She set down her luggage and dumped the envelope from Australia on the coffee table along with the rest of her mail. Then she went through to the bathroom and had a long hot shower, massaging the nagging pain in her hip under the steady stream of water.
She washed her hair, dried it roughly with a towel, letting the damp dark tresses hang loose past her shoulders as she changed into a comfy pair of stretch slacks and an oversized T-shirt.
Soon she would make her supper. A simple herb omelette would suffice. But first a glass of wine, an indulgence she could allow herself now that the performance tour was behind her.
Curled on the sofa, with the wine within reach and a cushion positioned to support her painful hip, Eva retrieved the envelope from Australia and slit it open. A card depicting an iconic Queensland beach fell out.
Beneath the picture, a message—an invitation to a reunion of her classmates to celebrate twenty years since their last year of high school.
Eva felt sick as she read the details.
Where: Emerald Bay Golf Club
When: Saturday October 20th
The simple wording hit her like a punch to the chest. A thousand long-suppressed images crashed in. The beach in summer and the thrill of riding the rolling green surf. The smooth trunk of a palm tree at her back as she sat at the edge of the sand, eating salty fish and chips wrapped in paper. The smell of sunscreen and citronella.
Her thoughts flashed to hot summer days in classrooms with windows opened wide to catch a sea breeze. And then, despite her best efforts to block them, there were memories of Griffin Fletcher.
Griff, sitting at the desk just behind her in class, all shaggy-haired and wide-shouldered, catching her eye when she turned and sending her a cheeky grin.
Griff on the football field. The flash of his solid thighs as he sped past to score a try.
Griff holding her close in the dark. The surprising gentleness of his lips.
And, flashing between those sweeter memories, the fear and the crushing weight of her terrible secret. The overwhelming heartbreak and pain.
Enough.
Stop it.
Eva knew at once what her response would be. What it must be. Of course she couldn’t possibly go. With deep regret, she would be unable to accept the kind invitation. She was very grateful to be remembered by her old school friends, but her schedule was far too tight.
It wasn’t untrue. She had a new set of rehearsals for The Nutcracker lined up and she couldn’t really afford the time away. And why would she want to go back to the Bay anyway? Her mother no longer lived there. It was many years now since her mum had married and settled in Cairns in the far north of the state. As for Eva’s classmates and the rest of her memories—of necessity, she’d very deliberately left all that behind.
Instead, she’d worked as hard as possible for those twenty years, putting in endless, punishing hours to build the career of her dreams. These days, posters of Eva Hennessey, dancing as Giselle, as Cinderella or as Romeo’s Juliet, were on display in almost every theatre or train station in Europe.
After long years of hard work, this was Eva’s reward. Rave reviews claimed her as ‘technically poised and polished and lyrically perfect’. Wherever she went, audiences cheered Bravo! and gave her standing ovations. Her dressing rooms were crammed with beautiful flowers.
Eva’s world was now different in every way imaginable from the life she’d known in the sleepy seaside town of her youth. She might as well be living on a different planet. If she ever returned to Emerald Bay, she would not only awaken past hurts, she would feel like an alien.
Just the same, she felt sick to the stomach as she tucked the card back into the envelope. She told herself she was simply overtired after the gruelling weeks on tour.
In the morning she would post an ‘inability to accept’ and she would delete all thoughts of Emerald Bay.
* * *
Bees buzzed in the bottlebrush hedge. Small children laughed and squealed as they splashed at the shallow end of the elegant swimming pool, while their mothers watched, dangling their bare legs in the water as they sipped Pimm’s from long glasses. The smell of frying onions floated on the balmiest of breezes. It was a typical Sunday afternoon in suburban Brisbane.
Griff Fletcher was the host on this particular Sunday and his guests were a couple of long-time mates and their families. Griff was repaying their hospitality while his girlfriend, Amanda, was away in Sydney on business. It made sense. Amanda hadn’t known these guys for decades as he had. They weren’t really part of her scene—she was so much younger than their wives—and she didn’t ‘do’ little kids.
As Griff added steaks to the sizzling barbecue plate, the men helped themselves to fresh beers and kept him company.
‘So what do you reckon about the school reunion?’ asked Tim, who, like Griff, had moved from Emerald Bay to live and work in Queensland’s capital city. ‘Are you planning to check it out, Griff?’
Griff shrugged. He’d known that Tim and Barney were bound to talk about the reunion today, but he really wasn’t that interested. ‘I think I might give it a miss,’ he said.
Tim pulled a face, clearly disappointed. ‘But surely you must be curious about your old mates? Wouldn’t you like to catch up with the gang?’
The best Griff could manage was a crooked grin. ‘I see you two often enough.’
Barney gave an awkward smile and Tim scowled and took a long drink of his beer. Griff scowled too, as he began to flip steaks. He knew it wouldn’t be long before one of the guys had another dig at him.
Tim shook his head. ‘I know you’re a hotshot barrister, Griff, but I didn’t take you for a snob.’
Griff gave another shrug as he turned the sausages for the children. ‘I just don’t see the point in revisiting the past. You know what these reunions are like. The only people who turn up are the ones who’ve been successful, or the ones who’ve bred a swag of offspring. Then they swan around feeling smug, gossiping about the ones who stayed away.’
‘That’s a bit harsh,’ Tim said stiffly.
‘I wasn’t talking about you of course, mate.’
His mate wasn’t mollified. ‘Have you ever been to a school reunion?’
‘No, but it’s easy to—’
‘I have,’ cut in Barney. ‘My folks still live in the Bay, so I’m up there pretty regularly and I went to the ten-year reunion.’ He looked a tad defensive. ‘I enjoyed meeting up with everyone again, even after just ten years. There were some who’d really changed and others who looked exactly the same. Not that any of that mattered. We all had plenty of laughs and swapped war stories. It was interesting to hear what everyone’s doing.’
‘See!’ crowed Tim with a triumphant grin.
Griff shrugged again and used the egg flip to shift the browned onions away from the heat. Then he turned to call to the women. ‘Steaks won’t be long.’
‘Right,’ Tim’s wife, Kylie, called back. ‘We’d better get these kids dry then.’
Tim, meanwhile, moved closer to Griff. Out of the corner of his mouth, he said, ‘Eva Hennessey’s not likely to be there.’
Griff stiffened, and was immediately annoyed that the mere mention of Eva could still raise a reaction. It really shouldn’t matter if he ran into a girl he’d known a million years ago.
The reaction didn’t make sense. Sure, Eva had been his first girlfriend, but he’d eventually got over the shock of her leaving town so abruptly. It wasn’t as if he’d been planning to marry her straight out