Meredith hoped all evening for a chance to tell Hal how sorry she was, but they were never alone and she knew better than to raise the subject with anyone else there. Emma and Mickey had taken to hanging around in the kitchen, and by the time Meredith had changed into her evening clothes, the stockmen were having a beer with Hal.

Hal himself had recovered his temper, but Meredith could see that he was withdrawn and the grey eyes were shuttered. When he turned down her offer to help with the clearing up after the meal, she decided that it might be better to leave it. If Hal didn’t want to talk, she shouldn’t make him. For once, she wouldn’t interfere or do what she thought was best, she thought, remembering how his comments about the way she treated Lucy had stung.

Instead, she would do some work.

The office was less inviting at night. Meredith tried to ignore the blank black windows and set up her laptop, averting her eyes from the photograph that had caused so much trouble that afternoon. Downloading her emails meant unplugging the phone, plugging in her laptop and dialing the Internet, a long process that had her remembering broadband at her house in London with affection.

She was just plugging the phone in once more when the door opened and Hal came in with a mug of coffee for her. ‘I thought you’d like this if you’re going to work,’ he said.

‘Oh…thank you.’ Having waited all evening for a chance to talk to him, Meredith found herself suddenly tongue-tied.

She could see the photo still propped against the base of the desktop computer and wished that she had put it away. It felt as if there were a flashing neon arrow pointing at it, reminding Hal of her interference. She went to sit back on the chair, where her body would partly obscure the picture, but it was too late. Hal had already seen it.

‘Hal, I’m sorry-’ she began, but he interrupted her.

‘No, I’m the one that’s sorry,’ he said. ‘I overreacted earlier. I haven’t seen a picture of my mother for over twenty years. I thought my father had destroyed them all and it was a shock to suddenly see her again.’

He took a breath, knowing that it would be impossible to explain to Meredith just how much of a shock it had been to come face to face with the past without warning like that. ‘I took it out on you,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘I shouldn’t have been looking through your papers,’ Meredith apologised in her turn. ‘You were right; it was none of my business.’

‘I’ve never looked in that box,’ he told her. ‘It must have been my father’s.’

Reaching past Meredith, Hal picked up the photograph and stood looking down at it, his mouth twisted. ‘I wonder why he kept this.’

It seemed obvious to Meredith. ‘It’s a lovely picture.’ She hesitated. ‘Your mother was very pretty.’

‘Yes, she was that,’ Hal agreed bitterly.

‘Why would your father destroy all pictures of her?’ asked Meredith. The pictures she and Lucy had of their own mother were their most treasured possessions. ‘It seems a terrible thing to do.’

‘As terrible as destroying a family?’ Hal dropped the picture back on the desk. ‘That’s what she did.’

‘Your mother?’ she said, startled. ‘But…I thought she died.’

‘No, she didn’t die,’ said Hal, a muscle beating in his clenched jaw. ‘She’s alive and well and living in Sydney, apparently. I haven’t seen her since she walked away from Wirrindago when I was twelve. She didn’t even say goodbye. She just left Dad a note, got into the ute and drove herself to Whyman’s Creek one day. Dad had to go and collect it from the airport after she’d gone.’

Meredith stared at him, shocked. ‘She abandoned you?’

‘She abandoned us all. Lydia was only nine.’

The same age she had been when she had been left at boarding school, Meredith thought. She had felt abandoned then, but what if it had been her own mother who had walked out on her? Meredith couldn’t imagine it. She couldn’t imagine leaving her own children.

‘Jack was ten,’ he went on, and she remembered the little boy with the cheeky grin.

‘Your brother?’

‘Yes,’ said Hal, but he didn’t elaborate.

‘Do…do you know why she went?’ she asked after a moment.

‘Oh, yes,’ he said with a grim smile. ‘She was bored.’

‘Bored?’

Hal raised an eyebrow at her incredulous expression. ‘I would have thought that you of all people would understand. You’re a city girl too. You don’t like the heat and the flies and the loneliness.’

‘No,’ Meredith agreed, stung by the implication that she would understand walking out on a family. ‘But I’m not married to you and I don’t have three children!’

‘True,’ he conceded. He leant back against the desk and picked up the picture once more, holding it as if he were fascinated and yet hated it at the same time. ‘Well, it was too much for my mother.’

He studied his mother’s face. He had forgotten how young and pretty she had been. ‘She should never have married my father in the first place. She was from Brisbane. They met at some outback ball and she fell in love with the idea of living on a cattle station, but year after year of the reality of it wore her down. Some years can be hard,’ he told Meredith. ‘She missed having friends and complained that my father and the men only talked about cattle and horses, which they probably did.’

‘But what about you? Her children?’ Meredith was still struggling with the idea that anyone could walk away from their children. ‘Didn’t she want you to go with her?’

Hal glanced up at her then, his grey eyes hard with the memory. ‘We would have cramped her style,’ he said. ‘She’d been going on longer and longer visits to her family, which turned out to be just a cover for meeting up with an old boyfriend. They moved to Sydney together-got married eventually-and they wouldn’t have wanted three half-wild kids around. Besides,’ he said, ‘we wouldn’t have gone. We couldn’t imagine living in a city. Wirrindago was all we knew.’

Meredith was silent. It was easier to understand now why Hal was so determined not to get married. He wasn’t prepared to take the risk of being abandoned again, the way he had been as a boy.

‘It must have been very hard for you all,’ she said after a while. ‘How did your father cope?’

‘Badly.’

‘And you?’ she asked gently.

Hal’s eyes went back to the picture, but this time he wasn’t looking at his mother. He was looking at the children with their bright, confident faces, unclouded by any suspicion that the world they knew could ever end.

‘We thought we were OK,’ he said. ‘After Mum left, Dad let things slip, and we were allowed to do what we wanted. For a while it was almost like a holiday.’

He remembered those days so clearly. The freedom they had once longed for had been terrifying now, but they’d stayed out as long as they could, finding more and more dangerous things to do because they hadn’t wanted to go home. They hadn’t wanted to see the expression in their father’s eyes, or think about the empty place at the table where their mother had sat. She had been away often, as he had told Meredith, but this time her absence had been like a cold, heavy stone in his stomach.

‘You must have missed her,’ said Meredith. Children were programmed to adore their mothers, however little they might deserve it.

‘I suppose we did,’ Hal said slowly. ‘Jack certainly did. He’d been her favourite. He never talked about it, but I don’t think he ever got over the way Mum left without saying goodbye to him. He thought that if he could just go and find her, he could make her come back and everything would be all right again.’ Hal’s face twisted. ‘He was only a kid. He didn’t know.’

At the look on Hal’s face, dread began to pool in Meredith’s stomach. ‘What happened?’ she whispered.

‘One day he ran away to try and find her. He had a plan, he said. He left a note and everything.’ Hal’s voice was very bleak, very controlled. ‘He sneaked on to a road train. The driver didn’t have a clue until they unloaded and found his body in with the cattle. They think he suffocated.’

CHAPTER SEVEN

THERE was a long, terrible silence. ‘Oh…Hal…’ Meredith didn’t know what to say.

Hal acknowledged her sympathy with a hunch of his shoulders. ‘You see why Dad didn’t want any reminders of her around? After Jack…I’ll never forget the way he tore up every picture, anything that might remind us of her. He wouldn’t have her name mentioned, and we all pretended that she was dead. Like Jack.’

‘Did your mother know?’

‘She must have done. I don’t know if she ever tried to contact Lydia or me-if she did, Dad wouldn’t have told us. Lydia’s seen her once or twice in Sydney, but I’ve never wanted to, not after Jack, and not after what she did to my father.’

He shook his head. ‘Dad was never the same after she left. I think there was part of him that knew it had been inevitable from the start, and that they should probably never have got married in the first place, but still, he couldn’t break himself of her spell. After she left, he just…gave up. He lost interest. It was only when he died that I realised how far he had let Wirrindago run down. It’s taken a long time to build things up again.’

Meredith’s throat was tight as she watched Hal, trying to imagine life in the homestead over twenty years ago, when his mother had gone and Jack was dead and his father had turned in on himself. Her heart ached for him, for the boy he had been, and she wanted to take him in her arms and hold him tightly.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said instead, desperately conscious of how inadequate that sounded.

Hal looked into her warm, dark eyes and felt something tight around his heart loosen. ‘That’s what I said to you when you told me about boarding school, and you told me that you got used to it,’ he reminded her. ‘It was the same for me.’