‘Yes, I’ve washed my hands,’ he said as he held them up for inspection, before kissing Tara on her forehead. ‘How’s my best girl?’
Tara frowned. She hated the way her father often treated her as if she was still his little girl.
‘Fine, Dad.’ She reached for her cup of tea as her mother passed the cake. ‘How did you go with the fences?’
‘All done, but I won’t move the cows until after milking tomorrow morning.’
‘Want a hand?’
Though she was quite able to handle a quad bike to get around the farm, and knew the routine of milking back to front, she guessed her father would say no. As he always did. She was sure she could manage most of the work from her wheelchair with a simple modification to raise her height. She’d developed strength in her arms and shoulders to rival any man’s.
But her father had refused to let her near the dairy after the accident. He didn’t seem to understand that her help would give him more time for the heavier work that neither Tara nor her mother could manage. For him, there was a non-negotiable line between men’s and women’s work that she’d almost given up trying to cross. His one concession was letting her mother help out now they could no longer afford to hire a dairyman.
‘No, love. It won’t take long, and you deserve your free time on the weekends.’
He had good intentions but was seriously lacking in subtlety. Another one of those man things, as her mother would say. He had no idea, though. She hardly needed to keep a social diary. Her life had settled into a comfortable equilibrium of work, home and the occasional outing to the shops or the pool at the physio’s in Bayfield, fifty kilometres away. And at the end of her working days she hardly had any energy left to party.
Their conversation was interrupted by a car pulling up at the front of the house.
‘Are you expecting visitors?’ Graham glanced at his wife.
‘Might be Audrey. She said she’d come round some time this week to return those preserving jars. But she usually drives around the back.’
A car door slammed and a few moments later there was a crisp knock on the front door. ‘I’ll go and see who it is,’ she added.
Graham stood up, an imposing thick-set man of six foot three. ‘No, I’ll go. You get another cup of tea poured.’
Tara heard her father talking, but not what he was saying. She could tell he was angry by the sharp rise and fall of his voice. The visitor was male, that was all she could tell, and clearly unwelcome.
‘Doesn’t sound like Audrey,’ her mother said with eyebrows raised.
They stilled at the sound of the front door slamming and her father clomping, barefoot, down the passage.
‘Who’s that?’ Jane asked. She’d already poured a cup of tea for the visitor and looked disappointed.
‘You don’t want to know.’ He scowled and shifted his gaze to Tara. ‘It’s Ryan.’
It took Tara a few moments to process the information.
‘Ryan?’ The word escaped as a husky whisper and didn’t require an answer. She’d tried to put her feelings for her ex-husband on hold since their dramatic parting, but rarely a day went by without her thinking of him, dreaming of what life could have been if she’d not rejected him so coldly. She’d made the right decision, though. She’d heard Ryan had married again and started a family. She was happy for him.
But she’d never stopped loving him.
So she’d have to make sure she remained cool and detached and not let her true feelings show.
But why was he here? And why now? She felt her heart pumping as a film of sweat broke out on her forehead. She felt winded.
After all these years!
She took a deep breath and attempted a steady voice. Both her parents were looking at her, waiting for her reaction. She tried to restore her usual calm.
‘Ryan Dennison?’
The angry fire in her father’s eyes answered her question.
‘He’s waiting outside, insisting he talks to you, says he won’t go until he’s seen you.’ He paused as if gauging her reaction. ‘I’ll send him away—even if it means running him off the property with the shotgun—’
‘No, Dad, I’ll see him.’ Though the last person she wanted to see was her ex, she knew her father wasn’t joking about the gun. ‘I’ll go outside. There’s no need for him to come in.’
He seemed to accept her suggestion as a sign of her disapproval of her ex-husband and conceded.
‘All right, but you be careful.’
Tara wasn’t sure what her father meant.
At the time of their separation her thoughts had been clouded by the devastation of losing so much—the use of her legs, her career, the baby they’d so desperately wanted to make their family complete.
Ryan had had his whole life to live. She hadn’t wanted to take that away from him. He’d just started his specialist training in orthopaedics—his dream career. If he’d become her full-time carer, as he’d said he would, the future they’d planned before the accident would have been shattered. She’d felt she had little choice, especially in the early days when the pain had been so acute, and in retrospect she’d probably been depressed, not capable of making rational decisions. Back then there’d been no way she could have deprived Ryan of his dreams of a career, a happy marriage to a healthy wife and the children he had wanted so much.
The best thing had been to divorce. It had been easier that way. She hadn’t wanted to find out if Ryan was capable of coping with living with a woman who was disabled. He’d always described her as perfect in every way.
But she wasn’t perfect any more, not since the crash, and her scars were more than just physical. Yes, the sadness and pain, both physical and emotional, had lessened as the years passed, but memories still lingered of the man she’d loved with every part of her heart and soul.
Why was he here? The thought tumbled into her mind again.
She felt light-headed as she opened the door and the familiar clawing of panic descended like thick smog. Her heart began to pound and she gagged on the taste of bile at the back of her throat. A shard of irrepressible fear mixed with long-suppressed hurt stabbed at her heart and threatened to take control of her mind.
She stopped in the doorway and began taking slow, deep breaths.
‘What’s the matter, Tara? Are you all right? You look pale.’
For a long moment she’d been so preoccupied with losing control in front of Ryan she’d forgotten where she was. By now it was too late. A man she hardly recognised crouched in front of her. This was a successful man in his mid-thirties, with thick brown hair clipped short, clean-shaven and dressed in a conservative charcoal-grey suit, white shirt and silver tie. He looked nothing like the relaxed young man she remembered.
She was beginning to feel normal again, but couldn’t bring herself to smile. Her emotions were too raw. She felt the slowing of her heartbeat and the fuzziness clearing from her head.
He still had the same deep blue eyes, though, and right now they were full of concern.
‘I’m fine,’ Tara replied. She hated the fact she’d let down her guard and revealed how vulnerable she could be before they’d even said hello. ‘I just get a bit light-headed sometimes. It never lasts for more than a few minutes.’ The tension in Ryan’s face relaxed. ‘Dad said you wanted to talk to me.’
Ryan