that right? A drug addict? You figured that out all by yourself. On what evidence?’
He paused, raking his long, surgeon’s fingers through his thatch of wavy, black hair. The gesture bought him some time and it made Kelly pause. Her anger faded, just a little.
The present flooded back. This man had saved her son’s leg. Maybe she needed to cut him some slack.
But it seemed slack wasn’t necessary. He’d gone past some personal boundary and was drawing back.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I made...I made assumptions when Jess died. I know now that at least some of them were wrong.’
Her anger had faded to bitterness. ‘You got the autopsy report, huh?’
‘You need to realise the last time I saw Jessie alive he was in drug rehab.’
‘That was years before he died.’
‘He told you about it?’
‘Jess was my husband,’ she snapped. ‘Of course he told me.’
‘You were seventeen!’
‘And needy. Jess was twenty-four and needy. We clung to each other.’ She shook her head. ‘Sorry, but I don’t have to listen to this. You never wanted to know about me before, and you don’t now. Thank you very much for saving my son’s leg. I guess I’ll see you over the next few days while he’s in hospital but I’ll steer clear as much as I can. I need to go back to our hotel and get Jess’s things, but I want to see him first. Is he awake?’
‘Give him a while. We put him pretty deeply under.’ He raked his hair again, looking as if he was searching for something to say. Anything. And finally it came.
‘You weren’t on drugs?’
‘You know,’ she said, quite mildly, ‘years ago I wanted to hit you. I was too exhausted to hit you then, too emotionally overwrought, too wrecked. Now I’m finding I want to hit you all over again. If it wasn’t for what you’ve just done for Jess, I would.’
‘You looked—’
‘I looked like my husband had just died.’ Her voice grew softer, dangerously so. ‘I was seventeen. I was twelve weeks pregnant and I’d sat by Jess’s bedside for twenty-four hours while he lost his fight to live. Then I’d sat in the waiting room at the funeral home, waiting for you, hour upon endless hour, because I thought that it’d be his father who’d come to get him and I didn’t think a message to contact me would work. I couldn’t risk missing him. And then you walked in instead, and I thought, yes, Matt’s come in his father’s stead and it’ll be okay, because Jess had told me how much he loved you. All I asked was for what Jess wanted, but you walked all over me, as if I was a piece of pond scum. And now...now you’re still telling me I looked like a drug addict?’
There was a long silence. She didn’t know where to go with this. She’d bottled up these emotions for years and she’d never thought she’d get a chance to say them.
Somewhere in Sydney, in a family vault, lay Jess’s ashes. She’d failed the only thing Jess had ever asked of her. She hadn’t stood up to his family.
She should hate this man. Maybe she did, but he was looking shocked and sick, and she felt...she felt...
Like she couldn’t afford to feel.
‘I’ll grab Jess’s things and bring them back,’ she said, deciding brisk and efficient was the way to go. ‘It’s only ten minutes’ walk to the hotel. I should be back before he’s properly awake. The rest of the surfers will be worried, too. There are a lot of people who love my Jess—practically family. Thank you for your help this afternoon, Matt Eveldene, but goodbye. I don’t think there’s single thing left that we need to talk about.’
* * *
There was. She knew there was. She walked down the hill from the hospital to the string of beachside hotels where most of the surfers were staying and she knew this wouldn’t end here.
Why did Jess look so much like his father? Why had she called him Jess?
Why had she kept her husband’s name?
‘Because it was all I had of him,’ she said out loud, and in truth she loved it that her son was called Jessie, she loved that he loved surfing, she loved that when she looked at him she could see his father.
But not if it meant...loss?
Her husband had told her about his family, his father in particular. ‘He controls everything, Kelly. It’s his way or no way. He loathed my surfing. He loathed everything that gave me pleasure, and when I got sick he labelled me a weakling. Depression? Snap out of it, he told me, over and over. Pull yourself together. I couldn’t cope. That’s why I hit the drugs that first time.’
She knew as much as she ever wanted to know about Jessie’s father—but he’d also told her about his brother, Matt.
‘He’s the only good thing about my family, Kell. If anything ever happens to me, go to him. He’ll help you.’
Well, he had helped her, Kelly thought grimly. She thought of the insurance cheque. It had been tossed at her in anger but she owed everything to it.
‘So Jess might have been wrong about him being a nice guy, but he’s had his uses,’ she told herself. ‘Now forget about him. You have enough to worry about without past history. For instance, the surf tour’s moving on. You’ll need to take leave. You’ll need a place to stay, and you’ll need to figure a way to stop Jess’s heart from breaking when he learns that he’s no longer part of the surf circuit.’
* * *
He felt like he’d been hit with a sledgehammer.
Matt walked up to the hospital rooftop, to the cafeteria area that looked out over the ocean. He leant on the rail overlooking the amazing view, trying to let the enormity of what had just happened sink in.
Jessie had a son. Somehow, his brother wasn’t dead.
Okay, that was a crazy thing to think but right now that was how it seemed. He knew if he phoned his mother—‘You have a grandson. He’s named Jess and he looks just like our Jessie’—his mother would be on the next plane. She’d broken her heart when Jess had died, and she’d never got over it. Always a doormat to her bully of a husband, she’d faded into silent misery. Matt worried about her, but not enough to stay in Sydney, not enough to stay near his father.
Should he tell his mother? He must. But if he told his mother, his father would know, too. There was the rub. Could you fight for custody of a seventeen-year-old boy? No, Matt thought, but knowing his father, he’d try. Or, worse, he’d let loose the anger he still carried toward his older son and unleash it on Kelly and his grandson.
The thought of his father bullying Kelly...
As he’d bullied her...
He thought back to the appalling funeral parlour scene and he felt ill.
He’d been a kid himself, a student. The call had come late at night; Jess had had a fall and died. Yes, it seemed to be suicide. His body was at a Hawaiian funeral home and a woman calling herself his wife was making the arrangements.
His father had exploded with grief and rage. ‘Stupid, idiotic, surfer hop-head. You needn’t think I’m heading off to that place to see him. You do it, boy. Go and get him, bring him home so his mother can bury him and there’s an end to it.’
‘They say he’s married?’
‘He’s been off his head for years. If there’s a marriage get it annulled. We have more than enough evidence to say he was mentally incapable. And don’t tell your mother. Just fix it.’
But Jess had never been mentally incapable. The depression that had dogged him since adolescence had been an illness, the same way cancer was an illness. Underneath the depression and, yes, the drugs when he’d been using,