Ali stepped back, away from temptation, and changed the subject.
‘Why didn’t you quit the army and follow your family? You could get work anywhere.’
‘It’s more complicated than that. The army paid for med school, I can’t just quit. There’s a thing called return of service,’ he explained. ‘I have to repay them in time for every year of study they supported me for plus one year. It was that or buy out my service and I couldn’t afford that. I’ve got four months left.’
‘What are you going to do then?’
‘I don’t know.’
Ali had hoped he’d say he was planning on staying here but she knew it would depend on other factors. Julieanne’s condition would be the decider and no one was in control of that.
She took one last look at his mouth. She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t take the chance. She wasn’t brave or courageous, certainly not enough to get involved in something that was complicated, potentially messy and tragic. She wasn’t strong enough for both of them.
Fate had brought them together again, even if she didn’t want to believe it, but circumstances would keep them apart no matter how much she wished things were different.
Julieanne
JULIEANNE WAS EXHAUSTED. It hadn’t been a particularly strenuous day but she found any day that she had to go to appointments stressful. The drive through the hills from Stirling into the city, waiting for the appointment, waiting for results, they all took their toll. She’d had scans today. Scans that showed that, despite the radiotherapy, the tumour continued to grow. She hadn’t been surprised. She could feel things weren’t improving yet a tiny part of her had been hoping she’d been wrong. That was exhausting too, trying to keep positive when she knew things weren’t getting better.
And just because the bad news wasn’t unexpected didn’t make it any easier to hear. She tried not to dwell on the statistics but she knew the odds were not in her favour. Survival rates were pretty well non-existent with this type of tumour, fewer than three per cent of people survived past five years and the average life expectancy, even with treatment, was between seven and nine months. She was approaching five months. But she wasn’t ready to give up yet.
She lay on her bed, listening to the sounds of the twins in the bath. They’d had netball practice and a late dinner, neither of which Julieanne had had the energy for. There was so much she was missing out on and this was just the beginning. She hated the thought that she was going to miss out on the rest of their lives.
She was grateful to her mother and to Quinn for stepping in to help. She didn’t know how she would manage without them both but then Quinn had always tried to do the right thing. He was the type of man who took his responsibilities seriously.
Sometimes she wondered why she couldn’t have been happy with Quinn. Why she’d had to go looking for some excitement. What was wrong with her that she couldn’t be satisfied with a man who wasn’t only attractive but also intelligent and kind and decent?
But he hadn’t often been around.
Julieanne knew she’d embarked on the extramarital affairs as a cry for attention. She’d felt weighed down by the responsibility of motherhood, she’d felt as though she’d lost her identity. Quinn had been busy, he had been studying and fulfilling his defence force training commitments, but she hadn’t been able to see that he’d been suffering with the same feelings of pressure. She’d only seen that he’d got to escape from the constant, unending world of crying, sleepless babies who had forever needed changing and feeding. She knew now that her expectations of him had been unrealistic. He had been trying to finish his degree and at the same time keep a roof over his family’s heads. She knew a lot of other men would have never taken on the responsibility in the first place yet at the time she’d been so caught up with her own needs that she hadn’t stopped to consider Quinn.
When he hadn’t even noticed the first affair she’d embarked on another and another. It had given her a chance to feel like a woman again instead of just a mother. She hadn’t pretended she’d felt like a wife. A wife wouldn’t have behaved the way she had. She’d known she was playing with fire but she hadn’t been able to stop. She’d got bolder as she’d waited for him to notice. Waited for him to beg her to stop. Waited for him to tell her he loved her and that her affairs were breaking his heart.
But those words had never come.
She waited and waited but it was a long time before he found out. They were living in army accommodation where there wasn’t a lot of privacy, people saw things, people talked, and eventually someone told Quinn. But even then he didn’t profess his love. He just asked her what she planned to do. He didn’t throw it in her face that he was working and studying hard to provide for them and this was her way of thanking him. He didn’t accuse her of childish or selfish behaviour or of any of the things that he could have accused her of. Should have accused her of. She knew she’d behaved badly but she wondered now if he’d seen it as a way to get out of his commitment. Not to the children but to her. Would their relationship even have lasted if she hadn’t fallen pregnant? Was an unplanned pregnancy the only reason their relationship had lasted as long as it had?
The whine of the hairdryer interrupted her thoughts, the high-pitched noise competing for room in her brain. She had noticed she was having increasing trouble concentrating and any extraneous noise only compounded the problem.
She blocked out the noise as she asked herself a question she’d asked countless times before but had never been able to answer. Had she destroyed their relationship or would it have eventually run its course anyway?
She knew the answer was most probably yes. They’d been young. Too young. And naïve. She suspected it would have run its course but she would never know for certain.
Whatever the answer, she still couldn’t believe she’d behaved so appallingly. She’d treated Quinn so badly and yet here he was, back beside her, offering his help and support. Even if he wasn’t offering his love, he was doing more than she deserved. But she knew he was doing it for his children.
He may not have always been there for them but he was here now and she needed to prepare him for what would come next. She needed to prepare all of them. This was going to be her last gift, her attempt to right all the wrongs she’d done to Quinn. To make amends. Her last chance to try to leave them all in a good place.
Someone switched the hairdryer off and the irritating whine was replaced by the sound of her daughters’ giggles. They skipped into her room, decked out in pink pyjamas, their cheeks still flushed from the heat of the bath, her blonde hair, Quinn’s brilliant blue eyes. Julieanne felt her spirits lift. She and Quinn may have been a mistake but she had no regrets. That mistake had given them these two gorgeous girls and despite her early struggles she loved her daughters. She knew they were the best things that had ever happened to her and she needed to do her best by them now.
‘What’s so funny?’ she asked.
‘Granny was teaching Dad how to wash our hair.’
‘How did he go?’
‘He didn’t use enough shampoo.’
‘He said it’s ’cos he hardly has to use any ’cos his hair is so short.’
‘Your hair looks pretty to me.’ Their hair fell in glossy, healthy sheaths to their shoulders, Eliza’s still longer than Beth’s. ‘Did he get all the knots out?’
‘Granny did.’
‘Can