‘Did you know your precious Blake missed my fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth birthdays? That on my fourteenth, my parents argued for four hours and the last thing I heard was my mother demanding a divorce?’

He could still remember the fight now. The agony and pain in his mother’s voice as she begged him, begged her husband to change, to just spend one night with her and their son, instead of out on the fields with the harvest. Instead of rushing off to some other town affair that couldn’t be handled by someone else.

‘That’s why she left. That’s why she took me with her. Because he couldn’t once look up from this place. Its small town, gossipy mentality where people aren’t allowed to get over their mistakes, where nothing and no one is more important than the Hawkesbury bloody estate.’

He was breathing hard now, the effort and energy expended in opening up his hurts, his past, almost a physical thing.

‘Do you know what the last words he said to me were? That until I learned to be less selfish and think of others, I wasn’t welcome back. That he didn’t want to see me again.’

Lily’s eyes grew even larger and rounder and he cursed himself for causing the pain and hurt he saw there.

‘I’m pleased that he was there for you. I am. You deserve it so much more than I ever did. And it made you happy and that’s wonderful. But that’s not who he was to me. That’s not what this place is to me. And I can’t stay here.’

With that he walked off, before she could reply. Before she could lessen the hurt that he wanted to pull about him like a shield. Because it was so much better, easier even, than the sheer avalanche of grief he was trying to hold back.

Lily cycled down the path to the road and on to the town with tears in her eyes and an ache in her heart. For Henry, for herself. For Blake. As she rounded the corner into her mother’s road on the outskirts of Hawke’s Cove she saw her through the bleary sheen of tears, standing in the garden in front of her small cottage. Lily practically dropped the bicycle on the ground, stepping over it, and rushed into her mother’s widespread arms.

‘Sweetheart, what’s wrong?’

‘I didn’t know, Mum. I didn’t know.’ She collapsed into the embrace as great sobs wracked her chest.

‘Didn’t know what, my love?’

‘I didn’t know how badly Henry was hurting because of Blake.’ So much hurt it nearly crushed her – she couldn’t imagine what it was doing to Henry.

Marion gently pulled out of the embrace and levelled her with a look, as if she could fathom all that had happened from Lily’s gaze.