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Table of Contents
Cover
Synopsis
Title Page
Copyright Page
About the Author
Acknowledgments
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Bella Books
Synopsis
Bron never intended to move back to Australia. Wracked with guilt over her sister Libby’s death, she’s spent three months trying to handle her grief while taking care of Libby’s young daughter, Annie.
Libby’s best friend Ally never had a chance to say good-bye to her dear friend. When she finally returns home, Ally finds Libby’s family open and welcoming…everyone, that is, except Libby’s sister Bron.
For her part, Bron can’t fathom why her family is so enamored with Ally—even offering her a job and a place to live—but grudgingly admires the way Ally and Annie get along.
While Bron contemplates moving Annie to Boston and away from the only home the little girl has ever known, bushfires begin to rage in the nearby mountains, and Bron begins to see that she’s sorely underestimated her sister’s friend.
Soon Ally’s past and Bron’s future collide—with a heat and wonder that neither of them expected.
Copyright © 2017 by Virginia Hale
Bella Books, Inc.
P.O. Box 10543
Tallahassee, FL 32302
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, without permission in writing from the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
First Bella Books Edition 2017
eBook released 2017
Editor: Ann Roberts
Cover Designer: Judith Fellows
ISBN: 978-1-59493-577-0
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.
About the Author
Virginia Hale lives in Sydney, Australia, and is currently completing her M.A. in Children’s Literature. When she isn’t writing or studying, she is dreaming up trips to New York and Boston. Echo Point—set in the heartland of the Blue Mountains—is her debut novel.
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to my editor, Ann Roberts. Your support and advice has been tremendously helpful. To Jessica Hill and the staff at Bella Books, thank you for making this possible.
Chapter One
Bronwyn Lee was a woman on a mission. She pressed her cheek flush to the cool wooden floorboards and squinted into the dark void beneath her sister’s dresser, praying to God she would spot a tiny glimmer. That iPhone torch app would have come in handy right about now, Bron thought, before reminding herself that her six-year-old niece Annie hadn’t purposely dropped her phone the night before. The million shards of her phone screen across the kitchen floor weren’t worth even one of Annie’s guilty tears. Regardless, Annie had shed enough tears to buoy a naval ship.
Bron huffed and scooted closer. There was probably a torch in the shed outside, but asking her stepmother Jackie for the key to the shed would lead to nagging questions like, “Why do you need a torch?” or “What is it that you’re looking for?” Bron didn’t have the heart to tell her saintly stepmother she’d misplaced Libby’s ring. Perhaps misplaced was a strong word. Bron couldn’t be completely certain, but she was almost sure that she’d seen the ring in Libby’s jewellery box three months prior when she first came home for Libby’s funeral. She’d stumbled upon the ring and put it aside selfishly for safekeeping, knowing full well Libby would have liked to be buried with it on her finger.
Had she imagined finding the ring? Had she imagined the guilt? Had she dreamt it up on one of those jetlagged, grief-stricken nights after the accident?
The rim of her reading glasses tapped the ironbark floor. Frustrated, she slid the black frames to the crown of her head. It was like Ripley’s Believe it or Not! Museum under the dresser. She couldn’t see anything past the dusty fort of bobby pins, hair ties and cap-less, half-used lip balms she was sure Libby had unknowingly hoarded since their teenage years.
The grandfather clock chimed on the half hour. Bron stood up and threw her glasses onto Libby’s freshly made bed. She ran a shaky hand across her face. They would all be back soon with Ally, and Bron would no longer have a chance to pull apart her sister’s bedroom in search of the ring. As she blew back a few blond strands which had come loose from her ponytail, her gaze landed on one of the photographs on the dresser. The cheap frame held a picture of Libby, no older than fourteen, and Ally, her arm around Libby. Bron rubbed the pad of her thumb back and forth over the tarnished plate at the bottom of the frame, trying to buff up the first few engraved letters of “Two Peas in a Pod.” She stared into her sister’s adolescent grin and imagined what Libby would think of her quest to find the ring. How dare you not trust my best friend, Libby would chastise. But Bron had never trusted Ally—and Ally had never given her reason to. Bron couldn’t bring herself to feel even a sliver of shame for judging the younger woman. The sad truth was Bron didn’t doubt for a second that Ally wouldn’t pawn Libby’s ring the minute she laid eyes on it. Ally was reckless, wild and careless. Uncontrollable. Her recent track record said it all. Or rather, her parole agreement did.
Just the thought of that precious, albeit fairly inexpensive ring sitting in a glass case of a hockshop in Katoomba town centre made Bron dizzy with rage. She so clearly remembered the day she’d given Libby the ring for her twenty-first birthday. One day, way down the track, she could pass it on to Annie when she turned twenty-one, assuming she could actually find the cursed platinum band in the first place.
She’d already checked the dresser drawers, beneath the mattress, and the pockets of Libby’s clothes, which Bron had shifted to her own closet that morning to give Ally her own space—even if it was in a room which smelled, looked and felt like Libby. Surely Ally would feel it too.
She’d casually asked Jackie about the ring the night before. “Mum, you know that ring I gave Libby? Did she wear it much?” Bron had paused. “She wasn’t wearing it the day of the accident.”
On her way to bed, Jackie had pressed her thin, tired frame against the doorjamb of Libby’s bedroom, watching as Bron emptied the top drawer of Libby’s bedside table. With a yawn, Jackie said she’d often seen the ring lying on the edge of the bathtub in the evening, or it would catch her eye in the morning as the sun streamed in through the kitchen window, the small, silver-encased diamond
glittering next to the drying breakfast dishes Libby had washed before leaving for work. “When it wasn’t on Libby’s finger, it was lying around here somewhere, more often than not next to a drain,” Jackie complained with a chuckle and nodded at the jewellery box across the room. “Did you see it in there?”
Bron had bitten the side of her cheek so hard she’d almost drawn blood. “Yep.” It wasn’t a lie. She had seen it. Possibly. Three months ago.
And that was that. Assuming the ring was safe in its jewellery box, Jackie had wished Bron a good night and retired to her bedroom down the hall. Bron had stood there, cursing herself for not placing it somewhere safe the first time she’d seen it. Well, the first time she may have seen it. Without Jackie’s help, she was out of options. She didn’t expect Daniel, her twenty-three-year-old half-brother, to remember a detail as small as the ring on their sister’s finger. She wanted to ask Annie about it. Of course, she wouldn’t be in trouble if she’d taken it, but Bron knew it was unlikely. She hadn’t seen the little girl go near Libby’s bedroom in months.
Bron looked around the room hopelessly. If she couldn’t find it turning Libby’s room upside down, there was little chance Ally would. Better to leave it be, she decided, than to worry her mother or brother over something so materialistic. It was the concern that weighed on her mind each time she thought of the ring—she would seem petty to her family. She’d just lost her beautiful baby sister to a freak car accident, and she was worried about an old ring with a diamond hardly bigger than a grain of sand? Maybe this was the universe’s way of forcing her to readjust her priorities. Perhaps it was perspective, not diamonds, that was a girl’s best friend.
She saw them before she heard them. Through the thin curtains of Libby’s bedroom window, she watched the red Toyota—so old it had served as her very first car—stall at the gate. At the very end of the driveway, past the blue gum trees, she could make out the tall figure of her brother opening the front gate, shooing a barking Tammy away from the gravel path. The familiar, heavy slam of the driver’s door as he got back in reached Bron’s ears through the open window.
They drove toward the house, the golden retriever chasing after them. Bron watched Jackie turn around in the front seat and throw her head back in laughter, probably at something Annie had asked in that painfully earnest manner that only little kids can get away with. Or, quite possibly, Jackie was laughing at Ally.
Sweet, forgiving Jackie had always loved Ally as much as her own children—step-daughters too. Jackie had never made Bron or Libby feel any less her children than Daniel. Daniel, a product of Bron’s father’s second marriage to Jackie, was barely crawling when Libby started fifth grade. At that point, Bron, two years from graduating high school, had initially thought it a blessing when Libby began bringing Ally Shepherd around for dinner, sleepovers, or a swim in the snake-ridden swamp out back—much to Jackie’s terror and their father’s indifference. Bron already had so much on her plate—a part-time job at the bakery, helping Jackie with Daniel, and trying to finish school with grades good enough to take her to all of the places she wanted to go. Finding time to entertain her ten-year-old sister was no longer a priority. But Jackie fawned over Libby’s new friend, and it had sparked Bron’s jealousy, despite her being seventeen. After only a few months into Libby and Ally’s friendship, Ally would show up uninvited on their doorstep after dinner, as though Jackie hadn’t had enough on her plate with a toddler, two teenage girls, and their impatient, stubborn father. Their father had called Ally one of the Lost Girls, always believing Ally’s penchant for endlessly running away from home was juvenile. They all had—at first.
In hindsight, Bron could see she’d been jealous of Ally. After losing her own mother to a heart attack when Bron was fourteen and Libby just seven—god, just a year older than Annie—Bron’s desire for Jackie’s maternal attention had grown. And by simply asking Jackie for another glass of cordial or to stay the night, ten-year-old Ally had struck a nerve in seventeen-year-old Bron.
The Toyota drew to a stop in its usual place just off the circular driveway in front of their two-story Colonial Queenslander. Annie was the first one out of the car, bouncing up the front steps of the wraparound veranda and out of Bron’s line of sight. Not a second later, Annie’s high-pitched voice rang out from downstairs, “Aunty Bron, we’re home!”
Bron jumped as the front door banged dramatically against the bulky iron doorstop. “Ah, shit,” she heard the six-year-old curse quietly. Still focused on the car, Bron rolled her eyes. She’d berated Annie for swearing more times than Jackie had chided her for swinging open the front door too harshly. It was like a never-ending cycle: door crashed, Nanna screamed, Annie swore, and Aunt Bron went bananas. Each time it occurred, Bron grew increasingly concerned about her new role as Annie’s guardian.
She shifted back from the open window and watched her brother, mother and Ally deep in conversation. Ally’s head was turned and it was hard to get a good look at her from Bron’s vantage point, especially with the way the shadow from the veranda roof leaked over the windscreen. Bron moved to the next window, where she could clearly make out Jackie, leaning forward from the backseat. She said something, which prompted Ally to nod slowly, and then Jackie gripped the juncture of Ally’s neck and shoulder reassuringly. So often Jackie had squeezed Bron’s shoulder comfortingly in the last few months that, standing there at Libby’s bedroom window, Bron felt it like a phantom caress.
Annie’s rubber thongs hesitantly flipped and flopped their way up the stairs. “Did you hear that?” Annie asked meekly from the doorway.
“Did I hear what?” Focused on the car, Bron raised a knowing eyebrow.
In the reflection of Libby’s dressing table mirror, she watched Annie bite her lip in an attempt to stifle a laugh. With one last glance down at the car, she crossed the room and playfully snaked her fingers beneath Annie’s armpits. She hoisted her petite frame onto her hip. Annie struggled against her, laughing.
“If I hear you swear one more time today, I’ll empty the water that’s left in the baby pool onto Nanna’s lettuce bed and you won’t swim for a week.”
“Okay, okay! Please put me down!” Annie groaned as Bron padded down the stairs, ignoring the request. “Aunty Bron, please!” she begged, pressing the palms of her hands into the hollow of Bron’s cheeks, the ridges of her cheekbones more prominent than they’d been months ago. “Youse is so bony and it’s real hot!”
“You’re, not ‘youse’,” Bron corrected. “Ewes are female sheep.” She sighed deeply, knowing her efforts were possibly in vain. When she returned to Boston—even if it was just to finalize her affairs—and Annie was left under Daniel and Jackie’s influence, Annie would slip deeper into that cringe-worthy rural Australian dialect.
A familiar, raspy voice floated in on the stifling breeze coming through the open front door. A car door shut and then another. Bron could faintly make out Daniel’s insistence to bring Ally’s bags inside and then the squeak of the car boot opening. With the hand that wasn’t supporting Annie, Bron picked at the thin, dampened cotton between her breasts and ignored the anticipatory flush that broke over her skin.
Ally stepped through the front door first and stopped abruptly when she saw Bron at the base of the staircase. She seemed to struggle for a second, as though she wanted to start with something simple, like hello or how are you? For a second—a split second, really—Bron almost felt sorry for Ally, until her pained expression brightened into that familiar Ally smirk, complete with a raised eyebrow and a single, gorgeously smug dimple.
Annie squirmed against Bron’s side. “Ew, you got sweat on your lip,” she whined.
The smirk split across Ally’s face into a full-fledged grin. Features Bron remembered as somewhat angular were now sharp. Ally’s cheekbones were more defined than Bron’s, her jawline pronounced. Bron had expected her to be…more solid. Ally was almost stick thin, as though she hadn’t eaten properly in weeks. But there was something about the darkne
ss in her eyes—so strangely alike to Libby’s glossy chestnut stare—which eliminated any thought of Ally as frail. If Bron once thought the mere presence of this girl intense, the woman standing before her now was…something else, something entirely new to contend with. At thirty-three, Ally Shepherd was all grown up.
Bron set Annie down, and took in the faded green tattoo sleeve that decorated Ally’s right arm from shoulder to elbow. Typical, Bron thought to herself.
She hadn’t seen Ally since before she left for America. Then, Ally had been barely…twenty-two, perhaps? It had only been three months later when Libby had phoned in tears, telling Bron about the video store robbery, and that, of course, like the time before that, Ally was innocent. Libby had rattled off a number of defences then: Ally was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, Ally had just lost her dad, Ally’s family’s motel business was going under, and Ally’s mother was still refusing to even entertain the idea that Ally was a lesbian. But this time Libby must have known the truth. In her tiny Back Bay apartment, waiting for Libby’s inevitable request to wire bail money for Ally, Bron had angrily held the landline so tightly to her ear that her hand had cramped. But the request hadn’t come. Apparently, Bron wasn’t the only Lee sister who’d had the last straw with Ally Shepherd.
Now, standing in the hallway, four inches taller than Bron, Ally was older and very much a grown woman. Bron wondered if she was grateful for another chance—or if it was simply just expected.
They were quiet, listening as Jackie’s and Dan’s voices moved around the back of the house, pandering in baby voices to Tammy’s howls of disappointment at Ally’s sudden disappearance inside. “Where’s she gone, Tam?” Daniel asked the dog. “Where’s Al gone?”
Bron looked down at her niece. “Go open the back door for Nanna, please.”
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