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  Except she didn’t have to live this way anymore. She was an adult, for crying out loud—in a house she owned. She didn’t have to live a life defined by other people’s lies.

  She wrenched at her bedroom door and it slammed open.

  Malcolm had turned the television back on. He refused to look at her when she stomped in.

  “Everything in here is going to charity tomorrow,” she said.

  He grunted.

  “Everything in the whole damn house—charity or the skip bin. If you want what’s in your room, you’d better stuff it in your car.”

  He slid lower in the recliner.

  “And you’d better do it before lunch time. The charity workers are arriving in the afternoon—and since I have to stay to let them in, I’ll empty the house tomorrow. It’ll be one hundred per cent empty. I’ll phone a real estate agent and put it on the market. Whichever real estate agent can come out tomorrow can have the listing.”

  “You’ll make a profit on it.”

  She bared her teeth. If tonight was all about emotional devastation, then why not? “I won’t make half the profit you did—before you lost it. Every bit of money I paid Roxie for her home went to buy your flat, and then, you borrowed against it for some stupid scheme.”

  He flinched.

  “Did you think I believed that she lent you only fifty per cent of the money? I never expected fairness from Roxie or you. I knew she would give you everything I paid her. Maybe it took a few years. One handout, one hundred. You took it all. But I let you. Did you ever ask yourself why?”

  “Why?” Shock slackened his facial muscles even as his shoulders hunched against a blow.

  She looked away from him and her gaze snagged on the mirror hanging on the wall. Reflected light from the television played across it in shifting colours, but not enough to obscure their images.

  “Oh God.” They were reduced to ridiculous, desperate caricatures of themselves in a tiny family drama. She was wearing pyjamas with sunshine faces and her hair was wet and straggly and she was holding her throat as if it hurt.

  It did. All the things she’d wanted to scream at Roxie but couldn’t because she was old and dying crowded in her throat. All the pain that she wanted to spew out strangled her.

  Armed with bug spray and rubbish bags, she’d come here to eradicate Roxie from her life. Instead, she’d simply piled Roxie’s sins onto Malcolm.

  Malcolm, who couldn’t sustain a relationship—evidenced by his single status and frequent job changes—or even manage to live for long in reality. He closed his eyes to anything difficult. For him, his fumbled dealings with the bombshell of her dad’s existence was downright heroic. He’d tried to protect her and Roxie.

  She pressed her forearm over her eyes, ashamed. Temper and stupidity had driven her to the edge of cruelty. She’d been about to tell him the truth. Because you’re a failure, useless.

  The only path back was surrender, and it took all her strength. “Because you’re my brother.”

  Chapter Nine

  “Aww, Alice.” Malcolm’s face crumpled. He pushed at his eyes with the heels of his hands, a trick from childhood. “I haven’t been much of a brother.”

  The pain in her wanted to scream its agreement. It wanted to shout and demand his suffering. He had left her to be the strong one.

  “Have I been much of a sister?”

  He looked at her then. “I hate you sometimes.”

  The simple confession stabbed her.

  “I resent you so much for being strong.” He dangled his arms over the sides of the chair. They swung faintly, like useless appendages. “And the guiltier I feel, the more I hate you.”

  She shivered in her pyjamas.

  “But I need you to be strong. I’m just like Roxie.” He leaned his head back to stare at the ceiling. “I hate you and I love you. I need you and I want to hurt you.”

  “Is this the end, then?” She curled up in a corner of the old sofa.

  “Do we bury our family with Roxie?” He continued to stare at the ceiling. “You can’t ask me that, Allie. Not tonight. Tonight, I’m being honest. It’s like cutting my own wrists, bleeding out. Nothing will be the same, again. I knew it wouldn’t, not once Roxie died.”

  “You’ll always be my brother.”

  His mouth twisted. “We both know how little that means. Absent fathers, absent brothers. Your life will move on. And I—” He stood abruptly. The recliner creaked in protest as it slammed upright. “I’m going out.”

  The door closed behind him. She heard the faint echo of his footsteps, just enough to judge direction and guess he was headed to the pub.

  She looked around the dreariness of Roxie’s lounge and felt its immense weariness creep into her body. For how many years had this mirror reflected Roxie in her small world? Had Roxie found comfort in the mottled glass, glancing at her reflection for proof she still existed?

  Alice unhooked the mirror from the wall and carried it out to the skip bin. She threw it in and listened with violent satisfaction to the shattering crack. “Not seven years bad luck. Long overdue freedom.”

  Except, freedom wasn’t what she’d thought it would be.

  Alice lay in bed listening to the night noises of the old house. There was more traffic these days, and now and then the wind blew the noise of the train close enough that she heard its whistle. It was popularly meant to be a signal of loneliness, but she heard promise. The train meant people were moving, building lives, creating hope—and she was one of them.

  The nurses at the hospice had tried to tell her, “You’ll feel grief.”

  She’d stopped listening then, knowing she wouldn’t feel grief for Roxie, not the grief that they meant. But in the darkness, their next words returned to her.

  “Your emotions will be all jumbled up. That’s natural. But people overlook how exhausting holding vigil is. You’ll be tired as well as upset. Give yourself time to recover before you make any big decisions.”

  Time to recover.

  Roxie and Malcolm weren’t the only ones who’d taken her strength for granted. Alice realised she’d done the same—until today. It had taken the devastation of her strength for her to accept what it meant.

  Her strength had been forged from her fear.

  Those who lived courageously didn’t try to structure the world. Yet she’d become a lawyer because she needed rules. Order had to be imposed on chaos. She’d devoted her life to upholding those rules.

  Addiction.

  In the darkness she pulled that old monster from under the bed and looked into its drooling, slack-jawed face; at its sharp teeth and hooked claws.

  She’d feared addiction when she was too young to know the name for it. Then she’d known it as the thing that stole her mum. It squatted over each makeshift home they’d lived in. It had been the ogre, the despot. It couldn’t be reasoned with, wouldn’t allow mercy.

  Addiction ate people from the inside out, and chewed on the people who loved them.

  “I fought it.” She’d fought it for Claire each time she found a semblance of normality: food, clean dishes, a radio. She’d tried to build a wall of normal between the addiction and her mum.

  But no wall had ever been strong enough. Not tears, not hugs, not her grim determination to survive.

  The monster had taken Claire—and Alice had waited for it to take her, too.

  Cold washed through her body. She’d lain here as a teenager, terrified.

  Bitter laughter scratched against the house’s silence.

  She hadn’t admitted her fear back then. She’d gripped on to her plans to escape, her intent “to make something of my life”. All the time, fear had caressed her, whispering that she was like Claire, that the monster of addiction would break down every wall and come for her.

  So she’d built stronger walls, higher walls, until she was completely enclosed. Her professional success had brought her something approaching peace of mind. She’d policed herself scrupulously. Genetics was
not destiny. Only, Roxie kept breaking in.

  And Malcolm. He’d gone to the other extreme. Where she’d invested in steel bars and harsh self-discipline, he’d become limp and indeterminate. Addiction hadn’t caught him because he slid like melting jelly from every responsibility.

  Addiction had to be fed. It demanded a complete surrender. Malcolm had resisted in his own way: he’d hugged himself tighter and tighter in a self-absorbed world.

  Fear. Their whole lives had been shaped by it.

  Alice slid out of bed, wrapped a blanket around herself and sat on the back step. When she finally retreated to bed, Malcolm still hadn’t returned home.

  Malcolm sat slumped at the kitchen table—hungover, unshaven, a mess—as the real estate agent walked through the house.

  The agent was young and eager for a commission. His business shirt had sharp creases along the sleeves and he wore a tie.

  “Of course, the house isn’t much,” the boy said on a downbeat of caution. His dark eyes flicked over Malcolm, and away. He had about twenty years before he had to face the demons of a life regretted. He withdrew his gaze and edged Alice to the kitchen door, holding it open for her. “But the land is spectacular. People really want these beachside blocks. It’s all about the lifestyle.”

  “So they say.” Alice accepted his business card, shook hands and agreed she’d be in touch. She listened to the brisk strike of his polished shoes against the old cement path.

  A clatter and kler-thunk announced the emptying of the skip bin.

  From inside the house she heard the scrape of a chair as Malcolm stood. His face appeared at the kitchen window, and the drain gurgled as he rinsed his mug. His footsteps retreated.

  She pulled her car keys from the pocket of her jeans and left.

  Let Malcolm pack his belongings and say his good-byes in private.

  The cemetery had plenty of parking. Alice abandoned her car beneath the shade of a gum tree and walked in through a side gate.

  Her memory proved surprisingly accurate. The large angel statue, wings furled. The rose garden. The long walkway—shorter now that she was grown. She spent ten minutes finding the actual plot, reading gravestones.

  White marble, the words incised.

  The words didn’t matter.

  “Hey, Mum.” She crouched down, felt awkward, and shifted sideways. Now it looked as if she sat on the side of a low bed.

  After today, there’d be no need to ever drive back this way. Roxie was gone.

  Alice flattened her hand on the marble. It was warm from the sun and faintly gritty from years of dirt. “You should have told me about my dad.”

  A group of mourners followed a hearse to the crematorium. A woman walked, wrapped up in a man’s arms, letting his strength support her.

  “I could never do that,” Alice said softly. So much had been stolen from her—and she’d never noticed.

  The memory of Ethan picking up his daughters and swinging them giggling through the air caught her by surprise. When they were back on the ground and running around shrieking, he’d stepped behind her and hugged her. Lightly. Naturally.

  “I leaned into him.” She stared at Claire’s gravestone in shock. “I leaned into him.”

  Chapter Ten

  Malcolm sat at the bottom of the yard, on the concrete bench. His car waited in the driveway, piled high with his belongings.

  A seagull soared on the thermals, its cry lonely and demanding.

  “Business done?” Malcolm gripped the edge of the seat, but his voice was determinedly friendly. Sunglasses hid his eyes.

  “Yes,” she said it triumphantly.

  He grimaced, and the paper covering the cracks in their relationship fluttered. That the cracks had threatened to break irretrievably last night was her fault.

  Was self-pity a stage of grief? She didn’t know. She thought perhaps it was a stage of healing, and now she’d moved beyond it. She wasn’t the victim-martyr-heroine of the closing drama of Roxie’s life.

  The real sufferer sat in front of her, needing a shave.

  Alice had Ethan and Emma and Olivia if she wanted a family. She had her father, whether she wanted a family or not. She had work she enjoyed, that she was good at. “I didn’t list the house for sale.”

  Malcolm’s head jerked. “Wasn’t the price good enough?”

  The snarkiness and his scarcely veiled resentment would always be part of their relationship.

  She turned and looked back at the house. To her it represented the claustrophobic world she’d succeeded in escaping. She could watch it bulldozed without regret. But the same wasn’t true of Malcolm. “I thought you might want to live here.”

  “What?” He came up off the bench.

  “If you want to live here, I’ll offer you the same deal Roxie had.”

  “Rent free.” He sounded dazed.

  She clothed her pity in business language. “The land will appreciate without me doing anything and I don’t need to realise any capital at the moment. You like it here, so stay.”

  “Just like that.” He sniggered his disbelief and snapped his fingers. “Just like that.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “Why?” It was nearly a shout. “Why did you change your mind? You were going to sell.”

  Because I was angry and I wanted to punish you for leaving me to cope with Roxie dying. But Roxie knew the truth of you. She recognised herself in you, and you can’t cope.

  “I decided I don’t so much want to shed the past as build a future. But I have no right to take away your past merely because I don’t want to live in it anymore.”

  “No. No! NO!”

  “Don’t get your knickers in a knot.” The childhood taunt slipped out as her brain stuttered. Malcolm wasn’t meant to reject her offer. He wasn’t meant to go ballistic.

  “Just stop.” He sat down on the bench hard enough to jar his spine. He slipped off his sunglasses. “I see what you’re doing.”

  She waited cautiously, unsure if he could see anything clearly.

  “This is about controlling our relationship.”

  Her mouth fell open.

  “Yes.” He jabbed a finger at her. “Yes, it is. You can’t face the fact that yesterday I was the one protecting you. You have a pathological need to be in control.”

  “If yesterday was about protecting me…” She inhaled deeply. “So, you don’t want the house.”

  “Of course I want the house,” he snapped.

  She shrugged, defeated.

  “I’ll live here.”

  Don’t do me any favours. But she kept her mouth shut.

  “It’s a good place to live.”

  She nodded, though she disagreed. Living here was living in the past—and with that she understood the final dissolution of their future. She stepped forward, into Malcolm’s space, and hugged him. “Be happy.”

  He squeezed her tight, as awkward as a little boy. “I miss Roxie.”

  “You’ll be fine.” She patted his back. There was a community here, surviving despite the brash newcomers. There was the beach and ships sailing by. It was what had saved him when Claire died and he’d been looking for it ever since: a place to be small.

  For herself, the sea air smelled invigorating. The bees buzzing in the lemon blossom energised her with the same need to be up and doing. She passed over the house keys to Malcolm and closed his hand around them. “It’s your home, now.”

  He waited till she was nearly at her car—or perhaps it took him that long to think of anyone but himself. “Are you going home to Ethan?”

  “Yes, and then we’re going to meet my dad.”

  Note From The Author

  I’m an avid reader, turned enthusiastic author, and I write as widely as I read. I’ve written in genres from science fiction to Regency romance, from steampunk to contemporary romance set on the coast and in small town America. The only thing I insist on is a happy ending.

  If you’d like to learn more about my books, please
visit my website (I have all my social media links and VIP newsletter sign-up there) or follow my Amazon Author Profile to have Amazon alert you to my new releases.

  Happy reading!

  Jenny

  http://authorjennyschwartz.com/

  P.S. Thank you for your reviews. They are the “social proof” that coaxes Amazon to show my books to readers like you who’ll also enjoy them. Thank you!