And Ava’s knees buckled and she collapsed onto the sofa.
‘I cheered for you the day we heard you had escaped.’ it read. ‘I wished you wings to fly. I wished you the freedom I had never been strong enough to seek or to fight for. I wished you the happiness that was stolen from you. I wished you love.
‘I hope you have found all of these things, and more.’
Ava blinked as she read the words her mother had committed to paper, of how she had watched her career blossom from afar and how she’d provided for her, and instructed her lawyers to send this letter, after her death.
‘I know I will never have your forgiveness,’ her mother had written in conclusion, ‘and neither do I deserve it, but wanted you to know, I’m so very proud of you, Ava.
‘I wish, I so wish things could have been different.’
For a long while Ava sat there, holding the letter, the words blurring in her mind, as she thought back, searching for a hint that she’d missed, a clue that her mother had felt something for her.
And all she could find was the memory of being rocked in her mother’s arms, being told not to cry, that tears made eyes puffy and men liked their women to look happy and beautiful, and Ava didn’t understand. She couldn’t understand. Not when she could see tears welling in her mother’s eyes too.
She put a hand to her mouth. Because there too was the memory of her mother taking her out one day, shopping, she’d told her husband, and Ava had imagined coming home with new gowns and underwear and designer shoes in preparation for another party and another man, only for her mother to take her to the zoo of all places, and they’d wandered around the grounds, looking at all the animals and eating ice cream and laughing, and it had been so unexpected and joyous.
And she remembered her mother brushing her hair, the long brush strokes through her hair like a caress, when Ava had fallen and sprained a wrist.
Tiny glimpses of kindness amongst the dark, and none of it had made sense.
Her eyes fell on the abandoned envelope, the letter still folded inside. She reached for it, unfolding it, the black legalese print stark on the white page. Her mother had provided for her, it said, and there was a number, an unimaginable number attached to that clause. Her money now.
Ava sucked in a breath, and took herself to the windows overlooking the gorge and beyond and put her hand upon the glass, solid and yet invisible, like the ties that bind people together, even when you she couldn’t see them, even when you she thought they were severed and cast away.
The ties that bind you forever.
And the air shifted around her as the heat haze shimmered over the horizon and the cold, withered heart inside her chest started beating again, and nothing was how it was before.
Because the freedom her mother wished for Ava and that she’d thought she’d found was another kind of prison, but this time self-imposed. She hadn’t embraced her freedom. She’d become trapped inside it, afraid to live. Afraid to love.
Lights flashed along a road in the suburbs below, red and blue speeding out of sight as soon as they’d appeared, and a stab of pain in her chest made her gasp.
Caleb, she thought, her fingers curling on the glass, before she pushed herself away and headed for her studio.
She found her sketch book where she’d left it in the studio, while pencilling some herbs, a bunch of basil and coriander and rosemary she’d picked from her herb garden. She flicked through the pages until she found them, the original sketches she’d made of Caleb, the first right here in this studio, of him pulling on a shirt, in the shower with the water cascading down his corded throat and over his muscled chest and sprawled on her unmade bed.
She collapsed onto her sofa, her fingers tracing over the lines, wishing it was his body under her fingertips, wishing for his heat and his strength and the warm masculine scent of him, the sense of loss growing until it threatened to swallow her whole.
Caleb, whose only crime was that he loved her.
Because she’d been too stupid to realise what was staring her in the face the whole time. That she loved him too.
She flung the book aside and put her head in her hands.
What the hell had she done?
Chapter Twelve
Caleb was back working nights, the February fire a thing of the past, and everyone hoping that summer had thrown its worst at them, when the incident came in at four in the morning. A string of brush fence fires in the leafy eastern foothill suburbs, disturbingly close to the Uriarra Gorge.
All available units were called out, the high winds and tinder dry conditions pushing panic buttons all over the emergency services, none pressed harder than Caleb’s.
His appliance screamed its way to their callout, arriving to find his worst fears realised, the residents in the street were all out desperately trying to wet down their houses with garden hoses because what had been started as a malicious prank by some idiot, was already spreading fast through the bush of a neighbouring picnic area. Some of the crews got to work on getting the residents clear and ensuring the houses were safe while more chased the fire in the trees that was being fanned by the wind and heading directly towards the gorge.
The crews fought desperately to get a handle on the fire, to control it before it could get into the gorge, everyone knowing that if it got there, into the steep and heavily wooded terrain, it would be impossible to stop.
As the battle progressed, Caleb’s gut knotted tighter and tighter. It was a race against time, a race against a fire rapidly gaining the ascendancy and heading for the gorge, the flames metres
