Chapters (39)
- Cover
- Title
- Author’s Note
- Glossary
- 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
- Acknowledgments
The lurch was powerful enough to rip her fingers from the plant. She fell forward, tumbling off the boulder for a metre or so before her lower chest rammed into the jagged edge of a rock. The impact seemed to knock every wisp of air from her lungs but wasn’t enough to stop her entirely. She rolled over and toppled again, legs and arms flailing until she landed on a ledge, her left knee taking the full force of the second phase of the fall.
She lay, stunned, trying to contain her fright and struggling to inhale, to exhale, to fill her lungs. Slowly, she told herself, slowly and deeply. That was when the pain pulsed through her. It seemed to come from muscles that held her ribs together, ribs which seemed to click as if disconnected. She breathed shallowly and fast, holding the oxygen in her upper airways. Her heart pounded, her head spun and her knee throbbed as though someone had pounded it with a mallet.
Clare closed her eyes and tried to calm her thoughts. She’d be okay. She hadn’t hit her head. She wasn’t at risk of falling further. The ledge wasn’t far from the top and, if she was careful, she could crawl back to safety. As she pushed herself up, a dagger of pain stabbed through her and she passed out.
Eleven
Eleven
She sat on the stairs leading into the lapa, shovelling muesli and long-life milk into her mouth. It was tasteless and required more chewing than it deserved. Faye remembered why, at home, once Derek left for work, she ate toast heaped with butter and marmalade rather than her husband’s preferred breakfast cereal.
“Breakfast is not about savouring textures and flavours,” he’d insisted when, early in their marriage, she’d tried to introduce other things to the table in the morning. “It’s about fuelling your body as quickly and effectively as possible. There’s no time for cooking and relishing food at breakfast.”
Faye didn’t agree. She was happy to get up in time to make omelettes with cheese and mushrooms and pancakes with apple and cinnamon. But she didn’t argue. Neither did she comment on how accurate Derek’s assessment of muesli was. Introduced as a morning meal for patients by a Swiss doctor in the early 1900s, muesli wasn’t, she thought, food at all; it was medicine.
Before Zach was old enough to go to school, Faye would wait until Derek had bolted down his muesli and left before she and her son went into the kitchen to create their own more interesting breakfasts. It was her son’s introduction to cooking.
Later, when he’d begun school, Zach ate breakfast with Derek.
“Eat your muesli, Zach. It contains everything you need to get going. There’s no time for toast or eggs. We’ll be late,” his father would grumble.