‘But –’

‘I read this article recently. There are thousands of us walking around with this neurotic little secret. People you wouldn’t expect: CEOs who can do big presentations to shareholders but can’t handle small talk at the Christmas party, actors with crippling shyness, doctors who are terrified of making eye contact. I felt like I had to hide it from everyone, and the more I hid it, the bigger it seemed. I told Felicity yesterday and she just dismissed it. She said, “Get over it.” It was strangely liberating actually, hearing her say that. It was like I finally took this big hairy spider out of a box and someone looked at it, and said, “That’s not a spider.”’

‘I don’t want to dismiss it,’ said Will. ‘I want to squash your spider. I want to kill the bloody thing.’

Tess felt the tears rise again. ‘I don’t want to dismiss your flat feeling either.’

Will reached across the table and held out his hand, palm up. She looked at it for a moment, considering, and then she laid her hand in his. The sudden warmth of his hand, its simultaneous familiarity and strangeness, the way it enfolded hers, reminded her of the first time they met, when they were introduced in the reception area of the company where Tess worked, and her usual anxiety about meeting new people was overwhelmed by a powerful attraction to this shortish grinning man with the laughing gold eyes looking straight into hers.

They sat silently holding hands, not looking at each other, and Tess thought of the way Felicity’s eyes flickered when she asked her if she and Will had held hands on the plane from Melbourne and she nearly pulled her hand away, but then she remembered standing outside the bar with Connor, his thumb caressing her palm, and for some reason she thought also of Cecilia Fitzpatrick sitting in a hospital room with poor little beautiful Polly right now, and of Liam, safe upstairs, in his blue flannel pyjamas, dreaming of chocolate eggs. She looked up at the clear starry night sky and imagined Felicity on a plane, somewhere high above them, flying off into a different day, a different season, a different life, wondering how in the world it had come to this.

There were so many decisions to be made. How would they manage the next part of their lives? Would they stay in Sydney? Keep Liam at St Angela’s? Impossible. She’d see Connor every day. What about the business? Would they replace Felicity? That seemed impossible too. In fact, it all seemed impossible. Insurmountable.

What if Will and Felicity really were meant to be together? What if she and Connor were meant to be together? Perhaps there were no answers to questions like that. Perhaps nothing was ever ‘meant to be’. There was just life, and right now, and doing your best. Being a bit ‘bendy’.

The sensor light on her mother’s back porch flickered and suddenly they were plunged into darkness. Neither of them moved.

‘We’ll give it till Christmas,’ said Tess after a moment. ‘If you still miss her by Christmas, if you still want her by then, you should go to her.’

‘Don’t say that. I’ve told you. I don’t –’

‘Shhh.’ She held his hand tighter and they sat in the moonlight, clinging to the wreckage of their marriage.

Chapter fifty-two

It was done.

Cecilia and John-Paul sat side by side watching Polly’s closed eyelids flutter and smooth, flutter and smooth, as if they were tracking the progress of her dreams.

Cecilia held on to Polly’s left hand; she could feel the tears sliding down her face and dripping off her chin, but she ignored them. She remembered sitting with John-Paul at another hospital, at the dawn of another autumn day, after two hours of intense labour (Cecilia gave birth efficiently; a little too efficiently with their third daughter). She and John-Paul were counting Polly’s fingers and toes, as they’d done with Isabel and Esther, a ritual like opening and inspecting a marvellous, magical gift.

Now their eyes kept returning to the space where Polly’s right arm should have been. It was an anomaly, an oddness, an optical discrepancy. From now on it wouldn’t be her beauty that would cause people to stare at her in shopping centres.

Cecilia let the tears slide on and on. She needed to get all her crying out of the way, because she was determined that Polly would never see her shed a tear. Cecilia was about to step into a new life, her life as an amputee’s mother. Even as she cried, she could feel her muscles tensing in readiness, as if she was an athlete about to begin a marathon. Soon she would be fluent in a new language of stumps and prostheses and God knows what else. She’d move heaven and earth and bake muffins and pay fraudulent compliments to get the best results for her daughter. No one was better qualified than Cecilia for this role.

But was Polly qualified? That was the question. Was any six year old qualified? Did she have the strength of character to live with this sort of injury in a world that put such value on a woman’s looks? She’s still beautiful, thought Cecilia furiously, as if someone had denied it.

‘She’s tough,’ she said to John-Paul. ‘Remember that day at the pool when she wanted to prove she could swim as far as Esther?’

She thought of Polly’s arms slicing through sunlit chlorinated blue water.

‘Jesus. Swimming.’ John-Paul’s whole body heaved and he pressed his palm to the centre of his chest as if he was in the throes of a heart attack.

‘Don’t drop dead on me,’ said Cecilia sharply.

She pushed the heels of her hands deep into her eye sockets and turned them in a circular motion. She could taste so much salt from all her tears, it was like she’d been swimming in the sea.

‘Why did you tell Rachel?’ said John-Paul. ‘Why now?’

She dropped her hands from her face and looked at him. She lowered her voice to a whisper. ‘Because she thought Connor Whitby killed Janie. She was trying to hit Connor.’

She watched John-Paul’s face as his mind travelled from A to B and finally to the horrendous responsibility of C.

He pressed his fist to his mouth. ‘Fuck,’ he said quietly into his knuckles and he began to rock back and forth like an autistic child.

‘This was my fault,’ he mumbled into his hand. ‘I made this happen. Oh God, Cecilia. I should have confessed. I should have told Rachel Crowley.’

‘Stop it,’ hissed Cecilia. ‘Polly might hear.’

He stood up and walked towards the door of the hospital room. He turned back and looked at Polly, his face ravaged with despair. He looked away, plucked helplessly at the fabric of his shirt. Then he suddenly crouched down, his head bent, his hands interlocked at the back of his neck.