‘Is there a big unemployment problem in the area?’
She left Ella with a warning not to touch things and crossed the room to the little kitchen nook, where he waited by the single gas ring for the kettle to boil. Picking up the gourd in which he had put the chopped-up leaves—were they called yerba? She tried to remember—for the tea, she turned it in her hands, cupping it and appreciating how snugly it fitted her hand, stirring the chopped dry leaves with the metal straw.
Eventually he answered, taking his turn in this painful pretence.
‘It’s a problem among the young people—the ones who choose not to go on to higher education,’ Jorge replied, though his inner reaction to her closeness and his fascination with the movement of her hands had delayed his reply too long. ‘In the beginning, working with the boys to make the mud bricks for the walls, I found it was a more satisfying form of physical therapy than working out in a gymnasium. Gradually it became a challenge to all of us, to build something with our own hands—something we could feel pride in. Yes, the hut is rough, the door is rough, but it is our hut and our door, and I, for one, cannot open it without a sense of perhaps not pride but satisfaction that I could, with only a little help, make myself a shelter.’
‘You started by making the bricks?’
Disbelief and admiration warred in her voice but the shrill whistle of the kettle stopped the conversation. He took the gourd from her, turning it upside down a couple of times to move the finer leaves to the top, then tipping it from side to side. That done, he poured in cold water to saturate the leaves and let it sit a minute on the table. The mechanical movement of his hands as he made the mate gave him time to think—time to tell himself her admiration wasn’t personal. She would be equally admiring of any man she knew had built his own dwelling.
Any man she knew?
He glanced at her left hand, certain he’d see a wedding ring.
No jewellery at all, but, then, she’d always shunned what she called fripperies. And if she’d married, Ella would have a father figure in her life, and there’d have been no reason for her to come.
He tipped the gourd once more so the leaves settled on one side of it, and carefully added the boiling water.
And while it steeped he shrugged off her admiration, making light of what had been a mammoth task.
‘It’s how people used to do it, and I cannot spend all my spare hours reading.’
‘Spare hours,’ Caroline replied. ‘I remember them, though the memory is hazy.’ She looked towards her daughter, then added, ‘Not that I’d swap Ella for even one spare hour.’
The remarks bothered Jorge, for all he was trying to do was keep the conversation determinedly neutral—coolly polite, nothing more. She’d sounded wistful, as if genuine regret lurked somewhere behind the words.
‘You have so little time?’ he asked, dropping a silver straw into the mate then pausing for an unseen guest to try it before handing the gourd to Caroline.
She lifted the gourd, and sipped through the straw, grimacing slightly at the taste, or perhaps the heat of the drink.
‘I pass it back to you, is that right?’ she said, and, knowing she’d remembered something as simple as the mate ceremony of sharing made his heart go bump again, but though the barriers he’d erected around his heart were as rough as the walls of his hut, he knew he had to keep them intact, heart-bumps or no heart-bumps!
His mind tracked back to the previous conversation—the question Caroline hadn’t answered.
‘You have so little time?’ he asked again.
It was all too weird, Caroline decided, standing in a little hut not unlike the one they’d shared in Africa—although that one had been round and roofed with palm fronds, not corrugated iron—with Jorge beside her, asking polite questions—exactly as it had been when they’d first met.
CHAPTER TWO
SHE shook off the memory and steeled herself against the attraction that still tingled along her nerves when she looked at him or heard his voice. Best to consider his question—to answer him.
Best to forget the past and all its joy and pain …
‘I work, I come home, and I try to be a good mother. Like all working mothers I feel guilt that someone else spends more time with my daughter than I do, so I probably overcompensate. Then, when Ella goes to bed, there are always business things to take care of, or articles to read or write—you know how it is, keeping up with the latest developments, hoping you’ll find something to help a patient you’ve seen recently.’
He turned to face her so the scar on his cheek was fully visible and it was only with an enormous effort she resisted the urge to lay her palm against his damaged skin, as Ella had done earlier.
‘You said your father left you money. You must have no need to work.’
She smiled at him and waved her hands around the hut, pleased to have such a bland, harmless topic of conversation to occupy her mind and distract it from the suggestions of her body—suggestions like moving closer, touching him.
‘And I’m sure you’re not so impoverished you needed to build your own hut, so you, at least, should understand. A lot of people put a lot of time and effort to train me for the job I do. I wouldn’t feel right to just stop doing it, especially when there are areas where doctors are still desperately needed. I’ve been working in an inner-city practice where patients are a mix of trendy twenties, urban aboriginals, homeless youths, prostitutes, Asian migrants and long-term street people. Probably not unlike this area you work in, although, from the article I read, most of your patients are the indigenous Toba people, so you don’t get the same mix.’
Pleased with herself for answering as if the tension in the air between them wasn’t twisting her intestines into knots, she kept going. Talking was better than thinking. Unfortunately for this plan, Ella chose that moment to knock over a second pile of books.
‘Oh, blast,’ Caroline said as she hurried towards the mess, but Jorge was there before her. ‘I really should control my daughter better.’
The words were no sooner out than she realised how stupid they had been.
‘Our daughter,’ she amended, but knew it was too late. She was kneeling now, directly in front of him, looking into Jorge’s deep brown eyes, eyes she’d once fallen right into and drowned in, losing her heart, soul and body to the man who owned them.
And because she was looking, she saw the pain, read it as clearly as words written in white chalk on a black background.
‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered, though for what she wasn’t certain.
For the lost years?
For him not knowing he had a daughter?
For hurting him by not showing enough love that he could have depended on it four years ago, depended on it enough not to have written that email?
Though surely pride had written that email—his pride, not her lack of love.
She didn’t know.
He stood up without a word, walking back to the kitchen where the mate sat on the small kitchen table. Leaving Ella to restack the books, Caroline followed him, picking up the gourd and taking another sip, trying to get back to polite conversation because anything else was too painful.
‘It must be an acquired taste,’ she said, handing the gourd over to him and hoping he’d think she’d been considering mate, not love and the pain it caused as she’d sipped. ‘And obviously very popular! We saw people drinking it everywhere—walking along the street in the city, even waiting at bus stops.’
‘It