To Vicky, who taught all who knew her about bearing sudden life change with dignity, courage and grace. We’ll always miss you.

      CHAPTER ONE

       Broome, North-Western Australia

      ALL day the heat had been like a headache, pulsing and thick with moisture. The local Aboriginal clans called this ‘knock-’em-down’ season—the clouds were a dark-and-brilliant tapestry covering the sky, and the rumbling thunder, lightning forking across the beach, brought the entire landscape to fascinating, terrifying life. Then at last the wild storms came, the unrelenting rain fell, cutting off the entire Kimberley region from the rest of the world, apart from a few brave souls that ventured here on the one highway that stayed open. The shops all closed in the town from just after New Year to the start of February, apart from grocery and the petrol stations, the resorts and the odd souvenir store.

      Her little grocery/souvenir shop stayed open for those few tourists who came in. It opened at seven a.m., and stayed open until seven at night. She had to fill her life with something, right?

      Anna West—soon to be Curran once again—walked along the beach toward the small apartment she’d taken five months ago. Cable Beach was her favourite place in the world. Dazzling creamy-white sands were littered with rocks and stunning aqua water, and sometimes, not as often as the famed Monkey Mia beach, but sometimes the dolphins came so close to the shore you could pat them, and the whales swam past on a journey to and from the Antarctic, leaping from the crystalline water to give tantalising glimpses of long, sleek, grey beauty, their family lives evident in their care for their little ones …

       Don’t think about it, not on this of all days.

      She wiped the sweat running down her face and kept walking, her eyes blinded to the beauty. She’d look again tomorrow, love it then as she always had. Not today. One year since—

      Anna knew she shouldn’t be alone today. She had plenty of places to go, if she wanted to.

      ‘Come to Perth, Anna. You can stay with me as long as you want to. You’ll have total peace and quiet here—but you won’t be alone,’ Sapphie told her during every call, in that gentle yet insistent way of hers. Sapphie, her long-time best friend from their boarding-school days, the daughter of Jarndirri’s former housekeeper, would never give up until Anna came.

      ‘Come to Yurraji, Anna,’ her sister, Lea, would say. ‘You don’t need to run that stupid shop—Broome’s got twenty of them already—but you’ve only got one niece. Molly needs to see her only aunt—and you should be with your family now.’

      Anna knew that beneath Lea’s gruff, commanding tone—so much like their dad’s—was a world of anxiety she felt for her little sister. She could never say ‘I love you, I miss you’, and especially not ‘I’m scared for you’. Lea was a fighter, not a lover—but it was in every call, in every unspoken word.

      Yurraji was the property Granddad had left Lea. It lay in the wildest, most remote part of Western Australia where brumbies, the wild horses, still ran free, and Lea could gentle them and give them a sanctuary. Anna could spend a week, a month or whatever she needed—and she’d never find a place more peaceful, or farther away from gossip and speculation.

      Both Lea and Sapphie called every evening to check on her, as they’d done for the past year, bearing with her monosyllabic replies with more patience and love than she had a right to expect. Their calls made the long, lonely evenings bearable, and yet …

      The bitter cocktail sloughed down her throat again, the shame and resentment of her own sister, her dearest friend—but the worst was that she couldn’t even bear to talk to her only, adored niece. Hanging up the phone when she heard Molly’s little, piping voice cry, ‘I wanna talk Aunty Anna!’

      She’d do it—soon. One day. When even hearing Molly’s voice didn’t set off images.

       Images of Molly playing with her baby cousin … Lea, Sapphie and Molly exclaiming over Adam’s first tooth, his first smile, his first steps while she and Jared almost burst with pride over every word, Adam’s every achievement.

      The rain was falling again, and not from the sky.

      Anna swiped savagely at her treacherous eyes. Stop it. Just don’t think about it.

      It was her daily mantra. As if she repeated it often enough, something might happen—perhaps a convenient dose of amnesia, or she’d wake up beside Jared fifteen months ago. She’d pull his hand over her enormous mound of belly, and they’d smile together as a little hand or foot travelled across, as if waving. Hi, Mummy, Daddy …

      A dark boom of thunder sounded from over the ocean, coming in ripples across the water. She broke into a run, heading across the sand to the end of the lane connecting the beach and the main street, where her little house sat in wonky pride. A shabby cottage with a sagging verandah, built to face the waves at the side of the beach, did her just fine. She didn’t need the big, gleaming apartment in the centre of town that Jared had bought for her, as befitted a Curran. Her cottage was private, and that was all she wanted.

      As she passed, the wafting scent of the local takeaway-cum-anything shop enticed her. She’d stop and grab some fish and chips, take them home and grab a DVD. Maybe Monty Python … nobody could feel self-pity while they watched Monty Python. She’d smile and laugh and almost forget for an hour or two.

      Half