The Mirrabrook Marriage

Reid looked up from the Cattlemen’s Journal he was reading. ‘Wrote what?’

She held up the latest edition of the Mirrabrook Star that had come that day with the mail drop. ‘Someone who calls herself Fed Up has sent a Dear Auntie letter to your local paper.’

‘What’s it about?’ asked Annie, who was curled on the sofa with a bridal magazine.

‘Listen,’ said Melissa. ‘I’ll read it to you.’

Reid groaned. ‘Do you have to?’

‘Of course she does, Reid.’

He should have known he’d get no sympathy from Annie. After spending several months in Italy with her fiancé his sister had changed in many ways, but she was as interested in local gossip as she’d ever been. Trying to guess which of the locals had submitted letters to the agony aunt column had always been one of her favourite pastimes.

Now she rolled her eyes at him. ‘Don’t be a spoilsport.’

Melissa looked from sister to brother, waiting for a decision.

Reid relented. ‘Oh, go on then. Read the letter if you must.’

‘Okay, this is Fed Up’s problem.’ Melissa cleared her throat. “‘I’ve been in love with a man for many years, and although I know he once had strong feelings for me, he only offers me friendship now. He’s a wonderful man and has been a very good friend, a best friend really, but I can’t remain content with friendship alone.

“He never told me why he changed his mind. As far as I know he doesn’t have another woman, but do you agree that I’m foolish to hang around year after year hoping he might fall in love with me again?”’

Melissa grinned as she looked up at them. ‘Does she really need to ask? What a loser. Anyone you know fit that description?’

Silent seconds later, Melissa frowned. ‘Annie, what’s the matter?’

Reid didn’t hear Annie’s reply. He’d jumped to his feet so quickly his chair made a sharp scrape on the polished timber floorboards. But he did hear Annie’s worried question. ‘Reid, are you okay?’

Of course he wasn’t okay. His chest was squeezing so tightly he couldn’t breathe. ‘I—I just remembered I—I forgot something.’ Ignoring his little sister’s sweet look of concern, he turned abruptly and strode out of the room and down the passage to the back veranda. Outside, he slammed the back door and sagged back against it, his heart thundering.

Sarah must have written that letter. It couldn’t be anyone else. He dragged in a deep breath, trying to calm down. Maybe it wasn’t her. She wouldn’t want to expose her problem in a public forum, would she?

But it was pointless to speculate. Deep down he knew the writer was Sarah. The poor girl had been driven to consult an agony aunt and Annie had guessed. After his pathetic reaction Melissa would probably guess too. How many others in the district would guess?

Heaving away from the door, he lurched across the veranda to the railing and stood with his hands thrust in his pockets, staring out at the horse paddock. He should have found a way to set Sarah free long before this.

Horrified, he sank on to the back step and stared out into the silent bush. Clouds drifted across a new moon, a thin fingernail of silver, and above the ragged black silhouette of gumtrees the night sky gleamed a cool gunmetal grey. Down by the creek a curlew called a long mournful lament.

And Reid wrestled with his despair.

The inevitable day had arrived. The day he’d been expecting and dreading. The day Sarah reached the end of her patience. Very soon she would want to end their friendship completely. And she had every right to do so. For her own sake, she should have done it long ago.

But, God help him, how could he bear to lose her?

To his horror, he felt his lips tremble. Tears threatened. He shook himself, trying to get a grip, but he felt as lost and wretched now as he had when this nightmare situation had first begun, when he’d been forced to abdicate his role as her lover.

It had damn near killed him to hurt the woman he loved, but in the black days after his father died everything in his world had turned upside-down. It had been the worst, the very worst time of his life—his dark night of the soul.

As he sat in the dark now, Reid wished as he’d wished so many times in the past six years that he could turn to Cob McKinnon for advice. The man had been so much more than simply his father. Reid had looked up to Cob as his hero and he’d loved him as a very special friend. They’d been best mates.

Cob had been a strong man, a tough Scot moulded even tougher by the unforgiving Australian outback. Among the cattlemen in the Star Valley he had been admired as a leader and Reid had grown up idolising him.

No one in his family had realised quite how devastated Reid was when Cob McKinnon died suddenly.

Reid had been away on a muster in the back country and when word came through that his father was gravely ill he’d made a reckless dash for home, riding hard through the night, but he’d been too late.

The worst of it had been that he couldn’t give way to the pain that ravaged him; his family had needed him to be strong. His mother had turned to him for help to organize the funeral and to deal with the solicitors and the will.

And Annie and Kane had looked to him for strength too. Although he and Kane were twins, his brother had always deferred to Reid’s leadership. And so a huge burden had seemed to fall on him at the very moment he most longed for his father’s guidance.

Somehow he had got through it.

But then, things had got worse.

One evening, about a week after his father’s funeral, his mother had found him sitting out here on this veranda.

Everything from that night was etched into Reid’s brain. He could remember each detail—the oppressive heat that had been building all day; the storm threatening but never quite breaking; the smell of his mother’s favourite tea rose oil, cloying on such a hot night; the creak of the old timber floorboards as she crossed the veranda to stand beside him.

‘Mind if I join you?’ she asked.

‘No, of course not.’ He jumped up and offered her the more comfortable squatter’s chair while he dragged a cane chair closer for himself.

Once she was settled, she said, ‘There’s something I need to explain to you, Reid.’ She paused, as if it was difficult to continue. ‘Cob was hoping to talk to you before he died. Poor man, he tried to hang on. He was most anxious to tell you this. But he—he ran out of time.’

Reid thought his father had wanted to explain how their cattle business was to be organised now—whether he and Kane would be entrusted with the running of it, or whether Cob had wanted to appoint a manager from outside the family.

But when Jessie paused again, for an even longer time, he felt a twinge of anxiety. She leaned forward, her elbows resting on her knees and her hands clasped together, her head bowed.

Good Lord, was she praying?

Alarm tightened his guts. ‘Mum, are you okay?’

‘Not really.’ She stared straight ahead. ‘Oh heavens, Reid, I’m so sorry. We should have told you this years ago.’

‘Told me what?’

He stared at her and saw the tension in her profile—her tightly drawn in mouth, her hunched body. ‘For God’s sake, Mum, what is it?’

‘It’s—about when you were born.’

The blast of shock hit him in the face as surely as if he’d received a king hit. His heart lurched painfully. Fine hairs rose on the back of his neck. What the hell was this about? His mind raced, trying to drum up possibilities, when Jessie spoke again.

She shifted uneasily. ‘I’m sure I’ve mentioned before that my sister Flora and I both lived in Mirrabrook before I was married. We worked in the bank and we had a little house in town.’

He nodded, wanting to yell at her to stop beating about the bush. Get on with it. What happened when I was born?

She sighed. ‘As you know, I fell pregnant very soon after I was married.’