back as she could, hooked the tiny hoof and hauled it toward her.
Another contraction hit. Her hand was still trapped. She gasped in pain, the sensation that of a vice against her hand. ‘Yike,’ she muttered. ‘Yike, yike, yike…’
‘Benjy,’ Ben was yelling, calling to Benjy to leave his final bucket of water and come back. ‘We think the foal’s coming.’
‘I know what’s coming,’ she muttered. ‘She’s delivering my arm. Don’t you dare call Benjy.’
‘Why-’
‘My language,’ she yelled, as another contraction rolled through. ‘Block your ears.’
The hoof had slithered through her fingers and wasn’t forward enough, but now she had it again. This time she tugged with more certainty. Heaven knew if it was right but it had to come in her direction so why not aim it that way? She just had it where she wanted it when the next contraction hit.
Her hand lifted free. The second hoof appeared like magic. With a nose.
And then…and then a foal slithered slowly out into a brand-new world.
It had been a huge physical effort, as well as an emotional one. Ben looked on as Benjy examined the perfect little foal. The little boy burst into tears and was gathered into his mother’s arms and held.
Ben cleared the foal’s nose and lifted the tiny creature round to his mother’s head so Flicker could nuzzle her baby then lie there in exhausted contentment.
Lily had been lying full length during the foal’s birth and she’d now rolled sideways to give Ben room to work. But she was going nowhere. She hugged Benjy to her as he sobbed and sobbed, and Ben thought this was much more than a foal being born. This was a culmination of all that had gone before-a month of hell.
Or more than that.
He looked down at Lily, bloodstained, filthy, smiling through her tears, holding her son against her breast, cradling him to her, whispering nothings.
He loved her.
He loved them all, he thought. Flicker and foal. Rosa and Doug.
Benjy. His son.
And Lily.
He always had, he thought, and it was such a massive, lightbulb moment that he felt his world shift in some momentous way that he didn’t understand.
But his world hadn’t moved from its axis. It was as if it had settled back onto an axis that he hadn’t known had been missing.
He thought back to something Benjy had said.
His son had needed him and he’d been there. If Benjy needed him again, how could he not be close?
If Lily needed him… It was exactly the same.
And more. He thought then that it was more than him being needed. Because what he felt for them both was a need itself.
He needed them both. They might need him but he needed them so desperately that he could never again walk away.
He hadn’t been there for Bethany, he thought, thinking suddenly of his baby sister. It hadn’t been his fault. He hadn’t been permitted to be there. But he’d loved her and now suddenly the grief for her loss settled, as if something had been explained that had been tormenting him for years.
He’d loved Bethany. It was OK to grieve for her. She wasn’t…nothing.
And with that thought the guilt he’d been carrying for years suddenly, inexplicably, eased.
Today he’d been there for his son. He’d been there for Lily and he would be again, for ever and ever, as long as they both lived.
He needed them. This was his family.
Who’d said that? He’d heard it at a funeral, he remembered. It had been the wife of a sergeant killed in East Timor. The woman had stood dry-eyed and empty, talking to her lost love.
He’d hardly listened. He remembered hearing the words and then consciously deciding that he needed to think about what he was doing the next day. He couldn’t let himself dwell on it.
Because love like that was terrible.
Only it wasn’t. He’d only thought it was terrible.
Today Benjy had called him Dad.
Sure, it might end, he thought as he looked down at his woman and his son. The thought of that was empty, bleak as hell, yet what he’d been doing until now was just as bleak.
To do without that love because one day it might end-that was dumb. He could see it now with a clarity that almost blew him away.
‘It’s not just you,’ he said to Lily, breaking in on the conversation to himself halfway through. ‘It’s more than just you.’
Lily looked up at him, smiling past her son’s rumpled curls.
‘It’s not just me?’
‘I do love Doug and Rosa.’
‘How about that?’ she whispered, and smiled at him.
It was enough. He sank to his knees and stooped to kiss her. But she had her arms full of child and his kiss went awry, as it had to in these crazy circumstances, but, then, he knew his intention.
And maybe she did, too. For she was still smiling, her eyes full of unshed tears but the beginnings of joy not far behind.
‘I need you,’ he told her. ‘Lily, I’ve always needed you. I’ve just been too stupid to see. But what happened today… We’re a family. I know I don’t deserve a second chance but I’m asking you for one. I want to marry you. I want to adjust our lives so we can be together. But I never want to be apart again.’
‘Oh, Ben…’
‘Will you come and live on our island?’ Benjy asked, absorbing Ben’s words and heading straight to what mattered most.
‘Yes,’ he said, and watched as Lily’s eyes filled with tears.
‘Ben, we can’t ask you…’
‘You’re not asking. I’m telling. I’m coming home.’ He bent forward and kissed her on the nose, and then, more surely, he kissed her on the mouth. When they finally broke away they were all smiling and Benjy’s was the biggest smile of all.
‘Kisses are yucky but I liked that,’ he said.
‘Great,’ Ben told him. ‘It’s good that you like it because I intend to kiss your mother just like that every day for the rest of our lives. Once first thing in the morning, once just before we go to sleep and a hundred times in between.’
‘We have a happy ending,’ Lily whispered.
‘I don’t believe in endings.’
‘No?’
‘No.’
‘I think this morning…’ he told her as he gathered woman and child into his arms and held them tight. ‘I think this morning is a happy beginning. Benjy, do you know what a phosphorescent tide is?’
‘No,’ said Benjy, puzzled.
‘It’s when the lights go on in the sea,’ he said. ‘In shallow water it might happen once in a lifetime. Your mother and I saw it but you missed out. So I’ve decided. I need to come back to your island so we can watch out together for phosphorescent tides. I have a feeling that when we’re around, the concept of once in a lifetime is ridiculous. We’ve been given a second chance, and from now, from right at this minute, we’re going to take any chance we’re given.’
