flinched and his high cheekbones sharpened. ‘I wouldn’t know about that. The fact I stayed at school had absolutely nothing to do with my family.’
His words stung like a slap. ‘Oh. I just assumed that—’
‘Yeah, well, don’t.’ He flattened his spine against the tree as if he wanted to move away from her.
‘I’m sorry. Obviously, though, you not only finished school, you went on to have a brilliant career.’
‘Had.’
‘Do.’ She didn’t realise she could sound so much like a school teacher. ‘The fact it’s different doesn’t make it any less.’
‘If you say so.’
She knew he didn’t believe her and she ached for him because for some reason he didn’t seem to recognise that he was a great teacher. ‘Can you just answer my original question, please?’
The stubble on his now drawn-in cheeks made him look thunderous and she wondered if he was going to say anything more. She’d just about given up when he spoke.
‘You’re not going to stop asking, are you?’
‘No.’
He sighed. ‘At fourteen, I hated school. I was bored by every thing and I was heading straight toward the juvenile justice system. Ironically, the fact I was acting out saved me.’
She wanted to know everything but all parts of her screamed at her to go slowly. If she rushed him for information, he’d clam up. As hard as it was to stay silent, she managed it, but only just.
His haggard expression softened. ‘One night the football coach caught me on the roof of the school with cans of spray paint in my hand. I was seconds away from graffitiing the windows. It wasn’t the first time I’d been in trouble, but instead of calling the police, he held it over me and made me go to training. I hated him for it, but at the same time part of me wanted to go. I hated being there but I missed it when I wasn’t, and it confused the hell out of me. The fact Mick put up with my smart mouth and gave me more than one chance was a miracle and once I started to achieve in footy, I started to settle at school and attended regularly.’
‘But I don’t understand. With your brain, why were you bored by school?’ The question slipped out before she could stop it.
He snorted. ‘You went to an all-girls private school, didn’t you?’
His accusatory tone bit into her. ‘I did but—’
He held up his hand. ‘Don’t give me “buts”. You had teachers who cared, parents who valued education and facilities that weren’t broken or falling down around your ears.’
She sat up straight, propelled by a mixture of guilt and anger. He made her childhood sound idyllic and what it had been was so far from that it didn’t bear thinking about. ‘By the sounds of things, you had a teacher who cared.’
‘Yeah. I had a couple.’ He sighed. ‘Mick’s wife, Carol, was a maths and science teacher. Looking back, I now see what they really did for me. What I thought was a casual invitation of “come home for dinner” after footy training was really “we’ll give you a healthy meal, a quiet place to study and any help you need”. They’re the reason I passed year twelve and got into medicine. That, and a burning desire to prove the bastards wrong.’
His pain swamped her and she instinctively pressed her hand to his heart. He’d not once mentioned his parents. ‘Which bastards?’
The set of his shoulders and the grimness around his mouth reminded her of the first time she’d met him when he’d been practising navigating around the hospital. ‘Everyone who ever told me I wouldn’t amount to anything because my mother was drunk more than she was sober. Her drinking started when my father took off, leaving her a single mother at seventeen and gradually got worse after every other man she’d tried to love did the same thing. Everyone who’s still telling kids from the estate the same thing.’
‘I bet Mick and Carol were really proud of you.’
He swallowed and seemed to force the words up and out from a very deep place. ‘Mick never saw me graduate. He died when I was in fifth year, taken out hard and fast by a glioblastoma, the most aggressive type of brain tumour a person can have.’
‘Oh, I’m so sorry.’ But she suddenly understood. ‘And that’s why you drove yourself to be a neurosurgeon.’
He nodded as if he was lost in the clutch of memories and then his lips formed a quiet smile. ‘For Mick first and then for the Ferrari.’
She smiled and slid her hand into his. ‘Proving the bastards wrong?’
He gripped it hard. ‘Hell, yeah.’
Her own heart swelled as she glimpsed the man’s giving heart that he seemed to want to hide more often than not. ‘So now you’re paying it forward and giving Jared the same sort of support that Mick and Carol gave you?’
He shook his head. ‘Carol was born to help, but I’m no saint, Hayley. I didn’t seek Jared out or offer to mentor him, like Mick did for me. Jared tracked me down in Perth and then refused to go away.’
‘But now you’re helping him. He probably tracked you down because of how you related to him when he was sick.’
The admiration in Hayley’s voice couldn’t be mistaken for anything else, but Tom didn’t want to hear it. Their conversation had taken him far too close to the memories of his mother. Hell, he hated thinking about her because it took him back to a place he’d fought so hard to escape. Hayley had no clue about the eroding nature of abject poverty. How it slowly ate away at self-esteem and corroded hope, making the seduction of alcohol and drugs so tantalising as a temporary escape.
Only it wasn’t an escape at all. It was an extension of the poverty trap, which then gripped people like his mother permanently until death claimed them. Her death had been her release and he ached that she’d wanted death more than she’d ever wanted him.
He shivered as he pushed the memories away and then realised the wind had changed. He reached out his hand for his cane. ‘Feel the cold in that wind? What does the sky look like?’
‘Gunmetal.’ She shivered. ‘Oh, it’s really spooky.’
He heard her tossing things into the picnic hamper as the sun vanished. The temperature plummeted and the south-buster wind picked up speed. Dust made his eyes water and he could imagine the leaves and any debris being tossed every which way by the ferocious wind that howled around them.
He stood up and wished he knew the area better. ‘We need to find shelter.’
‘My place is less than two blocks away.’
He shook his head. ‘I know storms like this and we don’t have that much time.’
As if on cue, huge drops of rain started falling, but the violence of the wind blew them horizontally, stinging his face.
‘Ouch.’ Hayley caught his hand. ‘Since when does rain hurt?’
‘When it’s sleet. I was here in 1999 for Sydney’s most expensive hailstorm ever and this feels like the start of that.’ He yelled to be heard over the wind. ‘Get us to the nearest shelter. Now.’
Thunder cracked around them and Hayley squealed. ‘Sorry.’ She jammed his hand on her shoulder. ‘There’s a bandstand a hundred metres away.’
As they started walking, the sleet became hail—stones of ice that dive-bombed them with sharp edges, and stung, bruised and grazed any uncovered skin. It was the most painful hundred metres he’d ever walked and he hated that his blindness meant Hayley had to endure it too instead of being able to run to safety.
‘Three steps,’ Hayley yelled over the noise of the hail on the bandstand’s tin roof.
He navigated the steps and he knew