The farmer, a big burly brute with an oilskin coat over bright red flannel pyjamas, had wet eyes. ‘Poor little bugger,’ he said. ‘I’ve a special place where I put the ones who don’t make it. Snow in winter and wildflowers in summer make a pretty headstone, I reckon.’
She had to swallow, hard, at that lovely image. She was the professional here and professionals didn’t get weepy over farmers with a turn for the poetic.
‘It’s your cow we need to think about now, Phil. I can give her an injection to dry up the milk since she’s not dairy stock, but we need to wait until the placenta arrives and make sure there’s no prolapse. If she’s been in labour since nightfall, she’s going to be exhausted, so let’s keep her calm and quiet. I can sit with her if you need to get some sleep.’
‘We’ll sit together, love,’ he said. ‘You want a stool or something?’
Kylie’s dress was never going to be the same now, no matter what she sat on. ‘This hay is good enough for me, Phil,’ she said, sitting on the floor and putting her back to the wall. Thank heavens she’d stopped long enough to switch out her idiot heels for her boots and grab an anorak. The temperature wasn’t quite low enough to have frost on the ground, but when she’d got out of her hatchback, her breath had hung white in the air.
‘The wife’ll be over soon with a cuppa for us, I expect.’
‘That’d be mighty welcome, Phil.’
It wasn’t quite dawn when Hannah judged the cow to be out of danger, but to the east, a grey cast lightened the night sky. She was very, very cold and as she coaxed her car’s reluctant engine into life and stabbed uselessly at the buttons that had once worked the heater, she looked in the rear-vision mirror. The farmer and his stout, steely-haired wife had their arms around each other, lifting their hands in a joint farewell.
That’s what she wanted. Arms that would go around her because they wanted her there, not because she’d persuaded them into it. Arms that would still be there when she was old and stout and wore red flannel pyjamas.
She’d spent all these years thinking ‘for keeps’ wasn’t for her, because that would make her vulnerable, and she couldn’t risk the crash that would come if it all failed. The last time she’d discovered what risk led to she’d curled into a dark corner and forced a bottle’s worth of sleeping pills down her throat. But now?
Now she felt strong. Now, she felt like all she had to do was give herself permission to release the handbrake.
It had been a stable very like Phil’s where Tom had kissed her and it had felt as though he’d woken her from a deep sleep. Everything that had happened afterwards—training Skipjack, getting involved with campdraft, even punching the camera out of that poor man’s hand—had been the New Hannah finally waking up.
Hannah didn’t stop at the clinic when she drove back to Hanrahan. Instead, she turned up Gorge Road and willed her decrepit little car to make it another forty minutes up the mountain to Ironbark Station.
She killed her headlights before approaching the house and parked to the side, out of the way, so none of the ringers up for the dawn shift would see her car and wonder why the vet was here.
She’d finally worked it out. The catalyst for change was not about forgiving the dickheads in her past. The change had come when she worked out she needed to forgive herself. She’d made some mistakes along the way. The overdose when she was eighteen. The half-baked plan to acquire donor sperm from Tom. The idea that a baby would salve her lonely heart.
That had been a cop-out. Worse, it had sent Tom very weird messages. He may not even know what she felt for him. She certainly didn’t know what he felt for her.
She just knew she wanted to find out.
Right now, while the memories of that cup of tea and the waving, flannel-pyjamaed, loved-up farmers were showing her what was really important.
CHAPTER
32
Of course, the front door was shut. But was it locked? The station was miles from anywhere and its value was in the animals in the stables, not anything tucked away in the homestead.
She tried the handle, and the door creaked its way open.
The corridor was dark, but god had invented the torch app for just this occasion, surely, so she flicked it on, hauled off her stinking boots and headed in. She knew where Tom’s room was—at least, she knew where it had been twenty years or so ago when she short-sheeted his bed as retaliation for the frog-in-boot incident—so she made her way there, socks sliding silently on the polished hoop pine planks.
‘Tom?’ She whispered his name, scratching at the door with her fingernails. ‘Tom? It’s Hannah.’
No sound, no movement. Crap, she couldn’t just barge on in—could she? Sure, she’d barged into the house uninvited, but—
Was that a noise?
‘Tom,’ she whispered again, only a little louder. She went for a softrat-a-tat-tatthis time.
A light flickered on under the door.
She waited and, a moment later, the door swung open. There he was, not—disappointingly—in red flannel pyjamas, but in grey tracksuit pants and a dark blue t-shirt that hugged ribs and abs and pecs. His feet were bare and his hair rumpled, and he had stubble on his face that glinted in the soft glow of the lamp.
Yellow vials littered his bedside table and a paperback lay on the floor and—
