by Trish Morey
He killed the engine and turned to her and said, ‘Because this is where it started, seven months ago. And if it’s going to end, this is where it’s going to end.’
‘I thought it already had. You saw to that.’
‘No,’ he said, ‘I can’t believe that. Not until you hear what I have to say. Then you can decide whether it’s over or not.’
She shook her head. ‘This is crazy. I don’t know what you’ve got in mind, but I don’t want any part of it.’
He looked out the windscreen. ‘Look. The sun’s setting.’ He turned to her. ‘Walk with me?’
She looked at the sky then back at Nick, and she decided that being outside was infinitely preferable to being inside a car that was filled with the scent of him and she reached for her doorhandle.
It was annoying that he was there to open it for her and offer her his arm, and more annoying that it did make it easier, but once she was upright, she let him go and wandered to the lawns, where she could see the picturesque Piccadilly Valley stretched out below. It was higher here on Mount Lofty, the air a shade cooler, edgier, and she shrugged her jacket closer around her as she looked out over the patchwork fields and hills and trees all painted in the sunset’s rays. And it was so damned beautiful it almost hurt.
‘So,’ she said, turning to him with a sigh, refusing to be swayed by the changing colours and the shifting scenery. ‘What’s so important that you had to bring me all the way up here to tell me?’
‘Something that’s taken me far too long to admit.’ And he too turned from the view and looked down at her. ‘I love you, Sophie.’
She snorted as a fuse shorted in her brain. ‘What? You love me? Don’t you dare give me that crap. Not after the way you treated me.’
‘Sophie, it’s true!’
‘You don’t give a damn about me.’ She put a hand over her belly. ‘All you care about is this pair in here. All you’ve ever cared about are these two babies. And now, you spin this line about love because you’re afraid you’ve blown it? Well you have blown it, wide open. Take me home, Nick, I’ve heard enough.’ She started marching to the car.
‘Sophie,’ he said, but she kept right on going.
‘Sophie?’
Still she didn’t listen.
‘Min’s not mine.’
Halfway to the car she stopped as his words registered. ‘What did you say?’
‘Min’s not mine,’ he said, drawing alongside. ‘I mean, it’s my name on her birth certificate and I love her to bits and I’ll always be her father, but biologically, she’s not mine.’
‘But …’
‘Penelope was fooling around. I only found out about it afterwards, after we’d decided to stick together for the sake of the baby. When she was born, I wondered, but it wasn’t until we argued one day and she threw it at me that I knew for certain.’
‘But you still kept her?’
‘By then she was mine, in all but one way. I wasn’t giving up the one positive thing that had come out of our marriage.’
Sophie thought back to the conversation about marriage they’d had that day over coffee in the back patio, when he’d said, ‘The circumstances are what they are—it’s how we choose to deal with them that matters …’
‘I never thought I’d get married again,’ he continued. ‘I never thought for a moment there’d be another chance to have a child of my own—a biological child of my own. And I love Min with all my heart, and maybe there shouldn’t be, but there’s a difference in knowing …’ He turned his storm-filled eyes to hers and put his hand over his heart. ‘To know they are mine is more special than I ever thought possible. Not more special than Min, but special to me. And I was so focused on them and the fact that they were mine, that I didn’t see what was sneaking up on me all the time. I didn’t see you. I didn’t count on falling in love with you.’
She blinked into the fading light, trying to assimilate it all. Afraid to believe. Afraid not to.
‘Please, Sophie, I love you and I’m sorry for being such a stupid bastard and treating you the way I did, and I hope that one day you’ll forgive me.’
‘You hurt me,’ she said, remembering the pain and shock of his unwarranted attack, remembering the bitterness of having her dreams shattered once again, dreams she’d been so guarded against having, but which had grown up regardless.
‘I’m sorry. When I got the call, I didn’t know what I felt for you, I hadn’t put it into words I wanted to admit. And when I found you were okay, relief turned to anger that I could have lost you—all of you—and I couldn’t deal with it. I didn’t deal with it. I didn’t know what I was feeling, so I focused on the babies, because that bit I knew, that bit I understood.’
‘I don’t know,’ she said, confused, stunned by his revelation, wanting to be swayed by his words but afraid in case she was wrong and the rug was once again pulled out from under her feet. ‘I want to believe you, but …’
‘It’s true,’ he said, putting a hand to her neck, his thumb stroking her skin, stroking her senses. She leaned into his touch. God, how she’d missed his touch. ‘I love you, Sophie. Can you forgive me? Can you love me back, just a little?’
Her battered heart lurched and kicked back into life as happy tears squeezed unbidden from her eyes. ‘I wanted to hate you,’ she admitted. ‘I wanted to forget. But I couldn’t forget. I love you, Nick.’
He made a sound in the back of his throat, half relief, half triumph, before his mouth joined with hers and they kissed long and hard under the fading colour of the sky.
Breathing hard, he drew away. ‘I booked our room,’ he said, his breathing as ragged as hers, ‘just in case.’
‘Our room?’
‘It will always be our room.’
‘You’re mad,’ she said, while secretly she was delighted. ‘Do you know how much those rooms cost?’
‘You’re worth it,’ he said. ‘You’re worth it a hundred times over.’
And he took her hand and led her back up to the hotel entrance while a rain shower drifted across the valley, and in the dying light from the sunset, emerged a rainbow.
EPILOGUE
Sophie was booked in for a precautionary caesarean at thirty-eight weeks, but her babies had their own timetable and weren’t waiting that long. When Sophie got up to pee early one morning and felt something come unstuck, she knew that the babies had taken matters into their own hands.
Rose Marie and Evie Grace were born eight hours later and ten minutes apart, just as Sophie’s sisters had been, and Nick was there the whole time to hold her hand and rub her back and welcome their new babies into the world.
And when visiting time came around, Nan fussed and clucked over the pair and said, ‘I told you all that women want babies, didn’t I? And there you go, I was right.’
‘You did indeed, Nan,’ said Hannah, smiling at Sophie and Beth to reassure them it was okay, while she firmly held the hand of Declan, who’d been the newest welcome addition to the Faraday family until these two babies had put in an appearance.
Pop looked as proud as punch with the two newborns. ‘I told you this was worth hanging around for,’ he said to anyone who’d listen. ‘That’s three great-grandchildren in the space of two months. Reckon that’s gotta be close to a record,’ to which Nan just rolled her eyes as if he was trying to steal her thunder.
Min was beside herself with joy with her brand-new baby sisters, fascinated by how tiny they were even though they’d each weighed in at just over two-point-seven kilos, or six pounds as Nan liked to tell everyone, bewitched by even tinier fingers and toes, and grinning proudly as she posed for photographs on the bed with a baby tucked under each arm, three dark-haired sisters together.
Dan and Lucy brought Jace in to visit, who looked huge now at two months old compared to the newborns, and was smiling up a storm for anyone who looked his way, and Beth came down with Harry and Siena.
‘Twins are so cool,’ said Hannah, with what looked like a tear in her e
ye, and Declan pulled her close and pressed his lips to her hair.
‘You would say that,’ agreed a smiling Beth, holding Rose in her arms as Siena enjoyed a cuddle of Evie. ‘You’ve done good, sis.’
Then visiting time wound up and the family departed, Min going home for a sleepover night with Siena, leaving just the four of them. ‘Tired?’ Nick asked as he helped organise pillows to support the babies for a feed.
‘I feel amazing,’ Sophie said.
‘You are amazing,’ he told her. ‘And you were amazing today. So unbelievably strong.’ He leaned over and kissed her brow before he sat back and watched as the babies suckled at her breasts.
‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen a sight more beautiful.’
She smiled up at him, her arms full of their babies, her heart so overflowing with love in this moment that the air seemed to shimmer with it.
‘Marry me,’ he said.
She blinked, not sure what she was hearing. ‘Really? I thought you never wanted to get married again.’
‘I was wrong. I once told you the worst part of being married was the divorce, but that wasn’t the worst thing at all. The worst part was choosing the wrong person to start with.’
‘How do you know I’m not the wrong person, too?’
He shrugged. ‘Maybe because I’m older and wiser and I’ve learned from my mistakes. Maybe because you’re the amazing woman you are and I happen to be head over heels in love with you. But I know we’ll last, because when I look at you, and when I’m with you, forever doesn’t seem anywhere near long enough.’
She blinked. ‘Wow. That was some speech.’
‘So what do you say, Sophie, will you marry me?’
Sophie thought about the events that had brought her to this place, the foolish choices and the mistakes she’d made along the way, the missteps and her futile rebellion when things didn’t go her way, and she realised that the old saying on Nan’s wall was true, that sometimes the wrong choices could still bring you to the right place.
Like ending up here, with Nick and gorgeous Min, and their two tiny babies, along with the promise of forever.
But there was something else she knew too, because this time there was only one choice she could make—the right choice.
She looked up at Nick and smiled over the bundle of babies on her chest, and over a heart that had somehow quadrupled in size today. ‘You better get over here pretty darn fast, because you’re going to want to kiss me when I say yes.’
And, just as Sophie predicted, he did.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The Adelaide Hills is a very special part of the world, so close to the city, and yet an entire world away, a world of gum trees and orchards, of koalas and kangaroos, and hard-working people who are the salt of the earth. It was fabulous writing The Trouble with Choices to revisit the area that was our family home for nigh on twenty years.
It was equally satisfying to revisit my fictional hills family and tell the stories of sisters, Sophie, Hannah and Beth Faraday. It made such sense to interweave their stories together, all set against a backdrop of the trials, laughter and unexpected bombshells of family life. I hope you enjoy reading about the Faraday sisters as much as I enjoyed writing them.
It’s an amazing feeling seeing a book of yours published and on the shelves in bookstores—a book with your very own name on it! It’s probably no exaggeration to say it’s one of the most amazing feelings on earth. But getting that book out there on those shelves is only partly down to the author, and I have to pay tribute to the fantastic team and the wonderful colleagues that helped turn a manuscript into the gorgeous book that The Trouble with Choices has become.
To my savvy agent, Helen Breitwieser, thank you for your sage advice, for always believing in this book, and for finding the right home for it. I don’t think it could be in a better place.
Thanks also have to go to the fabulous team at Harlequin Australia. To Rachael Donovan, who loved Choices from the get-go, and who together with Julia Knapman shepherded the book through its journey to publication with such care, skill and enthusiasm, thank you from the bottom of my heart. To Alex Nahlous, who can edit the leg off a chair and yet somehow make it more comfortable to sit on, and the wonderful proofreader, Chrysoula Aiello, thank you muchly too . It is both a privilege and a pleasure working with such awesome professionals who clearly love what they do.
Speaking of people who love what they do, thank you to the wonderful volunteers who care for our native animals in need, whether they be kangaroos, or koalas, possums or birds or wombats. Mum and my late dad were foster parents to something like thirty orphaned and injured kangaroos and wallabies over a period of about twenty years, and our girls grew up thinking it was normal to have kangaroos popping their heads up out of pouches, or hopping around the backyard. Hats off to all the native-animal carers out there, and thank you for all the amazing work you do.
To Abby Green, who kindly gave my orphaned joey an Irish name that made sense, thank you! I had oodles of fun writing a gorgeous Irish man—I admit I fell a bit in love with Declan myself—but readers, please note, any and all Irish bloopers are mine and mine alone.
Huge thanks also to the amazing Kate Cowling, who kindly filled me in on the legalities of how Pop’s drug bust might happen here in South Australia with a cantankerous client and dodgy plant. Again, if there are any legal slip-ups, they’re mine, and for story purposes.
Then there are the Maytoners to thank, the members of my writing tribe, all far flung but no more than an email away, who keep this writer sane when real life doesn’t behave. With special mention to Fiona McArthur, who is a one-person smiling cheer squad and who makes anything and everything seem possible and is so often right. Port Barb is ready and awaiting your return!
And, of course, there is the family at home to thank; 2017 was a mad year of downsizing and weddings and removals left, right and centre, and at the core, it’s always been about family and the love that binds us together. Thank you to our gorgeous gals for enduring and helping through all the upheavals, with once again, thanks to Gavin, for hanging in there all these years. It is some treat to find yourself on the other side of babies, school, driving lessons and school formals only to discover you still rather fancy the person you married. I am blessed.
Finally, to each and every one of you who pick up The Trouble with Choices, I say thank you for giving my story your time. There is no greater gift a reader can give an author. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.
And may all your choices be trouble-free ones …
Trish x
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ISBN: 9781489257765
TITLE: THE TROUBLE WITH CHOICES
First Australian Publication 2018
Copyright © 2018 Trish Morey
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