Chapters (50)
- Cover
- About the Book
- Dedication
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-one
- Twenty-two
- Twenty-three
- Twenty-four
- Twenty-five
- Twenty-six
- Twenty-seven
- Twenty-eight
- Twenty-nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-one
- Thirty-two
- Thirty-three
- Thirty-four
- Thirty-five
- Thirty-six
- Thirty-seven
- Thirty-eight
- Thirty-nine
- Acknowledgements
- About the Author
- Also by Sandie Docker
- Book Club Questions
- Welcome to the Kookaburra Creek Café
- Prologue
- One
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‘Mark, please. You won’t talk to me about our options for having children, you won’t talk to me about this. What’s going on?’
‘You want to talk? Then let’s talk.’ He took her hands. ‘I don’t want to have a child in a test tube and I don’t want to raise someone else’s kid, so adoption is out of the question. Do you ever stop for one minute and think about my feelings in this? No. It’s all about you. And now you come at me with this idea that will take you even further away from me and you wonder why I’m not thrilled. I never thought of you as selfish before, Nicky, but I’m starting to wonder if you even love me at all.’ His face fell, forlorn.
‘Of course I love you.’
‘Then why aren’t I enough for you?’
Mark walked out of the apartment and Nicky couldn’t move. How had they ended up here? So far away from each other? She collapsed on the floor.
Early the next morning as Mark snored, fast asleep, Nicky stood at her open cupboard and took out a pair of jeans and a couple of T-shirts and packed them into her small overnight bag. She’d feigned sleep when he came home just after one, smelling of red wine and she lay there all night, going over and over the conversation they’d had. She needed to get away. Just for a day or two. After everything that had happened lately, she needed to get some perspective. Just a couple of days to clear her head. Refocus. Deal with all these emotions she’d been bottling up.
Mark wouldn’t be thrilled. But surely he’d see the value once she came back fresh and happy and devoted once more.
But where would she go?
She stopped packing. She had no money for a hotel. Not a decent one, anyway. She tiptoed to her desk and turned her laptop on. There was usually a few hundred dollars in their joint account.
She opened the bank balance.
One hundred dollars. That wouldn’t be enough for one night anywhere near here. Shouldn’t there be more than that? Last time she checked, which was only yesterday when she did the online grocery shopping, there was five hundred in the account.
She clicked on the transaction history. At nine thirty last night, the rest of the money had been withdrawn. Mark had drunk it all away.
‘Nicky?’ Mark’s groggy voice came from the bedroom. ‘Come back to bed.’
Nicky stayed right where she was.
Fifteen
Nicole sanded back the peeling layers of decades-old paint from the window frame in the spare room, revealing the bare wood beneath. She went over it gently with some fine sandpaper and then a soft cloth. Opening the tin of primer, she dipped her brush in and made her first, slow, precise strokes.