‘She laughed at you?’
‘Yep.’ And shit did it kill him at the time. He’d walked the whole way up rehearsing how he’d do it, looking for the perfect spot, somewhere where he’d have two minutes with no people around except Cassidy and him. Somewhere she’d never forget and he’d always remember. And she laughed. Not in a bitchy way, just in a you can’t be serious way. He’d never been more serious. He’d been serious as a bushfire on a total fire-ban day.
‘I figured I’d do what she said, bide my time and ask her when we got home. She was from Noosa but I just figured she’d come here, to Chalk Hill. We’d have the farm. We’d have a bunch of little farm kids.
‘Cassidy told me she was pregnant and I was over the moon, even if I wasn’t sure how it happened. She’d been on the pill. We were in Calcutta for New Year and Cassidy got sick. A real case of Delhi-belly. So maybe the pill didn’t work. We didn’t know.’
This is where it got really hard. Jake steeled himself to spill the words. ‘That baby would have been about Sam’s age now, if he’d lived. I can’t look at kids Sam’s age and not think about him.’
‘You had a little boy?’ Ella breathed beside him. Her hand found his again. Her eyes glistened with fat tears, but they didn’t spill.
‘He was never born. She got rid of him.’ His voice tightened. A decade on and it hit him in the stomach every time he thought about. ‘I don’t know if it was a boy or a girl, but I think of it as a him. A boy.’
‘She didn’t tell you? Like, I mean … oh God sorry, Jake. I mean, you weren’t consulted with what she chose, or did you decide together?’
‘She told me she was pregnant and she knew I was happy about it, even if it wasn’t planned. She said she wanted to go home to her family and her own doctor back in Australia, so she left the UK early. We’d been planning to work in London for a while, stay longer and do more travelling. She said she’d go to Noosa, then come to WA when I got home. I had prepaid tickets to a Wallabies/England test match at Twickenham with a mate and I really wanted to go, and she said I should stay. So I stayed in the UK another six weeks.
‘And things changed after that, even on the phone. I thought it was just the distance and the telephone. My mate talked about pregnancy hormones, said his sister turned into a right cow when she was pregnant.
‘I talked to Cassidy before I booked my flight home. By this stage, I was going to fly to Noosa because I wanted to be with her so bad … and basically, she told me on the phone not to come, that she didn’t want to see me, that she didn’t want to be with me. She said I was her security blanket to travel through Europe and do the things we did … and that was great, but I wasn’t her forever guy, I was just the holiday guy.
‘And I think she knew I would have pushed it … because she said then that she’d had an abortion. She’d “got rid of the kid”. Those were her words. “I’ve got rid of the kid, so there’s no need for you to come.”’
Ella squeezed his fingers as she sat quiet beside him in the growing dark.
‘So do I deserve a bloody beer now?’ Jake said.
‘I think we both do. I’ll get you one.’
Ella stood beside him, and he sensed her eyes looking down. She put a hand on his shoulder.
‘At least there’s a bright side, Ella.’
‘Yeah? What’s that?’
‘I don’t fart in the bath.’
CHAPTER
17
Ella didn’t walk into Begg & Robertson next morning, oh, no. She dead-set bounced, light and joyful, and not even Sam’s sulks over his cornflakes about, ‘Why do I have to go to school? I hate school’, could bring her down.
What a night. What a beautiful, wonderful, achingly emotional night.
What a man.
‘Morning, Harvey,’ Ella called to her boss as she set her handbag on the carpet against the wall of her space and took the final bite of her apple, before throwing the core into the kitchen bin.
‘Good morning,’ Harvey said, coming out of his office with a stash of paper in his hand. ‘This will make you smile.’
‘I’m already smiling,’ Ella said, but she reached for the papers.
She recognised the writing instantly. It was the offer form on Irma Honeychurch’s house. Henry Graham’s previous $429,000 figure for Irma’s place had been neatly ruled out and a new number stood in its place.
Ella’s mouth dropped open. ‘He’s gone up fifty grand just like that?’
Harvey patted his stomach. ‘He’s keen. Wonder what Jake will say?’
‘I don’t know,’ Ella replied, thinking about it. In everything else they’d talked about last night, Henry Graham’s offer on the Honeychurch house hadn’t been mentioned once.
‘Well, better find out,’ Harvey said, and Ella reached for her office phone to dial Jake’s number. Then Harvey added, ‘And when you get back, I want to talk about this swimming thing.’
The bits of her brain that made fingers select and press numbers stopped working. Everything stopped working.
‘What swimming thing?’ Ella asked Harvey.
He made a fluttering motion with his hands that was meant to direct her back to dialling the phone. ‘Not now. When you get back. Go on. Call Jake.’ And he backed through the door and into his office, like an old-man reef fish retreating into his hole.
* * *
‘You’re chipper today. Get lucky last night, didya?’ Lester Huxtable greeted Jake from behind the plumbing supplies counter.
Lester—who had been married forty years and reckoned these days he only ever got lucky on his birthday—was convinced the entire male population had more good
