“Just tell me,” Alice hissed.
Karen strained to hear Libby’s reply but it sounded like, “Trust me. It’s better this way.”
“Here we go,” Peter said jovially, handing around the drinks. “Always lovely to have my girls home together. Cheers.”
Peter had returned home from work five minutes before Libby’s arrival so Karen was yet to explain the point of the gathering. Part of her was loath to do so. When it came to Alice, Peter didn’t always agree with her.
“Actually, Dad, it’s more than happenstance. There’s something we need to discuss as a family,” Libby said.
Peter’s bonhomie faded. “I thought you and Nick were finding your way through your problems?”
“We are. This isn’t anything to do with Nick and me.”
Peter blew out a long, relief-filled breath.
Karen put her hand on his thigh. “It’s Alice.”
“It’s not just Alice, Mom. This is about all of us.”
“Of course it is.” Karen heard the uncertainty in her voice as she tried to fathom Libby’s plan of action. “We’re all worried about Alice.”
Alice remained silent, her gaze fixed on Libby. “How sick am I? Is it leukemia?”
Sick? Karen’s fingers sank into Peter’s skin as a thousand terrifying scenarios for her beautiful Alice assaulted her.
“You’re not sick.” Libby grabbed Alice’s hand. “Mom, Dad, a colleague of mine in Bairnsdale recently ordered some routine blood tests for Alice. Why is up to Alice to tell you. The important thing is, when I saw the results I thought the lab had made a mistake. I repeated the tests and today they’ve come back exactly the same.”
“So, this is good news?” Karen’s racing heart made concentration difficult.
“It’s confusing news.”
“How?”
“Alice’s blood group is B positive. You, me and Dad are A positive. That means there’s no possible way Alice is my twin or your biological child.”
The air around Karen solidified, pressing hard on her chest like a ten-ton weight. She tried to breathe in, blow air out, but nothing moved. Like a rusty saw being dragged through her chest, excruciating pain followed, bringing with it the horrors of the past.
Alice was floating, adrift from everything that had ever anchored her. She was Alice Hunter of Pelican House, only Libby had just said she wasn’t a Hunter. Wasn’t her twin. No! That was impossible. Utterly untrue. Sure, they weren’t identical and they had different personalities, but growing up, they’d looked enough alike for people to confuse them. And they had twin radar.
It doesn’t always work.
It works enough!
Alice looked to her father, seeking reassurance. He’d tell her Libby was wrong. He’d explain. He always explained things to her in exacting detail whether she was interested or not.
“Dad?”
But Peter’s attention was focused on Karen. “Take slow deep breaths, darling. Come on, breathe in … and … out.”
“I’ll get a paper bag,” Libby said.
Don’t leave me, Alice silently yelled to Libby, but she was already on her feet and racing to the kitchen.
Everything around Alice—the art on the walls, the throw rugs on the knotted red gum floorboards and the view over the expansive green lawn down to the sea—all of it was as familiar to her as her own thumb. For the first eighteen years of her life, Pelican House was the only home she’d known. It had been her bolt-hole whenever things in the big, scary world battered her. It was a place she came to vacation. To draw. To live. It represented love, security and safety. Family.
Now as she looked at Libby and her father fussing over Karen, all that security mocked her.
They were a family of three.
Who the hell was she?
Without knowing how she got there, Alice was standing with her hand on the door handle. She opened the door and walked into the yard, along the path, out between the lacework iron gates and into the twilight.
“Pick up, pick up! Please!” But Alice knew that, despite throwing the plea into the universe, Dan played basketball on Tuesday nights. His phone would be buried in his gym bag and he wouldn’t be home for hours. She turned off her phone and walked with no other intention than the overwhelming need to put one foot in front of the other and to keep moving.
The beach called her. The soundtrack of her childhood was the roll and thump of the waves—sometimes as loud and vicious as thunder, sometimes as soft and gentle as a caress, but always there like her family. But as she crested the dunes, the salt-laden wind whipped and buffeted her—the physical manifestation of not being who she thought she was. For thirty-four years, she’d been anchored by her place in the family and now she was adrift, blown in every direction.
She wasn’t a Hunter. How was that even possible?
Alice had no idea how long she walked along the cold, wet sand. Nothing existed outside of her disjointed thoughts and half-formed questions that squawked as loud and unceasing as the raucous cry of the silver gulls. It was the airborne sand, blasting her skin and stinging her eyes, that eventually drove her to take the next set of steps off the beach and back over the dunes, seeking the protective break of the tea tree and paperbarks.
The vegetation sheltered her from the wind but not from her thoughts. She wanted Libby. God help her, she wanted Karen and yet she didn’t want either of them. She needed explanations, but she wasn’t ready for them. Amid the war zone in her head—the shrieking thoughts that exploded when they hit—some sort of survival instinct told her that talking to Karen tonight would be dangerous. She kept walking along the track, her hands pressed to her ears as if that would be enough to silence the noise in her mind.
“Bit nippy to be out without a jacket, love.”
Startled, she glanced up at the voice. At some point the track must have finished, because
