The Road to Hope

by Rachael Johns

  ‘It doesn’t have to be hard. Stuff responsibility! And stuff your ex! That is a load of codswallop. I don’t need weeks to think this through—’

  ‘Don’t do this, Lauren. I can’t be with you and that’s just the way it is. Forget about me.’ He started towards the door. ‘Leave Hope Junction like you planned and find someone who adores you the way you deserve to be adored. Someone who can offer you a lot more than I can.’

  Tom marched out the door and slammed it behind him. Lauren blinked as the noise reverberated around her room. She’d known it the moment she’d put her heart on the line. She’d opened herself up for heartache, but the anger she felt was unexpected.

  ‘How dare you compare me to your selfish ex-girlfriend,’ she shrieked, loud enough for him to hear her through the walls. She jumped to her feet, picked up her hairbrush and hurled it across the room. It slammed into a hanging frame with a photo of her parents in some far-off country and knocked it off the wall, onto the floor where the glass shattered. It felt good. For all of two seconds.

  Seriously, how dare he make love with her, confess feelings, say he too might be falling in love, and then ruin it all with stupid logic. He’d thrown in the kid card but hadn’t given her the chance to argue back. How did he know she even wanted children? And if she did? Well, he was the doctor… Hadn’t he heard about genetic testing for embryos? In this day and age there were options. They had options. Her fists clenched and her nails dug into her palms as she fought off a fury more intense than she’d ever felt before.

  She was still standing there frozen when she heard the front door open and close and then his ute roar to life.

  Ignoring the loud bang that sounded in Lauren’s room, Tom hurled his few worldly possessions into his backpack and prepared to do what he should have done weeks ago. He should have moved into the hospital’s residential rooms the moment he’d recognised his feelings for Lauren went deeper than just the potential for sex.

  The image of the look on her face when he’d told her sleeping together had been a mistake reared up in his head like a terrible monster. He doubted he’d ever be able to forget it. She’d been so open and honest with him, and every cell in his body wanted to draw her against him and praise the Lord for sending him this amazing woman. He realised now that he loved her with a fierceness he’d never felt for Lisa or the few girlfriends he’d had before her. Looking back, Lisa had ticked all the boxes for the type of woman he should spend his life with, but their relationship had lacked that extra something, that special zing. They hadn’t craved each other during times apart and they’d rarely taken the time out from study or work to have fun and enjoy life together. They’d been more about habit than heart.

  In hindsight, he’d been less heartbroken about Lisa breaking up with him than about the actual reason she’d done so. Her reasoning had cut him to pieces because he couldn’t fault it. He not only understood it—he agreed.

  On the other hand, his feelings for Lauren didn’t make sense. He couldn’t control them and he certainly couldn’t switch them on or off as he saw fit. They’d known each other barely a month, yet she’d taken over his mind so completely that whether they were together or not, he could hardly think of anything but her. He used to find lots of women attractive. Now he barely even noticed anyone else.

  His whole body ached with the knowledge that he’d hurt her, but it couldn’t be any other way.

  As he shoved the last of his things into the top of the bag and tried to pull the zip closed with shaking hands, he cursed, anger and frustration coming to a head inside him. He grabbed his laptop off the bed and forced it into its bag, uncaring when he shoved the whole thing so hard it slammed into the wall. Right now he was so strung up he felt like throwing it. Violence had never been part of who he was, and this fury scared him. He wanted to punch something, to lash out, to self-destruct.

  He was angry at himself for letting things get out of hand with Lauren. He was angry at fate, God, at whatever or whoever it was that wrote the script and had given him and his father this cruel, liberty-robbing gene. He was furious at Lisa for encouraging him to take the test that had made it all so real. Enraged at science for making such a discovery possible. He envied Caroline and Louise, who’d decided not to be tested. They didn’t know if they were walking around with a time bomb inside them, but had chosen to live as if they were not. And Monica had tested clear. As much as he loved her, he couldn’t help the anger at that injustice. They’d spent nine months sharing one womb, so why him and not her?

  If only he hadn’t taken the test. Against his better judgment he’d done it for Lisa, who’d believed it better to be armed with knowledge going forward. But all that knowledge had given her was an excuse to slam the door in his face. Meanwhile, he’d been left with a piece of information that would forever change who he was and how he lived.

  As tempting as it was to accept Lauren’s love and to admit he felt the same way, he’d hate himself even more if he did so. He wanted to believe that she loved him enough to tread the rocky path ahead, yet he loved her too much to let her sacrifice herself in that way. She’d chosen a career in which she cared for others on a day-to-day basis; he didn’t want her to feel obliged to look after him as well.

  Only the thought of her regretting her decision and one day resenting him gave him the strength to walk away. With one last glance around the room he’d called home for the past month, he lifted his bag and strode down the hallway. The door to Lauren’s bedroom remained shut. He hesitated outside it a moment, wanting to check on her. Even now he longed to go to her.

  Then, before he could do something stupid, he turned towards the front door and left. A clean break would be best for them both.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  How she’d gone back to sleep after Tom’s dramatic exit Lauren didn’t know. She’d been numb, unable to move further than the bed where she’d eventually flopped down and sobbed until she’d fallen into exhausted slumber, only to be woken a few hours later by the sound of scratching on her bedroom door. It was almost ten o’clock and Ginger wanted his cream.

  She groaned and rolled over, pulling the sheets along with her and cocooning herself like a caterpillar. Her eyes were sore and no doubt a ghastly puffy red. She dreaded the thought of looking in the mirror, not that it mattered what she looked like. Nobody gave a damn. Her head throbbed like she’d been on a bender until the early hours of the morning. But this was no hangover. Hangovers could be cured with sleep, greasy foods, fizzy pick-me-up drinks or even more alcohol, but none of those things could come remotely close to fixing this. While it was tempting to confine herself to bed, her sheets smelled torturously of sex, and lying there where she and Tom had consummated their attraction only made her heart ache more.

  Besides, if she didn’t get up and feed Ginger, he’d take his wrath out on her couch and carpet as well as the door. She didn’t need her house in shreds alongside her heart.

  Taking a deep breath, she threw back the covers and rolled to the edge of the bed. Feet on floor, she told herself. One foot in front of the other. Everything seemed like too much of an effort with her heavy heart weighing her down, but the mewling on the other side of her bedroom door gave her the wherewithal to start the day. When she finally staggered across the room and opened the door, Ginger launched himself at her legs. His loud purr drifted up towards her and instinctively she bent down and scooped him up. She cuddled him close and buried her head in his fur, desperate to feel even a fraction of the comfort his large, warm, furry body usually offered.

  But it was futile. Animals worked magic in many situations, but they couldn’t perform miracles—and a miracle was what she’d need to mend the shattered pieces of her heart.

  ‘Come on, let’s get your breakfast.’ She sniffed, starting to carry the cat down the hallway. Torturing herself, she couldn’t help a glance into the spare room as she passed. It looked painfully bare, all trace of Tom gone as if he’d never even stayed there. Her heart stil
led at the silence she met as she prepared herself to face the rest of the house.

  She wouldn’t hear him, smell him or feel his presence anymore. That knowledge pierced her like another knife twisting in her already wounded heart. The anger she’d felt a few hours ago paled in comparison to the hurt that plagued her now. Oh, she was still livid that Tom put her in the same box as his ex, that he wouldn’t even give her a chance to prove herself, but heartache had strength like no other emotion. It held a power almost impossible to fight, and right now, she didn’t have the energy or motivation to even try.

  Somehow she managed the short journey to the kitchen and just when she thought she couldn’t feel any worse, her gaze caught on something glinting on the kitchen bench. She went closer, her breath hitching in her throat at the sight of Tom’s key—the spare he’d found on the verandah the night he arrived. It was a final, blatant reminder that he’d left and wasn’t coming back. Turning away, she lowered Ginger to the floor and picked up the box of cat biscuits to shake into his bowl. Then, on autopilot, she found her way into the bathroom and forced herself into the shower, fearing that if she didn’t do so right away, she might crawl back into bed and never emerge.

  If only she had to work today, she’d have some kind of focus, something to distract her from thoughts of Tom. Instead, Boxing Day loomed ahead long and empty, and Lauren saw herself becoming the clichéd wounded heroine, destined to a life of replaying the good times.

  She tried to blink that thought away but the tears fell fast and furious, blending with the water from the showerhead as she remembered how good it had felt with Tom moving inside her last night. For a few blissful hours the planets had aligned and she’d felt like her lottery numbers had finally been pulled from the barrel. The elation had been like nothing she’d experienced before.

  It was now blindingly obvious to her that all the sex she’d had in the past was simply that. S.E.X. But when romance entered the equation—when you made love with someone who truly owned your heart—magic happened.

  Lauren sank down the wall of the shower and collapsed onto the floor, hugging her knees close to her chest, unable to bear the pain. Losing Tom wasn’t like losing a limb; it was like losing her essence. Unintentionally, he’d brought her alive. Working together, hanging out, sharing meals or even glances…everything he’d done had made her feel like she was worth something, and then he’d taken it all away.

  She sat there on the hard tiles until the water went cold and her extremities lost all feeling. Somehow, eventually, she heaved herself up, screwed off the water and reached for a towel to wrap around her body. What next? Getting dressed seemed pointless when she had nowhere to go, no one to see. Although her stomach growled its desire for sustenance, the whole notion of eating made her want to throw up. She was standing, frozen again in the middle of the bathroom floor, when her home phone started blaring.

  Her heart sprang to life, clambering up into her throat with the hope that he had come to his senses. This possibility gave new life to her legs and she all but charged out the bathroom and down the corridor to the phone, which hung upon the kitchen wall.

  Snatching the receiver, she answered breathlessly. ‘Hello?’

  ‘Morning. Did you have a good Christmas?’ Whitney sounded as if she’d been up all night drinking Red Bull.

  Lauren struggled to speak past her gut-wrenching disappointment. ‘Yep,’ she lied. ‘You?’

  ‘You’ll never guess what I got.’

  She waited for Whitney to elaborate.

  ‘Go on…guess!’

  The last thing Lauren felt like doing was playing games, but she could tell that it would be easier to play along. ‘A diamond necklace?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘A new car?’ Whitney had been dropping hints to Rats about wanting a Jeep for ages.

  ‘Guess again!’ Her chirpiness grated on Lauren’s nerves.

  ‘Whitney, I give up,’ she snapped. ‘What did you get?’

  ‘A positive pregnancy test.’

  Lauren’s hand flew to her chest and she almost dropped the receiver. This was great news for Whitney and Rats, but in her current situation she couldn’t help feeling like it was another slap in the face from fate.

  ‘Aren’t you going to say something? Can you believe it? Aren’t you excited for me?’

  ‘I’m shell-shocked,’ she managed, then added, ‘speechless.’ And a whole load of other feelings she could never voice to the person who was supposed to be her best friend.

  ‘I know.’ Thankfully Whitney seemed oblivious to Lauren’s bitterness. ‘It’s very early days. My period was only due yesterday, but I have such a good feeling about this. Rats and I downloaded a baby name book last night and OMG, it’s so good we have nine months to make a decision because we don’t agree on anything. He likes Tabitha for a girl. Can you imagine?’

  ‘Makes me think of a cat. Or that little girl in Bewitched,’ Lauren said, then realised she should have censored herself.

  ‘Exactly. Oh I knew you’d see sense. And Jennifer is another one of his boring suggestions.’ Whitney laughed. ‘I’m thinking of something much more unique. What do you think of Harmony? Or Anaya?’

  ‘A-what?’

  ‘Apparently it means “God answered”. Don’t you think that’s just perfect for our little miracle?’

  Lauren thought she might actually vomit. ‘Since when have you been religious?’

  ‘Hey, I went to church on Christmas Eve.’ Before Lauren could think up a snarky reply, Whitney went on. ‘We’re not announcing it just yet—we’ll try to wait till the three month check-up like you’re supposed to—but you can tell Tom if you like. He was so kind and helpful when I visited him and so I’d like him to know.’

  ‘You’ll have to tell him yourself.’ The moment the words were out she silently cursed. She hoped that Whitney, so lost in her bubble of happiness, hadn’t noticed her shortness.

  ‘Lauren?’ Her friend sounded suddenly serious. ‘Are you okay? I just thought it’d be easy for you to mention it to Tom with him living with you and everything.’

  ‘He wasn’t living with me,’ she said, trying not to take all her hurt and anger out on Whitney. ‘He was staying in a room at my house. And now he’s not.’

  Ginger wound between her legs and started meowing.

  ‘Did something happen between you?’

  Lauren blinked as tears welled in her eyes. Everything and nothing had happened and even if she wanted to talk it out, she wouldn’t know where the hell to start. ‘We had a moment,’ she confessed eventually, not wanting to tell Whitney just how heated that moment had been. ‘We kissed, I laid my heart on the line and he left.’

  ‘Oh sweetheart.’

  That was a simplistic version of events but, despite everything Tom had made her feel, she didn’t want to betray his trust and tell Whitney the whole story.

  ‘It’s fine.’

  ‘I’m coming over,’ Whitney announced.

  ‘No!’ Lauren didn’t want Whitney trying to console her. How could she commiserate when she had it all? It was one thing eating chocolate, drinking wine and watching chick flicks with girlfriends in the same predicament, but her friends were marrying off like dominoes falling and although Whitney would make all the right noises, she couldn’t hope to understand. ‘I said I’m fine. It’s not like I haven’t been here before.’

  But that was utter bollocks. She’d broken up with many men, been left behind in Hope Junction countless times as she’d waved guys she’d thought had cared about her out of town, but it had never felt like this.

  ‘Mr Right is still out there,’ Whitney said. ‘I’ll bet he’s just around the corner. Or maybe you’ll meet him when you leave. I still wish you wouldn’t, but I guess it’s true Hope Junction doesn’t have a huge pool of potential.’

  Lauren almost laughed. The old ‘fish in the sea’ thing. She could travel to every corner of the earth, meet every single guy on the planet and she’d never find another T
om. He might think himself faulty goods, but to her he couldn’t be more perfect.

  Ginger pressed his nose against her leg, indicating he had little time for this conversation. Right now, the cat’s company appealed far more than Whitney’s or any other human who would say a million wrong things in their quest to find the right one.

  ‘I’m sorry, Whitney, I have to go. Alf’s cat wants his daily dose of cream.’ She took a quick breath, summoning courage and strength. ‘Congratulations on the baby. Tell Rats he’s a hero. And I’ll try to think of some better names than Tabitha and Jennifer.’

  ‘Are you sure you’re all right? Rats and I were going to go out to the lake today. We could swing by and pick you up on our way?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ Lauren said forcefully. Ginger meowed loudly at the perfect moment. ‘Gotta go. Chat soon.’

  She all but slammed the phone back into its receiver and then slumped against the kitchen bench. Flynn and Ellie would be next—a perfect baby to go along with their perfect life.

  ‘Argh!’ The anguished scream roared from her mouth, startling Ginger, who generally wasn’t perturbed by anything. He dashed under the table and glared at her from his refuge. ‘Well, you’d be bitter too if you were me,’ she said, returning his glare.

  She hated the bitterness. What kind of person was she if she couldn’t even be happy for her best friend? With that thought swirling round her head, she went to the fridge, retrieved Ginger’s carton of cream and then poured a large dollop into his bowl.

  ‘Here you are,’ she said, holding out the bowl to try to lure him from under the table. As Ginger cautiously made his way towards her, she sighed. ‘At least I have you for company. At least I can tell you my whole sob story and you won’t try to comfort me with empty words.’

  Ginger tossed her a look as if she were crazy—why on earth would he want to comfort her? And then shoved his head into the bowl.

  As Lauren straightened into a stand, she saw a terrifying snapshot of her future. She was old, wrinkly, with lacklustre grey hair and a dozen cats pestering her to feed them. She liked cats, sure, but she wanted so much more from life than feline companionship.