Grant desperately needed a few minutes in the darkness to gather his composure. He slid into his passenger seat and sank into the familiar, comfortable leather, breathing deeply.
Cancer. Lung cancer.
A whole bunch of things flashed through his mind and suddenly made sense: Alan’s awkwardness when Grant had mentioned the stink of tobacco in his father’s house. The freaky, hippy health-concoction in his beer fridge. The fact he’d more or less got his affairs in order before …
Grant took a deep breath.
He’d even waited until Kate was away before taking his life. He glanced at the face, so serious with concentration, watching the road ahead. Had Leo not wanted such a gentle woman to find him? To discover the horror? He was willing to bet big bucks that his father wouldn’t have expected his only son to find him, either, in a million years. Grant had a sinking suspicion he’d been counting on his old mate Alan Sefton to do the honours.
Cancer.
It had had nothing to do with Kate’s project or the land grab. Something very close to relief rushed through him, stumbling and falling over the latent grief still clogging his arteries. He should have been here. He should have made more than one call a year. He should never have let so many years go by. And neither should his father.
I see Leo staring back at me. Were they truly that similar? Would he end up grumpy and alone and sick enough to end it all? There wasn’t much else stopping him, just his work. Just the same rigid discipline about his job that his father had had. That Kate had.
He cleared his throat and turned to the woman whose hands gripped the steering wheel brutally. She knew, first hand, how he was feeling yet she hadn’t taken advantage of his weakness. She’d just been there for him. Is that the kind of quality his father had seen in his young friend’s character?
He cleared his throat. ‘Kate, thank you.’
Her eyes flicked to his, wide and anxious. ‘How are you?’
He nodded slowly. ‘I’ll survive.’ She wanted to ask something. He could see it in the way her teeth worried her lips. ‘Go ahead, Kate. Ask.’
The words practically exploded from her. ‘Did it not say on the certificate—the cause of death? Or did you not see it?’
His chest tightened up. Could he tell her? She and Leo had been friends. ‘I saw it,’ he answered carefully.
‘Yet tonight was still a surprise?’
Anxiety ravaged her sweet face. Knowing would only hurt her, and lying couldn’t hurt Leo. Or him; not any more. Yet he couldn’t let her go on feeling bad for letting the truth slip, either. He reached over and slid a hand onto her cool arm.
‘I’m glad you told me. Imagine if you hadn’t …’
Her brows dropped and she thought about that. ‘I just … I would have approached it so much more carefully if I’d known. Obviously,’ she finished flatly and shook her head.
‘It hasn’t been the best night for you—assaulted by the local fishing mafia, accosted by me and now digging your way out of the deepest of social faux pas.’
Kate’s laugh shriveled. ‘Oh no; that’s pretty typical of a Dickson night out. It’s why I prefer to stay in.’
‘Well, looks like you’ve got your wish.’
She hit the indicator and turned off the highway into Tulloquay’s long access-road.
‘It feels weird, coming here at night.’
But also strangely right. Grant had the sudden flash of them driving home from a night out at the community centre, grey and old, chatting about town affairs, about their grandchildren. Their hands old and weathered, tightly entwined. Just like his father must have always wished for with the wife he had lost so young.
And then to lose a son, too …
They didn’t speak until Kate pulled up in front of the house. She killed the ignition and then turned to peer at him from the half-shadows. ‘What did he die of, Grant?’
Damn her intuition and her curiosity. ‘Kate …’
‘I’ve been thinking about it all the way home. I assumed it was the cancer—but there should have been hospitals, a decline. His lungs weren’t really any worse when I saw him the week before.’ Beautiful brown eyes appealed to him. ‘Please, Grant. I know you must not want to talk about it but the question is going to eat at me.’
He studied her hard. No matter what he said, she was going to sit on her guilt for not being here. That Leo had died alone. The same guilt he was nursing. ‘It was the cancer, Kate.’
Tears filled doe eyes. ‘You’re lying—which means it was worse. Was it his heart? Did something happen to him? Was he hurt?’
Her anxiety was only going to increase if he didn’t put an end to this. He tightened his lips and swore inwardly. ‘Did Leo ever lose stock?’
Thrown off-balance momentarily, she blinked back at him. ‘Sure. Sometimes. He hated finding them out in the paddock, suffering. He hated shooting them, too, but he did what he had to do.’
‘He never could abide anything suffering. Anyone.’
Kate frowned and waited for him to continue, but in his steady, loaded silence her beautiful face blanched and the liquid wash of her eyes spilled over as she pieced together Leo’s puzzle.
‘He did what he felt he had to do, Kate.’
She fought so hard to keep from losing it in front of him, almost visibly willing those tears back under the privacy of her eyelids. But she couldn’t sustain it; they leaked, unauthorised, down her face. Grant cursed and reached out to gently curl his hand around the back of her neck. She let herself fall into the support of his shoulder. Immediately his nostrils filled with the scent of clean, unadorned woman. Even going into town, Kate hadn’t broken the no-perfume rule. Her hands slipped up to control her descent, one curling around his bicep and the other bracing on his chest. They burned through his wool-blend sweater and branded his skin, setting off a chain reaction of tingles.
But his hormones weren’t his priority right now.
He threaded his fingers through the thickness of her hair and pressed her against his shoulder, murmuring comforting sounds. She wasn’t a sobber, but her silent tears were almost worse. They matched her perfectly—stoic and dignified.
‘I should be comforting, you,’ she mumbled between tight shudders.
‘It is comforting, knowing he had a friend who would cry like this for him. Honour him.’
She sniffed. ‘I hate that he felt he had to do it, but I understand why.’ Grant stroked her hair. ‘Maybe it was the last thing he could control—how he left us?’
Us. That sounded way too good on Kate’s tear-puffed lips. His eyes lingered on them—fuller and redder than usual—even in the half-darkness.
The tears surged back. ‘He was so difficult,’ she squeezed out. ‘But so lovely.’
‘I know,’ he murmured against her hair.
Except he didn’t. ‘Lovely’ was not a word he ever would have associated with his father.
‘It’s like losing Dad all over again,’ she croaked.
Nothing she said could have cut him more deeply. Here was a woman who would give anything to have her father back, to have a farm to call her own, to have sheep and alpacas and … bloody seals. And he’d thrown it all away decades before, as though it had no value.
To him, it hadn’t.
‘I was born into the wrong family,’