First Love, Second Chance: Friends to Forever / Second Chance with the Rebel / It Started with a Crush...

‘Sharks will be drawn by the dead calf. They’re more active at night. We shouldn’t go in deeper than our knees.’

She practically flew back to the shallows. Survival before dignity. Marc didn’t say anything further. It took her several minutes walking down the beach to reach a place she felt was sufficiently dark and safe. Safe from the dune snakes. Safe from the whale-eating sharks. Safe from Marc Duncannon and his awful neutrality.

She sank down onto the sand and let the tremors come.

Her life had changed direction that day behind the library and it had changed again eight years later and this man was central to both. A man who was so entirely unaffected by what had happened to them back at school.

Deep breathing helped. Plunging her bare toes into sand that was still warm from the day helped. Closing her eyes and imagining she was anywhere else but here helped.

Whatever it took to fool her body into thinking it wasn’t facing an unbearable amount of pressure. Something she wasn’t really used to having to face. As a rule, a drunk body didn’t care what was going on around it. And she’d been drunk for the better part of eight years. Even when she wasn’t.

In the early months of her marriage, she’d walked a careful line with Damien and his rapidly developing fondness for the bottle, keeping him just shy of the point where he liked to express his drunken feelings with his fists. But that line quickly got too hard to predict and so it was just easier to give in. To tumble behind him into the abyss where he was happiest and she was safest. The help she might have had evaporated. Friends. Her parents. They’d all stopped trying after her repeated assurances she was fine.

Why wouldn’t they? She was Beth. Beth didn’t make mistakes. But Beth—as it turned out—was a gifted and convincing liar.

By the time they’d realised she wasn’t fine, she was well and truly sunk. After a while, she didn’t even hate it. The abyss was a pleasantly blur-edged place to lose your youth. And she’d learned how possible it was to function in normal society while artificially numb.

And then one day she’d woken up and looked around at the empty half of her bed, the total strangers dossed down in her living room and she’d seen, with awful clarity, the faces of all the normal people she’d thought she was cleverly keeping her drunkenness from. Their averted eyes. Worse—their pity.

For no real reason, she’d thought about Marc that morning. About the boy who’d had such faith in her. The boy she’d lived her life for as a teen. The boy she’d finally forced from her dreams—her marriage—after his memory had steadfastly refused to leave. And she’d realised she hadn’t thought about him in years.

She’d sat crying in the shower long after the hot water ran icy cold.

Those convulsive shivers had been nothing on what was to come. The spasmodic wretchedness of weaning herself off the liquor, alone in her father’s old warehouse, surrounded by the tormented images she’d painted in her darkest days. The destructive try-and-fail spiral that had made her feel increasingly bad about herself. Increasingly desperate for the unconditional acceptance a bottle offered. The only thing that had kept her going was painting.

Then one night she’d stumbled—drunk, to her eternal shame—into an AA meeting and found a room full of survivors who’d given her compassion and empathy and a path out of the abyss, not judgement.

Those strangers had saved her life.

Long before any make-good list, she held onto Marc’s name as a ward against ever again forgetting someone who had represented such goodness in her life. She’d scrawled his name down on a scrap of paper that day she’d tumbled from the shower and she’d carried it in her wallet ever since, in lieu of the photos she’d thrown out years before in a fit of drunken heartbreak because looking at him had hurt too much.

She’d known that facing him today wouldn’t be easy. But it had never—ever—occurred to her that he simply wouldn’t care any more. If he ever actually had.

‘Beth? Are you done?’ His voice called her back from the darkness, just as it had two years ago that morning in the shower. ‘I need you.’

There was urgency in his voice she couldn’t ignore. And, in the face of what the whale needed, her decade-old issues could wait a few hours more. She quickly did what she’d come to do and then staggered, too sore and tired to run, back down the beach towards him.

The whale was thrashing violently in the water, the nasty arrow-head gash on its tail sawing back and forth, its whole body twisting.

‘Is she having a seizure?’ she cried as she neared.

‘She can feel the tide,’ Marc called. ‘She’s trying to move herself. We have to do it now.’

‘You can’t be serious?’ He wanted to get into the water with a crazed half-ton animal? Immobile with exhaustion was one thing …

‘She’s too far on-beach. She won’t be able to pull herself out. We have to help her.’

He had a loop of rope laid over his forearm and he was making darting efforts in between the wild thrashes of the whale, trying to snag the eyelet of the strap they’d managed to drag beneath her hours ago. But every time he got close, the insensible sea-mammoth twisted in his direction and he had to leap away, stumbling into the water.

With one mighty lurch, Marc plunged his arm into the water on the whale’s offside and jumped back, bringing the strap with him. It took only a moment to push the rope through the eyelet like a sewing needle. Then he pulled half of it through and tossed it high over the whale to splash into the water next to Beth.

She knew what he needed her to do.

The whale had slowed its frantic efforts now, perhaps realising that it wasn’t going to be able to do this alone. Beth made three attempts, feeling blindly along the sand in the dark shallows for her end of the strap, squinting against the salt water that splashed up into her eyes. Her careless groping meant Marc’s entire sweatshirt was soaked in cold water, but she didn’t care. She wouldn’t be needing it for long now that they were going to free the whale, and her own temporary discomfort wasn’t a patch on what this animal was going through.

On her fourth attempt, she emerged victorious. She clutched the strap tightly in one hand and felt around for Marc’s rope. When she found it, not yet soaked, still floating on the surface, she shoved it with trembling hands through the eyelet and then walked backwards away from the whale, pulling the rope taut. Marc did the same.

The strap slowly emerged and rose, flexing and dripping, above the water line as it tightened around the whale’s rounded belly.

‘We need to walk behind her, Beth. It’ll pull the ends together and tighten around her flank.’

Behind her? But that meant. She lifted wide eyes to him.

He was silent for long seconds. ‘I know. But, sharks are survivors, too. We’ll have to hope they’re more interested in the dead calf than in its dangerously thrashing mother.’

Was that likely? Beth’s skin burst into terrified gooseflesh all over.

His loud voice carried over the sound of the whale’s writhing. ‘I don’t see that we have much choice, Beth.’

‘There’s always a choice, Marc!’ she yelled back. AA had taught her that. They could both walk away from this animal and leave her to nature. Maybe it was meant to be.

He knew which way her mind was going. ‘Is that a choice you could make, Beth? Because I couldn’t.’

No. When it came down to it, neither could she.

He called out again. ‘We’ll try and twist her your way so you’re pulling in the shallows. I’ll take the deep end.’

‘Oh, great, so I’ll get to watch you be eaten by sharks instead. That’ll be nice!’

She gritted her teeth and plunged into the deeper water. The adrenalin did its job and fed her a steady stream of power. They didn’t waste any time, pulling their ropes hard and closing in until they stood side by side—mountain by waif—up to Beth’s waist in water. It was a lot by her standards but not much for a whale. Hopefully, it would be enough. The manoeuvre pulled the snatch strap tight around the whale’s bulging mid-section. Marc moved them slightly to one side so that their rope wouldn’t impede the thrust of her powerful tail.

‘Ready, Beth?’

She wasn’t. She never would be. But it seemed life was determined to plunge her back into the real world with a vengeance. She found his eyes, drew strength from them and nodded.

‘Pull!’

She put her entire, insignificant weight behind her and leaned back hard on her rope. Marc immediately made more progress, his side of the rope vibrating above the waterline enough to give off a dripping, high-pitched whine. The whale groaned in harmony.

Beth’s already damaged hands screamed as her end of the rope bit into them and she stumbled forward at the pain, losing purchase and crying out.

‘Wait!’

Marc let his rope loosen and the whale heaved a sigh. Beth quickly stripped off Marc’s drenched sweatshirt and wrapped it around her hands to protect them and then pulled her rope tight again. The salt water sluiced into open blisters, stinging badly.

‘Okay … go!’

They heaved again and the whale slid slightly sideways, adding her remaining strength to their far less significant pulling power. But it was movement. And, after thirteen hours in the sand, that was not a small achievement.