‘I’m—’
Choosing your words very carefully …?
‘—just enjoying you.’ He almost fell over himself to correct himself. ‘Your company. Talking.’
Well … Awkward, much? ‘Any way, nothing short of medicine or law was ever going to satisfy my father. He’s had high expectations of me my whole life.’ And was constantly disappointed. Ironic, really, when she considered how his marriage had ended. Imploded. And how little he’d done to save it.
‘Do you like what you do?’
‘I love what I do.’
‘Then that’s what you’re meant to be doing. Don’t doubt yourself.’
His absolute certainty struck her. ‘What if I might love being a doctor, too?’
He shrugged. ‘Then that was where you’d have found yourself. Life has a way of working out.’
His assured belief was as foreign to her as it was exhausting. How would it feel to be that sure—about everything? She settled back against the seat and let her eyes flutter closed for a moment, just to take the sting of dryness out of them.
‘Aimee—’
Sam was right there, gently rousing her with a feather touch to her cheek.
‘I can’t even rest my eyes?’
‘You went to sleep.’
Oh. ‘I can’t sleep?’
He stroked her hair again. Almost like an apology. ‘When you get to the hospital you can sleep all you want. But I need you to stay awake now. With me. Can you do that?’
Stay with me. Her sigh was more of a flutter deep in her chest. ‘I can do that.’ But it was going to be a challenge. It had to be four a.m. and she’d left at six yesterday morning. Twenty-four hours was a long haul, even if she had had some unconscious moments before he’d found her. And apparently another just now.
‘Tell me about your research,’ he said, clearly determined to keep her awake. ‘What’s your favourite story?’
She told him. All about wrinkled, weathered, ninety-five-year-old Dorothy Kenworthy, who’d come to Australia to marry a man she barely knew eight decades before. To start a life in a town she’d never heard of. A town full of prospects and gold and potential. About how poor they’d been, and how Dorothy’s husband had pulled a small cart with his culture-shocked bride and her belongings the six-hundred kilometres inland from the coast to the mining town he’d called home. How long love had been in coming for them; about the day that it finally had. And about how severely Dorothy’s heart had fractured the day, seventy years later, she’d lost him.
Stories of that kind of hardship were almost impossible to imagine now—how people had endured them—overcome them—and were always her favourites.
‘Dorothy reminds me that there is always hope. No matter how dire things get.’
Sam’s brow folded and he drifted away from her again. Not because he was bored—his intense focus while she’d been telling the start of the story told her that—but because he’d taken her words deep inside himself and was processing them.
‘Why didn’t she give up?’ he eventually asked. ‘When she was frightened and heatstroked and feeling so … alien.’
‘Because she’d come so far. Literally and figuratively. And she knew how important she was to her husband. She didn’t want to let him down.’ His frown trebled as she watched. ‘Plus she’d made a commitment. And she was a woman of great personal honour.’
‘Is that something you believe in? Honouring commitments?’
‘What do we have if not our honour?’
Finally his eyes came back to her. ‘Is it her story on your thumb drive?’
‘No. It’s another one …’
She told him that one too. Then another, and another, sipping occasionally at the water he meted out sparingly and not minding when he shared from the same bottle. She didn’t care if Search and Rescue Sam gave her a few boy germs while he was giving her the greatest gift any man in her life had ever given her.
He listened.
He showed interest. He asked questions. He didn’t just listen waiting for an opportunity to talk about himself, or slowly veer the subject around to something of more interest to him. He heard her. He didn’t interrupt. And he wasn’t the slightest bit bored.
Just like that a light came on, bright and blazing and impossible to ignore, right at the back of Aimee’s mind.
That was the kind of man she wanted for herself. That was the kind of man she’d never really believed existed. Yet here one sat: living, breathing evidence—her already compromised chest tightened—and the universe had handed him to her.
How had she ever thought a man like Wayne was even close to worthy? Maybe if she’d been allowed out more as a young girl, had got to meet more people, sample more personalities … Maybe then she never would have accepted Wayne’s domination of her. Maybe if she hadn’t grown up watching it, until her father had finally forced her mother’s hand …
‘I can see you love these stories.’ His blue eyes were locked on her so firmly, but were conflicted, yet immobile. ‘You’re … glowing.’
Unaccustomed to the intensity he was beaming at her, and still unsettled by her thoughts of just a moment before, Aimee took shelter in flippancy. ‘Maybe it’s the glow-sticks.’ She smiled and settled against the seat-back, her body begging her to let it drift into exhausted slumber. ‘Or the sunrise.’
That seemed to snap him out of his blue-eyed trance. Around them the light had changed from the total absence of any light at all during the night to a deep, dark purple, then a navy. And the navy was lightening up in patches by the moment.
Sam glanced at his watch. A dozen worry lines formed on his face. ‘Okay Aimee, the darkness is lifting. We made it.’ He found her hand and held it. ‘I’m going to need you to be very brave now, and to trust me more than ever.’
We will not fall. She heard the words though she knew he didn’t say them.
It only took another few minutes before she realised why a new kind of tension radiated from his big body and from the hand he’d wrapped so securely around hers. The deep blue outside seemed to dilute as she watched it, and darkness began to take on the indistinct blurs of shape. Then they firmed up into more defined forms—the tree branch outside the window, the hint of a hill on the horizon—as the first touch of lightness streaked high across the sky.
Her heart-rate accelerated as it struggled to pump blood that seemed to thicken and grow sluggish.
Around them she saw nothing but emerging treetops—some higher than her poor battered Honda, some lower. The front of the car was in darkness longer than the areas around it because the nose was buried in a treetop. Literally balancing in the crown of a big eucalypt, which threw off its distinctive scent as the overnight frost evaporated. In her shattered side mirror she could see the angle of the hillside—steep and severe—that the back of her little hatchback had wedged against.
And they perched perilously between the two, staring down into the abyss.
A black dread surged from deep inside Aimee’s terrified body. She sucked in a breath to cry out but it froze, tortured, in her lungs and only a pained squeak issued, as high as the elated morning chorus of the birds around them but infinitely more horrified.
‘Hold on to me, Aimee….’
Sam’s voice was as much a tether as any of the cables strapping her into her car, and she clung to it emotionally even though she couldn’t