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      CHAPTER TWO

      LUCY raced inside, eager to tell her brother all the morning’s news, while Rosie headed for the kitchen, where her mother was doing the last of the breakfast dishes.

      ‘What happened? Are you all right?’

      Rosie followed her mother’s gaze, looking down at her sundress that had started the day clean and white but was now covered in blood and dirt.

      ‘I’m fine. It’s not my blood. There was an accident, a pedestrian was hit, a boy from Lucy’s school.’ Rosie pulled out a kitchen stool and collapsed onto it. She should probably take over the dishes from her mum but she didn’t have the energy.

      ‘Is he okay?’

      ‘Some broken bones but he’ll be fine. It was a bit crazy.’

      ‘I’ll put the kettle on, you look like you could use a cup of tea.’

      The old ritual of a cup of tea as a cure-all. Funnily enough, it did always seem to help. Maybe because it made you stop and catch your breath? Then again, in the two months since her brother and sister-in-law had died, she’d had so many cups of tea she sometimes felt she was one big tea bag herself.

      Half-heartedly, she started sorting through the stack of mail, including her own redirected post, that had been dumped in a teetering pile on the kitchen bench. One more task that seemed to be getting away from her, one more task she started on routinely but never completed. Was that a key part of the definition of parenthood? She was starting to wonder.

      Her mum slid a cup of tea over the counter. ‘Ally phoned while you were out, she said something about going out tonight. Do you need me to watch the children?’

      ‘Thanks, but no. I wasn’t planning on going.’

      ‘Are you sure? It’d do you good.’

      ‘What do you mean?’ Rosie put aside the mail.

      ‘How many times have you been out since you moved back to Sydney? Twice? For coffee with Ally, nothing more at my count.’

      She shrugged. ‘I’m often out.’

      Her mum pushed a strand of hair out of her face and shook her head. ‘Going to the supermarket and dropping the twins at school doesn’t count. You need to see your friends and it’s not good for you or the children if you spend all your time with them.’

      ‘I want them to know I’m here for them, that they’re not alone.’

      ‘They know that, sweetheart.’

      ‘Do they? I know they worry when I go out in the car without them. The last time they saw their parents was as they were driving off for their weekend away. They haven’t expressed that, but it’s what they’re thinking about, it’s in their eyes,’ Rosie explained.

      ‘I understand what you’re saying but you can’t let that make you a hermit,’ her mother pointed out.

      ‘The twins need time, especially Charlie. So far we’ve somehow managed to stop his mutism worsening because at least he’s still talking to our immediate family, but if he starts to doubt he’s safe with me, what then? And I need time, too. For one thing, I’m not sure how, or if, my old life and my new life can coexist. I’m just trying to give myself space to fit the pieces together.’

      ‘Space is one thing, shutting friends out is another,’ her mother insisted.

      ‘Mum, I’m not intentionally doing that. To be honest, as pathetic as it sounds, I don’t have the energy to get dressed and make conversation.’ She could have added that she didn’t have anything to make conversation about. No one she knew had children. Right now, that was all she had to talk about. When had she last managed to stay awake to see the end of a TV show? Ditto for reading. She’d been on the same chapter of the same book for over three weeks. Within minutes of settling down, she nodded off. Night after night.

      A basket of washing waited on the steps. Sure, it was clean, but there was more waiting in the laundry. Newspapers for recycling were lying by the back door and Lucy’s half-finished school project was scattered over an entire end of the kitchen table. Everywhere Rosie looked there were half-completed tasks, testament to her difficulty in getting on top of things. She couldn’t blame the children’s interruptions for a lot of it, although having Charlie home sick for the past two days with yet another bout of tonsillitis hadn’t helped. What she needed was another pair of hands and, failing that, a better system.

      ‘Honey, I’ve got to dash but ring me if you change your mind. I can head back in an hour or so after I’ve done my errands,’ her mum said.

      She wouldn’t change her mind, she already knew that. Besides, Ally’s idea of an evening out would last into the early hours of the morning. Rosie couldn’t have asked that of her mum even if she’d wanted to.

      Besides, who could go out socialising when there was a mountain of washing to do and nothing to talk about? And right now, she decided as she waved goodbye to her mum, if she gave in to demands and let the twins watch their favourite DVD, she had a precious hour to tackle folding the laundry.

      Well into the hour, she realised she’d thought about nothing except a certain doctor in boardshorts, her mind leaping from question to assumption to imagery, all focused on him. It was the longest stretch of worry-free time she’d had since moving to Sydney from Canberra.

      None of which left her any wiser about what she really wanted to know: would she see him again?

      Or had walking away been the biggest mistake made by any single girl in Sydney this weekend?

      On Tuesday morning, Rosie dropped Lucy at the school gate with ten minutes to spare and treated herself to a mental Woo-hoo! It felt like a major achievement and gave her a spark of hope that her attempts over the last few days to start developing a better time-management system were paying off. She watched as Lucy waited for a friend then gave one final wave to Rosie before she disappeared through the school gate, chatting happily.

      She checked Charlie still had his seat belt on before pulling into the traffic.

      ‘Do you think we’ll make it in time?’ she asked. Charlie’s specialist appointment was in half an hour and, even though the clinic was in Bondi, Sydney traffic wasn’t the best at this time of the day.

      In the mirror she watched as Charlie shrugged his shoulders. ‘Dr Masters will still see me if we’re late, he’ll probably be running behind anyway,’ he told her.

      He had a point, but she didn’t want to arrive late, particularly when the specialist was fitting Charlie in as a favour. ‘Have you thought some more about having your tonsils out? Dr Masters might suggest it today.’

      ‘I don’t want them out.’

      Ah, so he hadn’t budged. With Charlie’s history of recurrent tonsillitis, it was only a matter of time before his tonsils had to come out. She was convinced these infections were exacerbating his other speech problems.

      ‘There’d be no more sore throats, and you wouldn’t have to miss so many Nippers’ trainings.’ Junior surf-lifesaving was one activity Charlie loved. She suppressed a twinge of guilt that she was using it to convince him to have the operation. ‘Remember, I had my tonsils out when I was your age and I can still remember how much better I felt afterwards.’

      ‘Yeah, but I don’t like jelly.’

      ‘What do you mean?’ She glanced in the rear-view mirror to see Charlie pull a face.

      ‘You told me you had jelly and ice cream in hospital. I don’t like jelly.’

      Who would have known jelly and ice cream would be a deal-breaker, not a deal-sweetener? ‘They won’t force you to eat jelly. Let’s see what Dr. Masters has to say,’ Rosie said as she pulled into the clinic car park, hoping she’d solved the jelly objection. What would he think of next?

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