‘That’s the one,’ Vanessa said. ‘Got himself a business degree and spent some time in New York after university. Came back bursting with ideas for revitalising the town. He’s quite the renaissance man these days.’
‘Wow,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘I had him pegged as the “marry the girl next door, have three kids by the age of twenty-five, work at his dad’s ag supply business for the rest of his life” type.’
‘People can change, sweetheart,’ Vanessa said gently. ‘You’ve been gone a long time.’
Claire ducked her head and took a long sip of her smoothie, feeling chastised. It was obvious that Bindallarah was different. She hadn’t really expected it to be the same dreary hamlet she’d left at fifteen, though it didn’t seem to have changed much when she returned briefly for her father’s funeral five years later. But she couldn’t simply forget her past here. Bindy had shattered her family, and that memory wouldn’t be so quick to fade.
‘So, you saw Scotty?’ Vanessa asked.
Claire looked up, startled. ‘How did you know that?’
‘Don’t look so shocked,’ her aunt said, laughing. ‘I saw him walking up the beach path as I was coming down. And besides’ – she nodded towards the deep indentations Scotty’s work boots and Tank’s paws had left in the sand – ‘I can’t think of any other owners of size-thirteen feet and a tripod dog that you’d be chatting to.’
‘I invited him for dinner tonight,’ Claire said. ‘Is that okay?’
‘Of course,’ her aunt replied. ‘But what will his wife-to-be think?’
‘Oh, I asked Nina, too.’
Vanessa raised her eyebrows. ‘Really? That’s very magnanimous of you.’
Claire felt a flutter of indignation in her chest. ‘What’s that supposed to mean? Why would I have a problem with Nina? I haven’t even met the woman.’
‘It’s not supposed to mean anything, darling,’ Vanessa said, her tone implying that it meant everything. ‘I just imagine it can’t be easy knowing Scotty’s about to marry someone else.’
The words hit Claire like a punch to the gut. ‘Someone else? You mean someone other than me? Aunty Vee, you don’t think I’ve been sitting around thinking that one day Scotty and I would get married, do you?’
Vanessa sipped her juice and shrugged.
‘That’s absurd,’ Claire said, not sure whether to laugh or cry. ‘We’re friends. That’s all. Until six months ago, Scotty and I hadn’t even spoken in eight years. Not since . . .’
‘Not since he proposed to you and you ran away to America,’ Vanessa said matter-of-factly.
Claire closed her eyes and breathed deeply. Her aunt was the only person she’d told about Scotty’s proposal, the only person who knew that Claire’s confusion and panic had been the catalyst for her decision to do her postgraduate equine specialisation studies at an American university.
She opened her eyes and regarded Vanessa steadily. ‘Right,’ she said eventually. ‘Not since then. He only asked me to marry him because Dad died and Scotty decided he could fix everything. You know what he’s like. We’re both different people now. I don’t have feelings for Scotty any more.’
‘And yet, news of his engagement has brought you racing back to Bindallarah,’ Vanessa said quietly. ‘Something eight years of invitations from your own family couldn’t do.’
Understanding dawned. This wasn’t about Scotty at all. It was about Claire having left Vanessa high and dry in a town where their family’s name was mud. Jim Thorne had burned a lot of bridges in Bindallarah by the time he died, and Claire had been so consumed by her own grief that she hadn’t thought much about how Vanessa had coped with the shocking loss of her brother – or how she had managed to clean up the mess Big Jim had left behind. The community might not have blamed Vanessa for Jim’s demise the way they had blamed Claire, but they had wanted someone held responsible for the damage he’d done and, with Claire on her way to the United States, her aunt had been the only Thorne still standing.
Claire’s heart thudded painfully in her chest as she contemplated for the first time how lonely her aunt must have been, raising Gus on her own without any sort of support network in town. Vanessa’s parents were long dead and Gus’s father hadn’t ever been in the picture. She had been close to Claire’s mother, Emily, but when Emily had finally walked out on Jim and moved across the country to Perth, Vanessa’s loyalty to her brother had driven her to cut contact.
The tears that had threatened earlier welled up again. ‘I’m so sorry, Vanessa. I never wanted to leave Bindy in the first place. It wasn’t my decision,’ Claire said. She grasped Vanessa’s shoulder with her free hand. ‘I wanted to come back when Mum left, but Dad wouldn’t let me. He said my education was more important. If I’d known what was going on, I would have been here in a heartbeat. I didn’t know about any of it until it was too late, not that anybody in this town believes that.’
‘I know that, sweetheart,’ Vanessa said, her eyes shining. She placed her own hand over Claire’s and squeezed. ‘Your father made his own decisions. Not great ones, admittedly, but it’s certainly not for you to shoulder the burden of his mistakes. I didn’t want you to come back here out of some sense of guilt. I wanted you to come back because I love you and I miss you. Gus and I both do.’
‘I love you too, Vee,’ she said, wrapping her aunt in a fierce hug. ‘And I’ve missed you more than I think I even realised.’
The mantle of guilt was like an anvil on Claire’s shoulders. Despite what her aunt said, Claire felt responsible. Responsible for her father’s lonely death, for the people whose money he’d lost, for failing to be
