bare feet padding across the floor.

‘Hey wait a minute—’ But before Dan could say anything else, Lizzie was pulling him back.

‘Dan,’ she whispered. ‘Let him go.’

Joe heard the door slam behind him and stood in the middle of the front garden, hurriedly scanning the street. There was no sign of Anna. He stepped over the low wall separating Ry and Julia’s place from Dan’s and pushed the front door open, looking around for any sign of life.

He stopped in Dan’s living room, rested a hand on the orange vinyl sofa, trying not to make a sound. He couldn’t hear a thing and there wasn’t a light on.

Where the hell had she gone?

Anna stumbled across the esplanade and once her eyes had adjusted to the dark, she spotted the wooden walkway that split the dunes and led to the beach. Her eyes were swimming with tears and she could barely see. The stars were hidden by clouds and it was almost pitch black. All there was to guide her was the sound of the beach and the waves, the crush of the water on the sand, the pull and drag of the tide and the night. When the hard pine of the walkway planks gave way to cold, soft sand, she sunk into it and stopped, sucking in the deepest breath she could manage. She could taste the salt and the sea spray was cold on her face and her arms. The sand between her toes felt damp and thick and the wind caught her linen shirt. She needed the blanket of the night to smother her, comfort her, give her the freedom and the solitude to let go.

Anna stumbled along a few metres before dropping to the sand. She pulled her knees up, wrapped her arms around them and dropped her head onto her folded elbows. And then the tears came, racked her frame and scraped her throat. She could no longer bury her deepest regret; the open wound on her heart. A movie about a dog had cracked it wide open.

Her tears weren’t about Alex. They weren’t about her loneliness or regrets about Joe. She’d been letting go of everything; her marriage,
la bella figura
, being a good girl, her shame. She’d opened her Pandora’s box and everything was finding its way into the open air. There was one secret that was so painful and personal, so profound, that she’d hidden it in the deepest place of all.

She’d wanted to be a mother for so long and that aching desire and hurt wouldn’t stay buried any longer. The whole time she and Alex had been trying to have a baby – the last year they were together – he’d been cheating on her and his betrayal had become doubly crushing under those circumstances. Three times she’d been pregnant but miscarried. Three times she’d let herself believe and hope and plan and then have those dreams shatter. She’d not only had to let go of her marriage, but she had to let go of the idea of ever being a mother. That hurt the most, cut her the deepest. The ache in her heart about being thirty-five and childless hadn’t gone away. If anything it had lodged there, like a persistent cough, rising up to irritate her every now and then, just when she thought it had left. And tonight, sobbing over a beautiful dead dog, was more than she could take. It had all come out in a howl.

Joe heard her before he could see her. Standing on the end of the walkway he could hear Anna crying, louder than the waves and the wind. In the dark he could make out a hunched figure on the sand, where the beach met the dunes, and he went to her, his feet sinking into the sand and a lump in his throat almost too big to swallow.

‘Anna?’ If she’d heard him, she didn’t react. Joe’s heart ached at the sight of her, her back shaking with her sobs, her black hair all around her, over her shoulders and hiding her face, a mask behind which she was hidden from him and from the world.

‘Anna.’ He was surprised as hell to hear the croak in his voice.

She stilled but didn’t look up.

Joe took the few steps he needed to close the gap between them and lowered himself to the sand beside her. And then when her sobbing started up again, it cut him up. It seemed to be from such a deep place inside her that he was sure it was rattling her bones and rearranging them inside her skin. He hadn’t heard crying like that since … he looked out to the inky ocean and to the infinity of the night.

The sound of it took him back more than a decade. To the death of his mother. He’d flown back to Middle Point from Sydney for her final days before she died of breast cancer and stayed for a few weeks after the funeral. He remembered how much Lizzie had cried, for what seemed like weeks, and how useless he’d felt being of any solace at all. He’d been young, just twenty-three, and emotionally ill-equipped to deal with anything that he and his sister were going through. The cancer had rendered them orphans and Lizzie felt it more deeply than he’d cared to admit to himself. At the time, all those years ago, he’d been cold comfort to his sister.

He was normally good with words, wasn’t that what he did – or rather used to do – for a living? But the words deserted him, washed out to see in the current like the crushed shells and dead sea grasses on the sand. All he could think of to say was her name, like poetry, like the sweetest word he’d ever said.

‘Anna.’ He said it again, gently, close to her and reached his right arm around her. She stiffened but didn’t fight him. Then he felt it, the slow unwinding as her shoulders dropped and it was only then that he urged her closer, into the crook of his arm. Her head dropped onto his chest and then his other arm was about her, holding her up, being her rock in the darkness and the wind and the anonymity of the night that hung all around them like a cloak.

They sat for a long while, until his T-shirt was wet through and her shoulders stopped quaking.

It was a whisper and he barely heard it above the crashing waves.

‘Thank you,’ she said and, finally, Anna’s sobbing eased.

CHAPTER
27

Anna tossed and turned in the perfectly crisp white sheets of the king-size bed in Ry and Julia’s spare room. Her phone told her it was 1 a.m., but she was too restless to sleep. The window was only open an inch but the curtains billowed with the sea breeze. Anna snuggled down, covering herself and trying to ward off the shiver she was feeling, which she knew had nothing to do with the wind and everything to do with Joe Blake.

Who was this man?

When she wanted to hide, he’d found her.

When she wanted to cry, he’d let her.

And when she didn’t want to speak, he sat with her in the silence.

And he’d held her.

Everything about that night was spinning like a cyclone in her head.

When Joe had called out her name earlier that night, when she was half buried in the sand with her head on her knees, she’d panicked. Lizzie’s words from earlier that day were still zinging around in her head:
You might think you’re having a simple conversation with him but he’ll really be throwing a million questions at you and, before you know it, you’ve told him your whole life story
.

But he hadn’t asked one. And then, when she’d finally found the strength, he’d helped her up and walked her back to Ry and Julia’s. He’d simply walked beside her, the only time he touched her again was a hand to the small of her back as they waited to cross the esplanade, a car’s headlights almost blinding them in the dark as the vehicle sped past. And then they were at the door. He’d reached around her and opened it and she’d stopped. There was something she’d wanted to say, but had struggled to find the words.

‘Good night.’ It was all she could manage.

‘Sweet dreams,’ he’d replied with a serious smile.

Just thinking about it now, hours later, and Anna’s stomach fluttered at the memory of his face. The way his hungry gaze had dropped to her lips and returned to her eyes, his blue eyes so intense they seemed to blaze into her and zing an arrow right through her ribcage and into her chest.

And it had felt like that, like an electric shock. As if it had reached right in and grabbed her broken heart and jolted it back into a normal rhythm after months and months of pain. She’d had most of the symptoms of arrhythmia: the palpitations, the shortness of breath, the pain. Oh, the pain. But there had never been anything physically wrong with her. That much she knew. It was grief, pure and simple, a grief that had reached around her heart and almost squeezed it into lifelessness.

And since that look from Joe, that look that had resuscitated her heart, she hadn’t felt the same.

As Anna fell asleep she was struck by the strangest feeling.

For the first time in such a long time she felt there was hope in tomorrow.

‘Where is she?’ The smell of freshly brewed coffee hit Joe as he walked into Ry and Julia’s house. While it was his regular morning pick-me-up, he didn’t want to waste time this morning on a brew and the inevitable chit-chat he’d have to share to get it. He padded over to the kitchen, where they were standing by the fridge, barely awake.

‘Good morning,’ he called and for a bizarre reason he wasn’t feigning the cheerfulness in his voice. He’d had barely a few hours sleep yet he was buzzing about today. And fuck it, he wasn’t going to hide it, about seeing Anna again. He hadn’t asked what last night had been about, although he wanted to. The questions were lined up like soldiers about to go into battle, but he didn’t want to interrogate Anna. He was realising that life wasn’t a game of twenty questions. He’d reset that default position since he’d been back in Middle Point. If it was someone you cared about, he decided, it was their call about what they wanted to tell you and when. If they wanted to share it with you at all. Not that he wasn’t curious about whether she had banished her demons for good, but he realised that feeling had nothing to do with being a reporter and everything to do with being a man who was beginning to want Anna Morelli like he’d never wanted anything else in his life.

Julia squinted and held a hand to her stomach. ‘Good morning. Nothing good about it. I feel sick.’

Ry rested a soothing hand on her shoulder. ‘You want some dry crackers, JJ? Peppermint tea?’

She nodded, plodded around to the other side of the kitchen bench and sat down morosely, dropping her head into her hands. ‘I don’t care what Anna says, this is never going to end. I’m going to feel sick until this baby arrives, I just know it.’

Joe was beside her, giving her a pat on the shoulder. ‘Well, you will go and get up the duff.’

‘Thanks for the sympathy,’ she moaned.

‘So where’s Anna? Is she up yet?’

‘Huh?’ Ry yawned and flicked his precious coffee machine into life.

‘Anna,’ Joe told them. ‘We’ve got another surfing lesson. Out there.’ He pointed through the windows to the bright sunshine of the morning. ‘I’m going to get that woman up on a surfboard if it’s the last thing I do.’

Ry rubbed the sleep from his eyes. ‘We haven’t seen her yet. I’m guessing she’s still in bed. You want a coffee?’

‘No time. Thanks.’

Ry and Julia watched in sleepy disbelief as Joe jogged across the living room, took the stairs to the mezzanine two-by-two and pounded on the guest room door.

‘He’s not giving up, is he?’ Ry said sleepily as he stretched and yawned.

‘Doesn’t look like it,’ Julia smiled. ‘That makes him a Middle Point man in my book. Did you say something about peppermint tea, handsome husband of mine?’