The Cafe by the Bridge

by Lily Malone

  He knew what was coming. He steeled himself for it. ‘Yeah?’

  ‘I haven’t asked you, officially.’

  Hell yeah. He knew what was coming. Her mint-flecked eyes locked on his. Her fingers took a death grip on the handle of that mug.

  ‘Please will you go to the police and press charges against Amanda? Will you do it for Will? For me?’

  Her voice broke, and his heart bloody well broke with it. He’d do a lot for Taylor Woods. A lot.

  But he couldn’t do what she wanted this time. That’s what got him out of bed half an hour ago when all the thoughts spun too fast in his head and everything narrowed down to the question she hadn’t asked directly before, but she asked him now. Would he go to the police?

  Should he have offered to do that way back when she first tracked him down at the café?

  Should he have offered it at Albany, while they sat on the rocks talking about places they’d travel, watching the whales?

  Should he have offered to do it, so she didn’t have to ask?

  He crossed his arms, leaning back on the humming oven. ‘It’s not my fight with Amanda.’

  She put her milk mug down and sat there looking at him with a white smudge of milk on her lip. Lost as a kitten. ‘It is your fight. She robbed you too.’

  ‘I can’t prove anything. It’s just her word against mine.’

  The right thing would be to go around the kitchen counter and pull her into his arms, hug her, tell her it would all be okay, of course he’d help, and to go back to bed.

  That would be the right thing for Taylor, but the wrong thing for him.

  He scrubbed his hand through his hair. ‘I gave her the money. She never put a gun to my head. I wouldn’t have a leg to stand on in court and we all know it.’

  She didn’t like that. ‘What about Will? What about Keeley? What about all the other freaking Uncles. There’s an Uncle Jack on the scene now too.’

  ‘Do you think she’d hurt Keeley? Cos I do worry about that.’

  ‘I don’t know, Abe. Abuse doesn’t always equal bruises. Women like Amanda, they can do Mum of the Year at the drop of a hat. They put on a show and it can fool pretty much everyone. I’ve seen it. When I went round there Friday she was nice as pie to me until she found out who I was. Once she knew my name, all that changed.’

  There was a pause, and Taylor’s gaze slipped from his, studying the milk in her mug. ‘I never told you about the day I picked up Bruno from the vet and how I took him to the park at the end of Amanda’s street.’

  Abe knew the park. He’d taken Keeley to play there too.

  ‘I’d been watching her house for a few weeks and I knew Amanda took Keeley to the park on Saturday mornings. I took Bruno there and I let him play with Keeley and this other little girl, and I was trying to find out about Keeley’s relationship with Will. Will told me she called him Uncle Will, and I thought I could find out how many other uncles were in Keeley’s life. I wanted to know if Will was special, or if he was in over his head, like I suspected.’

  Abe really wished he didn’t know all these answers. Knowing the answers hurt.

  ‘So I found out there were a few Uncles, right? Keeley had Uncle Will, and Uncle Abe, and she’d had an Uncle Peter once but apparently he’d gone to Heaven … and when I said it was sad when people we love went to Heaven, do you know what she said?’

  ‘No,’ he answered quietly, skin crawling cold in a kitchen that smelled of muffins baking perfectly, warm and golden on top.

  Taylor lifted her chin and the ache in her eyes reached for him. ‘She said Mummy told her not to be sad about Uncle Peter because Uncle Peter was a tight-arsed prick!’

  Abe flinched. Couldn’t help it. Out of the mouth of a six-year-old girl.

  ‘Where do you think Keeley heard that word, Abe?’

  He knew, but he didn’t have to say it because Taylor said it for both of them.

  ‘She heard it from her mother.’ Taylor sucked in a breath that made her chest heave. ‘Sure, she might not hit Keeley but you can’t say she’s a good role model. Without a psychologist or a doctor examining that little girl it’s hard to say. Maybe her teachers might know more.’

  ‘Her teachers would report Amanda to child services if they suspected anything,’ Abe said.

  ‘Reporting isn’t mandatory in WA.’

  ‘Could you report her?’

  Taylor’s mouth twisted and she shifted on the stool. ‘I stuffed up when I talked to Keeley in the park. Amanda had a point. It wasn’t ethical what I did. I really can’t get involved any further at all. That’s why Will needs to be the one to press charges. Or you do. It can’t come from me. I have a conflict of interest.’

  ‘If it’s Keeley you’re worried about, I’ll support you. If the child protection authorities, or whoever it is that gets involved in these things, if they need me then to tell a story or my experience of Amanda, then I’d do that. But if it’s about pressing charges against Amanda for what she did to me, I’m not your guy, Doc. I’ve forgiven myself for that. I made a mistake but I’m outta there. I’m not going back.’

  ‘Then she’ll keep doing it. Again and again. She’s not going to stop unless someone makes her.’

  ‘It’s not my fight.’

  ‘Jesus, Abe. Why not? She owes you.’

  He shook his head. ‘I’m not sure it’s your fight either.’

  ‘I’m doing this to help Will.’ One of her hands waved, but no words came, and those tears welled again.

  This time Abe moved around the kitchen bench to offer what comfort he could. It was tricky the way she sat so stiff on the bar stool, tucked so tight into herself that hugging her was like trying to hug a pole, but he hated seeing Taylor so sad, couldn’t bear to see her broken.

  He wanted to comfort her because she was his friend, his very good friend, and he cared about her.

  She raised bleary eyes to his. ‘Don’t you care what happens to Will?’

  ‘Of course I do. He’s your brother.’

  ‘Then why won’t you do this for me? To help me. To help Will. Please, Abe?’

  ‘Will needs to help himself.’ He said it as soft, as gentle as he could. He said it gentle as a man could, when he cared a lot about a pole who looked like a lost kitten and was his very, very good friend.

  ‘What if he can’t help himself?’ Taylor whispered.

  Abe wiped his thumb across the smudge of milk on her top lip and hugged her head into his chest, rubbing the pole-stiffness from her shoulders, swaying as he held her there.

  He loved this lost-kitten pole who was his very, very good friend.

  The oven timer bleeped into the silence and Taylor jumped. She let the jump carry her right out of his arms, and she slipped off the stool and didn’t look at him as she walked away.

  ‘Your muffins are ready,’ she said. ‘I’m going back to bed.’

  CHAPTER

  32

  You would think after years of being a ‘fixer’ and a ‘helper’ and someone people could rely on in their hour of need ... after all that karma banked, all those favours owed, you would bloody well think that when the time came that you asked someone for help, you’d get it.

  Taylor crawled back into the bed that held remnants of Abe’s warmth and fragments of Abe’s smell, and made her want to bury her head in his pillow, breathe vanilla custard sweetness and bawl her little heart out.

  Oh boy she’d dropped the ball. She’d dropped it in Chalk Hill when she got side-tracked by her growing feelings for Abe. Instead of enlisting Abe’s help for Will, she’d been all about helping Abe solve his own problems.

  The Taylor Woods’s theory of de-sensitisation seemed so damn silly now.

  When she thought of her little brother, all thin wrists and fumbling fingers, closing all those blinds, ducking his head so no one from the outside could see in, it killed her inside. Will, Will, falling apart. She never wanted to see that again.

  She’d had no idea how bad Will was until toda
y, and how was that for ironic? She was the trained psychologist. Twenty minutes with a patient and she could spot anxiety or depression and a host of other mental disorders a mile away. How had she misdiagnosed it in her brother? Hell, she hadn’t misdiagnosed it. She hadn’t diagnosed anything at all.

  She’d missed it because she’d been looking at Will’s problem personally, not professionally. As his sister, not his counsellor, and she’d missed it because she plain stopped looking.

  She’d gotten so frustrated when Will wouldn’t go to the police that she’d navigated a great big circle around Will, and set her sights on a different man and a different approach to solve the original problem.

  X marked the spot in Chalk Hill.

  X marked Abel Honeychurch. Plan B.

  She’d put all her eggs in that particular (admittedly gorgeous) basket, and now she’d lost the basket. Well, the basket was baking muffins in her kitchen.

  Taylor rolled the other way, searching for a spot where her tears hadn’t wet the pillow. Her bedside clock read one-thirty. She pushed her right leg back, trying to feel if any of Abe’s warmth remained in the sheets.

  A tiny bit. More the memory of body heat than anything real.

  Where did this leave them, anyway?

  If Abe didn’t care about her enough to help her, there wasn’t much point continuing this, this ... whatever this long-distance thing was between them.

  Her number one reason for pursuing Abe was to enlist his help for Will. Convince Abe to go press charges against Amanda, and show Will that it wasn’t weak to admit he’d made a mistake, and there was a way to fix it!

  Go to the police. Go to court. Get his money back. Stop Amanda doing this to anyone else.

  Abe wasn’t weak. It wasn’t easy for men to front up to a counselling session, as Abe had done yesterday. Plus he’d been first to the door, ready to tackle a tattooed biker ex-husband on their behalf.

  She’d been right behind him.

  And Will had come too.

  Because Abe had been there, showing the way, Will had found the courage to step forward too.

  Light expanded into the room as the door opened a tiny crack, and widened.

  ‘Doc?’

  ‘I’m awake,’ she said, rolling onto her back. ‘I’m awake and I’m miserable and my feet are cold.’ This bed’s too big without you.

  The mattress depressed as Abe sat beside her on the bed. ‘Remember how my mum always said the day you don’t share the same bed after a fight is the day it’s all over. I don’t want to catch a couple of hours’ sleep on your couch, Taylor. I don’t want to leave with you angry at me and things not right between us.’

  Oh, you’re a good man, Abel Honeychurch.

  ‘I’m not angry at you.’ And she realised it was true. ‘I’m pissed off at myself for not realising how bad Will was, and I’m pissed off for how I went about things—I’ve gone in circles for almost a year trying to help Will and, of all people, I’m the one who knows you can’t help someone who doesn’t want to help themselves. I didn’t realise how bad things were for him and I’m angry at myself for that. But I promise I’m not angry at you. It frustrates me that you won’t go to the police, but I’m not angry anymore. I have to respect your decision.’

  Taylor pulled the covers open on Abe’s side of her bed.

  He eased beneath them, stretching out.

  ‘It was a great thing you did today at Will’s. It was really brave. Thank you for being there and for doing that. I know it helped him,’ she said.

  ‘You don’t have to thank me for wanting to protect you. I’d always do that. I’ll do that whenever you need me to.’

  She put her right foot on his shin and felt the fabric of his tracksuit pants. She ran her foot lower, finding the elastic with her toes, and hooked it so the sole of her cold foot met his skin.

  ‘Jeez.’ The abrupt cold made him wince and she got warmer straight away, smiling in the dark.

  He lifted his arm and she tucked her head in the crook of his shoulder, rolling into him.

  ‘I’m sorry I can’t help Will,’ Abe said, and she couldn’t hear any country or rock in his voice, just a whole lot of blues.

  ‘You helped him by opening the front door today. By standing up to what frightened him. By making him talk about it. That helped him, or it will. It has to. At least he knows that there’s no need to worry about Amanda’s biker ex. He knows now that it was all her, all the time.’

  Taylor lifted her head to look at his face. Enough light shone from the passage that she could see his eyes, the paler skin around them.

  ‘That bloody woman, I tell you. I want to punch her lights out,’ she said.

  Abe chuckled and the muscles in his shoulder rolled with it. ‘Easy there, Doc.’

  She laid her cheek to his chest. His heartbeat was beneath her ear: strong, solid, dependable. His fingers played along her skin.

  ‘I’m not going to give Amanda a second’s more thought. I’m really not. I’m moving on,’ Abe said quietly. ‘Dr Palmer said I have to understand why I fell for her in the first place. She said that’s what I need to concentrate on. If I work that out and sort it out, I can move on. That’s what I’m going to do.’

  ‘She’s a good doctor, Larissa,’ Taylor said. ‘I shouldn’t have pushed you. It wasn’t fair of me and I’m sorry.’

  ‘You are a beautiful woman, Taylor Woods, with a big generous heart. Don’t apologise for being in the skin you’re in.’

  ‘I just want to see Will smile again,’ Taylor said.

  ‘I know you do. He knows that too.’

  Taylor folded her hands under her chin and pulled up with her elbows on his chest so she could look in his eyes.

  ‘I’m falling in love with you, Abel Honeychurch,’ she said. ‘I kind of wish I wasn’t, because you’re so young and I know we haven’t known each other long, and I’m worried about the whole kid thing with you, and I know that’s a bit intense—I get intense—and I don’t want to scare you off.’

  ‘I don’t scare easily.’

  ‘I know. That’s the reason I can say what I think when I’m with you. I love you.’

  He smoothed her fringe behind her ear. ‘All I know is, I want to be where you are. I want to be with you.’ He cupped the side of her face. ‘Whatever you do. Wherever you go. I’m only at home when I’m with you.’

  She kissed him, and even though they both had to get up early and it was already so very late, comfort morphed into passion. Eyes open in the semi-dark, their bodies moved, slow and easy, so that when Taylor climbed above Abe and his body sought and found entry to hers, she couldn’t imagine a moment more natural, more perfect.

  That’s what Abe did to her. He took her breath away.

  CHAPTER

  33

  ‘Boy, did you miss the excitement yesterday,’ the receptionist, Bianca, greeted Taylor when she arrived at the clinic at eight the next morning.

  ‘Why? What happened?’

  ‘There was a dead rabbit on our doorstep,’ Bianca confided, wide-eyed.

  The toast Taylor had for breakfast flipped in her stomach. ‘Do we know how it got there? Did our security camera show anything?’ She’d have proof then. Proof Amanda was harassing her. Harassing Will.

  Bianca stared blankly. For the first time the receptionist appeared uncertain rather than excited. ‘I don’t think Kristin looked. I don’t think anybody looked. We assumed a cat or a dog dragged it up the step. The security camera would have recorded over itself now anyway. It resets each night. Why? Do you think someone would have done it on purpose?’

  ‘Never mind.’ Taylor sighed. ‘Not much point looking then, I guess.’

  Bianca returned her attention to her computer screen. ‘No way was I touching the manky thing. The gardener was here yesterday. He put the carcass in the bin.’

  Taylor hung her coat on the rack in the cutaway space behind the reception wall, cursing Amanda to the depths of hell.

  The phone rang and
Bianca was kept busy after that as more of the partners arrived for work and the clinic sprang to life.

  Taylor made coffee, put a cup for Bianca on her desk and took her own cup to her office.

  I hope Amanda dies in a random attack by rabid killer rabbits.

  Andrew Hamilton was Taylor’s first patient for the morning. In her office she reviewed the notes in his file. He’d last been in to the clinic when she was in Chalk Hill. Kristin had completed the session.

  A warning.

  That’s what the dead rabbit on the clinic step was. A warning not to get involved. She’s trying to scare me.

  She tried to shake the thoughts from her head so she could focus on Andrew. He was eleven years old and struggling socially due to being bullied about his speech impediment, something doctors had now linked to problems with his hearing that had gone undetected for too long.

  Two dead bunnies in two days. One at Will’s. One here at the practice.

  Amanda’s way of stamping her turf.

  Stop. Right now.

  Her patients deserved and expected her full attention and she prided herself on giving that service to them. She wasn’t going to let Amanda interfere with her professional or her personal life. Not anymore. No way.

  Taylor squared her shoulders and walked out of her office to call Andrew and his mother from reception. Bianca said softly to her after she greeted the Hamiltons, ‘Your mum rang for you. You’ve got your mobile diverted to voicemail. She asked if you can call her back when you get the chance.’

  ‘Thank you. Will do.’

  She ushered Andrew and his mother through to her room.

  * * *

  ‘Hi, Mum, it’s me. Sorry it took me a while to get back to you. I was with clients.’

  ‘Darling, I’m worried about Will,’ her mum began without preamble.

  What now? ‘Why? What’s up?’

  ‘He rang us last night. He talked to your dad, not to me, but I don’t like the sound of it.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘He told Dad about a book he should buy. A finance-type book about investing and superannuation. All that stuff. He said it was deal of the day on Amazon. What I want to know is: why would your dad need a book about share investing when he has a son who is a financial adviser unless that son won’t be there to advise him anymore?’