“Shh, my darling boy. It’s okay. Those horrible nasty women have gone.”
Only Jess wasn’t certain who she was reassuring more—her son or herself.
Chapter Eleven
“Journal your feelings. It helps,” Alice suggested a week after Libby’s world imploded.
Libby doubted it. Besides, her feelings weren’t complex, they were glaringly simple: rage and despair. She’d spent the week being flung back and forth between the two and the energy required rendered her inert. The sensations battered her—pain, anger, heartache and hopelessness—and brought her as close to a premonition of death as she’d ever been before. Sleep was impossible, but constantly wondering why this had happened to her, how could they have done this to her and what else wasn’t she being told, made it agonizing to be awake.
Thank God for Alice. She was the unexpected blessing in this nightmare. Her twin, who so often hesitated and doubted herself, had walked unflinchingly into this house of pain. She’d surprised everyone by quietly taking charge. Although Alice did things in very different ways from Libby, the results were the same. The children were bathed and fed, cuddled and read to, and taken to all their activities. If the pictures in Libby’s room were anything to go by, the girls had been allowed unfettered access to the craft box, including free and liberal use of the glitter.
When they were children, Alice had been the physically weaker twin, struggling to execute tasks Libby had taken for granted, and she’d never been any good with bodily fluids. But she’d held Libby while she sobbed until she vomited and then she’d changed the bedsheets when Libby’s faithless uterus had added insult to her pain and distress by flooding and staining the bed with blood clots. Alice even cooked her their favorite childhood comfort food of soft boiled eggs with bread and Vegemite ‘soldiers’, coaxing her to eat after she’d spent days gagging on the thought of food and existing on milk and coffee.
Karen had provided practical help too, filling the cookie jars with baking, taking the girls on outings and scrubbing the bathrooms with potent rage. Karen’s anger at Nick was a licking ball of fire that heated every room she entered. It surprised Libby that her mother’s outrage hadn’t melded with hers and comforted. Instead it had buffeted and hustled, demanding answers Libby didn’t have.
“Libby, think of the girls!”
“I am! It’s why I’m still here.”
“Then put yourself first. God knows, if you don’t, no one else will.”
The comment smacked Libby like the sting from an open palm. This from the woman who’d raised her to always consider how her actions would affect other people. “Apparently, you gave that selfish and useless advice to Jess years ago. It’s her and Nick putting themselves first that’s got us into this mess!”
Alice had come into the room then and asked Karen for a hand with the girls. When she’d shut the door behind them, Libby had fallen back on her pillows and cried with relief.
When Rosa and Rick had arrived at Burrunan asking to talk to her, it was Alice who came and found her. Libby braced herself for an argument. “I can’t do it, Al.”
But all Alice said was, “I get it. Leave it with me.”
For half an hour, Libby lay listening to the rise and fall of voices, knowing her twin, who once would have devolved into tears at a partially raised voice, was taking a bullet for her.
“They send their love,” Alice reported later, sitting on the bed in the guest room nursing a cup of tea.
“For what a Pirelli’s word is worth.”
Libby’s in-laws had only ever been welcoming and loving toward her, but then again, she’d always thought that of Nick too. Apparently it meant squat.
“They’re really upset, Libs. They almost got me to sign a promise that I’d tell you they love you like a daughter. They’re absolutely furious with Nick.”
“Good! Did you tell them to take a number?”
“Put it this way. If Nick dares to go into Rosa’s kitchen, I wouldn’t be surprised if she takes the wooden spoon to him. And Rick, well, I learned a couple of new Italian swear words.”
“And Jess? Are they going to burn her at the stake?”
“Mmm-hmm.” Alice’s nose was buried in her mug of tea.
Libby knew her twin only did that when she was avoiding an issue. “What?”
“Nothing.” Alice kept her gaze fixed inside the mug as if tea was the most fascinating thing on the planet. “Like I said, they’re furious with Nick so of course they’re not happy with Jess.”
Libby sat up and pinned her twin with something the two of them had labelled years earlier the “truth stare.” “There’s something you’re not telling me.”
Alice shook her head.
“It’s something about Jess, isn’t it? You have to tell me!”
“No, I don’t.”
“You do. I’m the first twin!”
Alice rolled her eyes. “We’re not kids and you’re not the boss of me anymore.”
“God, I wish we were twelve again.”
Alice’s face, almost a mirror image of her own, creased in lines of disagreement. “I’m not telling you because it will only upset you. I don’t want you hurt again.”
“Hah!” The sound cracked the air like a whip. “After what Nick and Jess did to me, believe me, I’m fully immune. And you not telling me is just as bad as them not telling me. If it affects me, I deserve to know.”
Anguish filled her twin’s eyes. “Okay … They’ve asked Nick to arrange—they want to spend time with Leo.”
Libby’s chest tightened so fast the pain shot clear through to her spine and she stifled a cry. As she pressed a fist against the burn under her sternum, she made her first real decision since the apocalypse.
That night Libby sat at the kitchen table opposite Nick with the red leather-bound notebook Alice had given her for another purpose entirely. The children were asleep and on Libby’s insistence, Alice had returned to Pelican House. It was the first time she’d been alone with her husband in
